There’s something oddly appropriate about the fact that this month, which marks a decade since my high school graduation, should also be the month in which I met Trent Reznor (my high school idol) and rediscovered D&D and Magic: The Gathering (my high school hobbies).

It was at the Webby Awards that I met Trent Reznor, of course. I went with four of my coworkers who also worked on the project for which we won a Webby, and all in all it was an entertaining evening. While I’m typically not the gown-wearing type, once in a while it’s fun to get all dressed up and go to a big fancy party. The cocktails and food were surprisingly awesome, and I discovered that I do in fact like caviar. (This is not an uncommon experience for me - I did not realize until about four years ago that I like olives, for example.) I ran into David Pogue, which was pleasant as I had not seen him in a couple of years, and a coworker was verbally abused by Sarah Silverman, which was of course a delight.

The highlight of the evening for me was, of course, my brief meeting and awkward small talk with Mr. Reznor, who was friendlier and much more tan than I had expected. This was definitely a different Trent than the angsty, long-haired one whose photos still adorn my childhood bedroom, but then again I am not the angsty, long-haired girl I was ten years ago, either. Which is definitely for the best, all things considered. In any case, my coworkers enjoyed seeing me geek the fuck out, and I have some poor-quality footage of a relevant bit of the awards show itself.

As for the nerdier bits: I am currently playing in a 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which is my first taste of D&D in at least a decade, and am quite enjoying it. I know most of you either have never heard of 4E or have very strong opinions about it already, so I shan’t spend a lot of time discussing its relative merits as compared with the game you probably played in middle school. But I will say that taken on its own terms, it’s a streamlined, tightly-designed game and I am digging it.

Magic, too, has changed quite a bit since I last dabbled in it. I am not engaging in it regularly at the moment, but I played a few games over Shackburgers a couple weeks back and had a good time. I’ve also just downloaded Duels of the Planeswalkers, which in addition to being a difficult name to say aloud, is also a savory translation of Magic to an XBLA-friendly format. I haven’t played more than a couple of duels so far, but apart from some control awkwardness that can make it difficult to zoom in on certain cards sometimes, it seems to be a solid effort and one that I intend to spend more time with.

I have a few other quick bits to mention. I did indeed purchase an iPhone 3GS, as several of you have wondered, and it’s pretty fucking fantastic. The compass functionality is tailor-made for moments of subway emergence confusion, and the whole thing is just so much faster and smoother and more lovely than my first gen that I really couldn’t be happier with it.

And finally, I had the chance last night to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and found that while the theatre itself was almost too hot to be believed, the show was entertaining and still safely on this side of the line between fun and excessively wacky. I recommend it.

This is all that I have to tell you about for now. More generally speaking, life is pretty great at the moment. I am busy as it seems I always am, but I am also managing to cram a surprising quantity of awesome into each day. What more could I want? Aside from a spaceship and an army of robot servants, of course.

Since I mentioned on Twitter that I’ve been producing a lot of HTML email in the past year or so, I’ve gotten a bunch of requests for help in this area. This is because HTML email is a notoriously bizarre and unpredictable little subset of front-end development, and one can be a great web developer without having the faintest idea how to do an email that will work in most mail clients.

First, let’s get a couple of things out of the way. I’m not really interested in arguing about whether or not HTML email should exist; while I’m aware that lots of folks think it’s utterly loathsome and to be avoided at all costs, I’m also aware that it’s something lots of my clients want and request. So why not at least make an effort to do it well?

Ok. So what I’ve basically tried to do here is collect some of the little tricks and oddities I’ve had to learn while building this stuff. I’m not calling them best practices, because they aren’t, really – they’re just my practices. There are certainly other ways to approach email development, and plenty of them work as well or better than mine depending on what mail clients you or your company needs to support. Speaking of supported mail clients, here’s the list I’m using currently:

• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Apple Mail
• AOL Webmail
• Gmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• Hotmail

For the webmail clients listed above, I support the following browser/OS combinations: Firefox 3/IE6/IE7/Safari 3 for Windows, Firefox 3/Safari 3 for OS X. And there’s also a number of clients I support sort of unofficially. What that means is that while they are not part of the normal testing process to which all my emails are subjected, I don’t use anything I know is unsupported in these clients, and I work around their bugs as much as possible. Here’s that list:

• Entourage 2008
• Notes 6
• Thunderbird 2

This combination of mail clients means that I’m pretty severely restricted in terms of what I can do when building an email. If you take a look at Campaign Monitor’s excellent 2008 guide to CSS support in email, you’ll see that there aren’t a whole lot of things that work in every single client on that list, and their list is pretty similar to mine. Essentially, most of the standard CSS techniques I would use when building a page for display on the web are not safe for use in email. What this means is that my approach to email development is entirely different than my approach to web development, despite the fact that they both involve HTML.

I care very deeply about semantic markup, standards compliance, accessibility, human readability, and all of those lovely things. That is, when I’m building a website. For email, I throw all of that out. My top priority for email is that it displays correctly in all the mail clients I support, and my second priority is that it’s still more-or-less readable before images are enabled (since images are turned off by default in many mail clients). For most web developers interested in standards, this approach sounds like heresy. It may help if you consider that many of the concerns we have when building websites simply don’t exist when building something as transient as an email. It isn’t going to get indexed by a search engine, for example, unless you do a web version as well – and if you’re doing a web version, use web techniques instead.

My basic strategy for HTML email is tables, tables, tables. And not the kind of tables you probably used on the web in 1998 – it’s even worse than that. Because I unofficially support Notes, I try to avoid making my tables too complex. This means I favor nesting instead of using colspan and rowspan because of their historically spotty Notes support. Notes also has trouble with too many levels of nested tables, but in practice I find that I rarely need more than five levels or so. The code this strategy produces is ugly as sin, but the resulting email will display correctly almost anywhere. Also, specify widths on all your tables, even nested ones that you wouldn’t think would need it – I’ve had trouble with Entourage and width-less tables.

The other thing I do that will be surprising and dirty-seeming if you’re used to good web development is that I rely almost exclusively on spacer images to position things, instead of CSS positioning (or cell padding, or line breaks). I stick each spacer image in its own cell and slap style="display: block;" on it. These latter two steps are not always necessary, but they avoid the once-in-a-while Hotmail and Outlook spacing problems that used to drive me nuts. Of course CSS positioning is more elegant, but none of the normal properties I’d use on the web can be trusted in email. So I’ve had to rekindle my relationship with one-pixel transparent GIFs. If you still end up with whitespace where you don’t want it, try stringing together your code and removing linebreaks where possible.

As for text styling, there are a couple different ways you can approach it. The CSS properties related to text are safer than the positioning stuff – font-family, font-size, font-style, text-decoration and such are safe enough to use. But because I like to be sure my emails will display without any CSS whatsoever, I slap the style attributes on font tags and on links. You can avoid using the dreaded font tag, of course, by slapping your styling on the relevant cell or what have you, but I actually find it easier this way and I like having the redundancy in just in case.

And that right there is the only CSS I’ll use in an email: display: block on images and text styling on font tags and links. That’s it. It’s almost beautiful in its perversity, don’t you think?

That about covers the tips I have as far as making sure your email will display properly in most mail clients. I leave the rest to your tinkering. As for making it mostly readable without images, this can be tricky if the email in question is a company newsletter or announcement, as many of the ones I build are. These tend to be pretty image-heavy. Nevertheless, try to use HTML text whenever possible. One thing that may take you by surprise here is the difficulty of using background images, at least if you support Outlook 2007 or Gmail. If you don’t, lucky you. But if you do, try to make sure the text bits of your email are on top of a solid color instead of an image, or at least be aware of what it looks like when the background image gets stripped out and adjust accordingly. For the parts that must be images, use alt attributes on anything with text in it. I also like to include title attributes on both the link (if there is one) and the image itself – it’s redundant but it also means you have a better chance of something being there if a recipient is looking at or mousing over your email with images turned off.

I could also write a lot about actually sending your email, and reducing its spam score, but for right now I just wanted to assemble some bits and pieces about email development itself. I will say that for deployment, it’s pretty tough to beat Campaign Monitor (and their blog is great, too). The rest will have to wait for another day.

If your job includes producing HTML email, I hope you have found this post helpful. And if your job has nothing to do with HTML email, I hope this post has made you thankful for that fact.

Here are six things I like. Perhaps you will like them, too.

1. Spending St Patrick’s Day drinking novelty martinis at a sake bar. Typically St Patrick’s Day, like Halloween and New Year’s Eve, is a terrible, terrible night to go drinking in Manhattan. But it turns out that Japanese places don’t really serve green beer, and are thus blessedly un-packed. Also recommended: wearing black pants, so that when you spill your dark purple pomtini a couple hours into the evening, nobody can tell.
2. Parents. Who else would sacrifice an entire weekend to drive to New York City and shuttle you around for two days doing errands that require a car, including braving Ikea on a Saturday? And then help you drill things that need drilling and hang things that need hanging and move furniture that needs moving and then take you out for awesome Mexican food? It’s a short list, let me tell you.
3. I have two podcasts to recommend. One is the second Penny Arcade D&D series, which is good for entertaining me during my new, longer commute. The other is Planet Money, which is good for depressing the fucking hell out of me during my new, longer commute. But in a fun, informative way! If you’ve listened to any of the This American Life shows on the economy (The Giant Pool of Money, Another Frightening Show About the Economy, Bad Bank), Planet Money is in the same vein. And if you haven’t listened to any of those TAL shows, you really should.
4. And speaking of the colossal mindfuck that is the economy, brown bagging it is also recommended. I was really good about brining my own lunch to work for a long time, years ago. Then I got very lazy. Now I’m trying to get back in that habit again, and after just a couple of weeks it’s sort of shocking how much money I’m actually saving. Which means, of course, that it’s shocking how much money I was spending on lunch. But let’s be positive, here.
5. Another reason packing your lunch is recommended is that you then don’t feel as guiltly when you overspend on a delightful, ridiculous lunch once in a while. Like hopping a cab to Stand in the middle of the day for a chicken burger and hazelnut chocolate milkshake with a much-missed former coworker. The milkshake, by the way, is also heartily recommended.
6. And finally, my iPhone app recommendation at the moment is Zen Bound. It’s a lovely, lovely game.

So I’ve been back in Brooklyn for a little over two weeks now, and so far I’m digging it. I do indeed miss my dishwasher and my doormen, but I’m much fonder of this neighborhood than I think I ever was of Raccoon City. I love my bizarre old-fashioned doorways and my courtyard and the falafel place on the corner. I even like my creakier floors and clankier steam heat. It’s good to be back in my favorite borough.

Here are several things I enjoyed this week, and one I did not:

• Happy Up Here by Röyksopp
  You should go and watch this video, because it is oustanding.
• State of the Art: Google Geniuses at Work on Free Goodies
  The consensus around my office after we all read this Pogue piece was that most of us knew about most of these features, but none of us knew about all of them. This is in spite of the fact that they’re pretty much listed right here.
• MetaFilter: Squeeze in, get online for a better life
  A MeFi post on net rooms in Tokyo. The linked articles are worth reading for their own sake, but I was immediately struck by how much the photos reminded me of the coffin hotels described in William Gibson novels like Neuromancer. I am aware, though, that capsule hotels already exist and have for a while.

• Consumerist: Identifying yourself as a lesbian gets you banned on Xbox Live
  Sometimes, the stupidity in the world causes me actual physical pain.
• Etsy: JRGOLDBERG
  If you enjoyed Jellyfist, please to investigate J.R. Goldberg’s new Etsy shop. I would buy the place out if I were a little richer or a lot drunker, but as it is I could not resist picking up one of these print sets as a housewarming gift to myself.
• Though I think the “fail” thing is now cringe-worthy and generally to be avoided, I laughed my goddamn ass off at this photo. Then I saw this sketch and was afraid.

And here are a few technical bits, which you may skip unless you are also a web nerd.

• At my day job, I produce a fair amount of HTML email for clients. If you have also had occasion to write HTML email, you’re probably aware that it’s a murky, non-semantic tangle of pre-CSS markup and pure arcana. The Campaign Monitor blog, however, provides a huge amount of badly-needed information that’s based on actual testing, not guesswork. This week I made use of two of their posts: one on support for nested tables and one announcing a new Campaign Monitor report on mail client usage that I’ve already found extremely helpful.
• WebAim Screen Reader Survey Results: Fascinating information that will be of use to anyone interested in web accessibility.

Though I can’t quite believe January has come and gone already, I had a lovely birthday. I received some festive flowers, an extraordinary homemade cake, and a shiny new president. Not a bad haul, really, and a fine consolation for being all old and crusty now. Older and crustier than I was before, even.

Of course, the big news (which isn’t really news at all if you follow me on Twitter) is that in a little less than a week I am leaving behind Raccon City and moving back to dear old Brooklyn. The past few weeks have been a flurry of boxes and boxes and oh look some more boxes. Although some of them are quite large, I have used only one or two to sneak up on terrorists. Mostly I just put things in them, and then tape them up. The boxes, not the terrorists.

I signed the lease on my new apartment about a month ago, so I’ve had plenty of time to think about the various things I will miss about living on this strange little island. Here they are:

• I am really, really going to miss having a doorman. Five doormen, in fact. Mostly because of their signing-for-packages capabilities.
• The quiet. Brooklyn is many wonderful things, but eerily silent it is not. I am fond of my eerie silence.
• My dishwasher. Oh, how I love my dishwasher. I wish to take it with me, but in fact it isn’t really mine at all and would leave a strange hole in the kitchen if I did.
• John’s, the Italian place just over the bridge in Queens which happily delivers to my building and does amazing pepperoni rolls. Try them, I implore you.

And here are some things I will not miss:

• Having a doorman. Which is to say, the package signing is great and all, but when I haul my work-weary ass through the door at the end of the day, mostly all I want to do is get upstairs and enjoy the three hours or so between getting home and going to bed. I am not so much interested in a conversation about how late I get home or what various sporting teams are up to.
• Gristedes, the one grocery store on the island. It’s an awful grocery store, full of expired food products and half-human register-creatures who literally throw your food at the bag-creatures. Who then paw at it and make you uneasy about eating it. And crush the bread with canned goods.
• The shocking amount I currently pay in rent. If you do not currently live in New York or Tokyo and I told you how much I pay in rent, it is likely that you would fall over. My new rent would merely make you gasp a little.
• Living a little bit too far from the subway to walk comfortably in bad weather. Which means waiting for the wretched little shuttle bus, which is propelled by crazy people who like to drive up on the curb.
• The F train during the morning rush hour, particularly when the tram is out of service.

The new building is quite close to the subway, which is nice, and the apartment itself is quite pretty in an old-fashioned sort of way. Interestingly-shaped doorways and such. I am sure that once my toil and tribulation in box-hell is complete, I will be happy there.

And another quick note, as it’s quite likely I will not yet have cable on the day itself: on Sunday, this much-neglected beast of a site turns ten years old. Ten fucking years, for really reals. Let’s ponder it for a moment.

Ok, enough of that.

Since I got back from Massachusetts I’ve been slowly unpacking the heaps and piles of new treasures I brought back with me, since once again my family and friends pretty much outdid themselves in demonstrating how awesome they are and how well they know my taste.

As for what I gave out: this year in addition to the usual pile of books, music, and games, I also gifted some neat things from Etsy that were (I think) well-received. I’ll probably buy even more from Etsy next year if I can manage to get started on my shopping a little earlier.

If you liked the costumes on the Skinny Puppy tour in 2004, then you liked the work of Bethany Shorb, and should check out her Cyberoptix TieLab. I chose the Coney Island Parachute Jump and Sharp Dressed Man ties for two friends.

For my mother I got this lovely hummingbird mug from PottersVision. The glaze on the inside of the mug is especially pretty, I think.

My grandmother got this hand-carved Canada Goose from SandraHealy, though I had a hard time choosing which one to get. The birds in particular were all pretty appealing, I thought.

I also picked up this bottle opener for my cousin – it’s made from part of a recycled bicycle gear and I think it’s pretty neat.

But my absolute favorite Etsy purchase this year has to be the custom red squirrel feltidermy I ordered for my squirrel-plagued dad from GirlSavage. It’s simultaneously adorable and a little bit sick, which I’m pretty sure means it’s awesome.

The only downside to doing my holiday shopping on Etsy is, of course, that I keep finding new things I want for myself. Perhaps I should just start dumping a percentage of my paycheck into PayPal - just like with my 401(k), only instead of nothing I’d get things.

I won’t bore you with excuses. Let’s just get straight to the stuff I ought to have mentioned days or weeks or in some cases months ago, shall we? By the way, I recommend that for an optimal experience, you read this list in the same manner in which I wrote it. So go on and have an awful nightmare about teeth, then make some excellent coffee and grab a handful of Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s to munch on. I’ll wait.

• I am quite overcome with shame that I’m mentioning on December 20th something that happened in October, but here it is: I attended the Halloween Extravaganza & Procession of the Ghouls at St John the Divine and enjoyed it very much. There is video of the ghoulish bits, which took place after a screening of Phantom of the Opera.
• I am completely shocked that I have not previously said anything about Quordy, one of my very favorite iPhone games. The multiplayer functionality is what sets it apart from the other word games, many of which I am also fond of but which do not allow you to engage in epic, unending combat with your friends. I like this game so much that I threw three crumpled dollar bills at Nicole in an effort to force her to buy it. (She wisely complied.)
• My Thanksgiving was lovely and relaxing and full of deep-fried meat. Previously I would have said that deep-fried turkey was a thing I would not enjoy, but I am happy to have been proven wrong.
• I am of the opinion that the Devils in my Details is pretty great, so seeing the ohGr show at Blender Theater a couple of weeks ago was a treat. There is video of this, as well. I offer Pepper, Timebomb (my favorite track from the new album), Lusid, Cracker, and a bit with feathers. I believe that now, weeks later, I have finally gotten all of the feathers off of my bag and the coat I wore to the show, but little clumps of them still reside in my apartment. I imagine they will do so for all time.
• And speaking of videos, I have two more to show you, from the John Hodgman & Jonathan Coulton event at the Wired Store last night. Here is Hodgman’s theme song, and here is Code Monkey. I am aware that these clips are somewhat more head-filled than is ideal, but it couldn’t be helped. Of the handful of chairs available, the view from half of them was blocked by comically elaborate camera equipment, and the rest was all heads.
• I am still playing Warcraft, but only barely. November and December are busy times for those of us who make things for a living, even when those things are websites and newsletters. My mage reached 80 some time ago and has mostly languished since then, with Storm Peaks only half-completed and Icecrown still untouched. But I have made an effort to log in for the Winter Veil stuff, for which I have an unabashedly goofy and previously-mentioned affection. I mention this because my entire experience of the game changed earlier this week when I finally installed the large quantity of new RAM sent to me by a concerned friend. It is now an absolute joy to stroll through Dalaran, whereas a week ago I was avoiding it whenever possible as the lag-based rage and frustration was taking years off my life. And now it’s just a lovely floating mage-city! Quite charming, really.
• Being a girl, I am somewhat fond of cosmetics. This time of year is when all the ridiculous holiday makeup palettes come out, so I thought I would direct you to my two favorites: MAC’s smokey eye set, and this absurd and fantastic Tarte collection. I have them both already, so this is not a hint that you should buy them for me - you have been beaten to it! But I don’t have this Givenchy set and I do have a birthday in January. Cough, cough.
• And yes, I can hardly believe that Christmas is less than a week away. I actually enjoy this time of year in spite of its attendant horrors and am a little sad that it’s nearly over. I did a lot of my shopping on Etsy this time around, which was very satisfying, but of course I’m still remembering people I need to buy for even now, when it’s pretty much too late for leisurely pouncing with a cup of cocoa.

Oh, Internet. I am very sorry to have neglected you so egregiously once again. I hope that all of your holiday shopping is done and that you are not as busy as I am and have had time to play in the snow or do whatever it is that people who live in snow-free areas do in December. I will remind you once more that I am somewhat less silent on Twitter, so if you find your days saddened by the lack of me, it is always an option. And if you liked the Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s, try the ones that are covered in dark chocolate.

I’ve had a rather long and trying week that has left me more than a little tired and cranky. As a result, I don’t really feel equal to the task of writing something meaningful about what happened on Tuesday. I will say, however, that for the first time in a very long time I actually feel proud to live in this country. And quite pleased to share my birthday with Inauguration Day.