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A personal note

Two weeks ago I heard that a person close to me is seriously ill. I spent too much time in the hospital lately, but fortunately the situation has improved all the way to serious but not hopeless. Let’s hope it improves again from there — not impossible at all, but not a certainty, either.

As a consequence my schedule is all shot to hell and I’m very tired, to the point that I left our own CSS Day during the lunch break because I was making too many mistakes, didn’t hear what people told me, and even fell asleep during one of the talks. If you were at CSS Day and hoped to talk to me, now you know why you couldn’t. I hope this is the last time I have to leave early.

I planned to continue working on my argument that the Web is suffering from featuritis. I want to write one more article and then close off with a summary, but this is the first day in two weeks I can work on it, and I don’t think I will. So it’ll have to wait.

Also I find that my concentration is just gone. One of my sponsors asked me to do some research on using the vw unit for font sizes, but I find this is not the right time to examine Safari’s curious bugs or the way Android WebKit messes up other units such as em. The test pages are just a confused jumble to me. (I am fairly certain that using vw for font sizes has no place in responsive design, though.)

This is a roundabout way of saying that I may be entirely absent from time to time, and that my productivity will take a while to recover. If I don’t reply to your mail or tweet, you now know the reason why.

By the way, right now I'm doing pretty fine. I even feel good enough to write this blog post, and I may do a little more work later today. I'm just not sure if I'm going to finish that work; that's all.

A note that may be of interest to mobile context researchers: I find that I cannot talk about my situation via mail or SMS; I want to talk to people on the phone. Fortunately a lot of friends reach out to me, and I’m glad I can talk to them, but I want to do it with actual voice technology, and not with any form of written text. This may be entirely personal, but I still think it’s noteworthy, since it may help to explain why voice will always retain a place in the palette of mobile contexts we’re carrying in our pockets.