kyleandkelly.com

Or so it would seem, according to my friend and colleague, Christian Bell. He provides the fitting burial with “An obituary for the semantic web”:http://six27.com/weblogs/christian/christian.2006-08-23.writeback.

First, a quick aside: I would consider the “Semantic Web”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web proper to be the realm of RDF documents and generally far more advanced than what we mere mortals can aspire to understand. Christian and I are more concerned with the practice of using the HTML element that is most semantically appropriate for the content it contains, henceforth known as the “semantic web”.

While I have a great deal of esteem for Christian and his technical perspectives, this issue is likely to be a bone of contention between us. The bulk of his argument rests on the assertions that 1) HTML elements aren’t used in consistent enough manner to be semantically useful and 2) browsers don’t really care what sort of element you use because they don’t really _do_ anything with the elements anyhow (especially in the CSS world where you can make any element look like anything else).
Continue reading »

written by Kyle

The highlight of this weekend was “BarCampGrandRapids”:http://barcamp.org/BarCampGrandRapids. To briefly describe: BarCamps are technology conferences that take place worldwide, from Austin, Texas to Perth, Australia. Most professional conferences are expensive events, and you often end up listening to a lot of marketing pitches from companies, rather than learning something.
Continue reading »

written by Kyle

A local landmark, the Doo Drop Inn, has closed. After serving delicious perch dinners and mouth-watering onion rings (among other things) to Muskegon for 71 years, the family-owned restaurant is retiring. The current owners are taking their well-deserved rest and the family’s third generation has gone outside of the restaurant business.

Continue reading »

written by Kyle

Mom Adams and Grandmom Bromley came up and visited both Katie (my sister) and I this past week. It Grandma’s first time to see our houses, where we worked, and enjoy the beautiful places along the lakeshore.

We enjoyed shishkabobs on the grill on Monday night at our place, followed by a fun-but-short game of Balderdash. Tuesday and Wednesday we enjoyed wonderful food at Doug and Katie’s place, followed by a slow, relaxing evening of socializing over a 600-piece puzzle. Mom and Grandmom were able to visit “Muskegon State Park”:http://www.michigandnr.com/parksandtrails/ParksandTrailsInfo.aspx?id=475 and the “Meijer Gardens”:http://www.meijergardens.org/ during the day; they also enjoyed an unplanned car tour of “Grand Rapids”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=grand+rapids,+mi&ie=UTF8&ll=42.971874,-85.677567&spn=0.117061,0.346069&om=1, thanks to a missed turn and some nasty construction.

All in all, the time spent with family was too short when the time for goodbyes arrived. I’m glad they had the chance (with both husbands off on various trips) to travel up here when they did.

written by Kyle

One day and two absolutely incredible segments on NPR.

The first was a story about “the race to rescue a Lebanese girl buried by an Israeli airstrike”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624491. It is a poignant reminder of the human toll of war, as the story could have easily come from either side (i.e. it could have been an Israeli girl buried by a rocket attack).

That afternoon I listened as Betsy Chalmers explained why “I believe in faithfulness.” Though you can read her essay, I would recommend listening, to hear the emotions in her voice; this too was a frank look at the human toll of brokeness, but within the context of God’s redemptive work.

written by Kyle

You can now browse our photos again. We don’t have all of the same photos up yet (we’re missing a number of the earlier albums), but it’s a start. You can see the last nine photos posted at the bottom of each page or click on the “view all” link to go to the photos page. Enjoy!

written by Kyle

Growing up, my parents frequently used a particular technique when my sister and I got into a dispute. They would talk to each of us separately about the incident and ask what we had done wrong. If you protested that it was all the other person’s fault, or that they had done such-and-such, the parent assigned to your case would reply, “I don’t care about what they did. We’re talking about what you did.” Consequently resistance was futile and it was best to just examine your actions and confess any mistakes, no matter how tiny, as soon as possible.

Boy I wish we had some way of doing the same thing with countries. Specifically, I’d like to get Syria/Iran/Hezbollah in one room, Lebanon in another, and Israel in a third and go at them untel they each are ready to repent and confess the misteps that lead to the current war. I feel like the U.S. probably has sufficient pull with Israel to pull that of; we’re just too spineless to get tough on Israel. I’m not sure anyone has sufficient pull with Iran, since they’re rolling in the oil money. The same money that funds Hezbollah.

And so violence begets violence and the Middle East continues to deteriorate.

written by Kyle

The idea of a BarCamp sounded really appealing to me:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

One of the neat things about BarCamps is that the amount of pre-conference organization is minimal, due to the ad-hoc nature. Consequently (in theory) normal geeks like me should be able to help organize one. In theory.

We’ll see how it works out in practice. Presenting: BarCampGrandRapids.

Any and all Michigan geeks, artists, and anyone with a general interest in technology are welcome to attend.

written by Kyle