Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur…

I saw that text for the first time in a Photoshop document at my first dot com job in 1999. I didn’t know that it was standard placer text for designers. It was one of the many things I learned at that first job.

That first job as a front end developer was at a company called Concrete Media. The office was on Hudson between Spring and Vandam in an old warehouse building. I learned everything I know from a guy named Joseph. He taught me the basics of creating web pages. Cutting out and optimizing images (because page weight over a dial up modem mattered), then writing HTML, and adding JavaScript for rollovers. There was even a new thing coming out called CSS, cascading style sheets.

In a matter of weeks I was up to speed. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Those are the three basics that have earned me a living in New York City for almost twenty years. Things change. Flash was a thing. Now it’s not. XML was a thing. Now it’s all JSON. There are libraries and frameworks and new methodologies. But at the end of the day, it comes down to HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

I’m thinking about this for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve got to be honest with you guys. I’m tired. My last three posts have been long and confessional and I’m a little worn out. So, the idea of “filler text” occurred to me for this post. But second, I’m going to be heading back into full-time work. I’ve been working forty hour weeks at my current contract gig but I’ll be signing on to go full-time and I’m pretty happy about it. A few years ago, a full-time job was something to get away from but, these days, I’m happy to go to work every day again, to have people to work with, to have things due. It makes me wonder why they don’t have bumper stickers that say, “A bad day at the office is better than a good day on a film set as an extra.”

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur…

I’ve been seeing that for years. It’s Latin. I have no idea what it means.