The official U.S. time

A government site with a memorable URL: www.time.gov. So yeah, my phone (current time piece of choice, since I've gotta lug the thing around anyway) was 10 minutes slow. That's my excuse for showing up to work late and I'm sticking to it.

Tahoe, May 2004

These photos have been uploaded to Flickr, tagged with May 2004 Tahoe vacation and added to my Vacations set.

Since I've mostly been posting pictures, and rarely even that, I really should get Picasa up and running with the BloggerBot. Or I could actually decide to finish one of those articles I have saved as drafts, like the position: fixed; design one, where I explain how I did Jade Lee's site. But not now, it's time to pack my bags.

Salad Fingers Episode 2 "Friends"

jfred is disturbing sometimes. he sent me this flash movie

National Geographic Snowflakes Pictures: Photograph 1 (winter, Christmas)

getting psyched to visit maine

DoubleType - DoubleType

A font creation tool written in Java. I'm more at the learning to use typography stage of learning than the creating my own, but looks like a cool tool to come back to.

Hiking in New Zealand Introduction - GreatOutdoors.com

A note to myself, from gadling, a travel blog.

Pierced Eyeglasses

Just got new new rimless glasses, taking some adjusting too, keep having these moments of, "my glasses are broken, where did my frames go?!" Anyway, these glasses mounted to your bridge-of-nose piercing make a certain amount of sense, IF you've already got a bar of metal through your face. But I can't imagine why someone with glasses would put a piercing there in the first place.

Serenity

Serenity exceeds all expectations. And if you've noticed the banner ad on this page you know those expectations were rather high.

We saw an early screening last night, the special effects were quick rendered with no texture, but it was still awesome seeing them all on the big screen.

If I had to sum up the movie with one word it would be "intense". Cybil and I stayed up late talking about it, recalling favorite scenes. I can't believe we have to wait until September, I want to see it again right now.

Early Christmas

Celebrated an early Christmas with the Solyns yesterday. Cybil got me a freestanding tent:

The ground here is too hard to pitch a stake, but they've finally started coming out with free-standing tents light enough to carry solo. It's not very wide, but there's lots of head room for a tent it's size.

The white thing in the very back corner of the room in the above photo is my ping pong table, hidden behind a canvas cover I made so that it isn't this giant looming black thing dominating the room.

And as long as I'm posting, here's the obligitory cats being cute photo:

zipdecode

Hit "z" or click the word "zoom" to make it fun. Try tying your current zip code. Try typing the zip code of your home town.

Fuck the South

Somebody wrote what I've been saying for years. And they backed it up with research.

Html Validator for Firefox and Mozilla

perhaps one of the greatest extensions ever. an html validator built in to view source. via mister jon.

Boing Boing: Purple Haze

so I guess my outright condemnation of the south and the bible belt is a little overkill. but they did still voted out gay marriage, trashing common law marriage while they were at it.

Uncollapsing Margins (Complex Spiral Consulting)

for that better understanding of collapsing margins that you've always wanted. this is especially relevant if you're trying to avoid the box model by putting margins on elements within a container. mr meyer should do more of these. but then again he does have a writing career to think about.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Hobbit' joins human family tree

Hobbits! via kottle.

ipod2car adapter

Control your iPod with your car stereo. via Leaves Rustle.

Eminem Mosh Video

a very dark call to vote.

Errol Morris: Election '04

"Apple Switch" style ads (by the same guy) with people who voted republican in 2000 and are voting for Kerry in 2004.

Ian's Shoelace Site - Shoelace Knots - How To Tie Your Shoes

a collection of quality shoe lacing knots. now that my weekend/driving shoes have laces it's time i learned one of the faster ones. via mister jon.

Design by Fire: Santorini in black & white

grayscale conversion technique. because i always forget where it is.

Design by Fire: Santorini in black & white

grayscale conversion technique. because i always forget where it is.

CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode

Better late than never. PPK, owner of quirksmode.org, has finally written a page on doctype switching. It is better than any other page written on the subject that I've read, clearly stating the problem, the solutions, and explaining exactly what aspects of CSS are effected an d in what way.

Pirates & Emperors

Learn all about US international policy. via jfred.

Google Search: keira knightly site:sublimedirectory.com

A new use for Google Alerts that I just came up with. Watch a particular website for a certain set of keywords. For example, the above search searches sublimedirectory.com for "keira knightly," an alert type "Web" that emails me "as it happens". Their was a particularly clever and less porn mongering search that I came up with last night on the drive home, but I've forgotten it.

Just remembered! You could set up a search of your favorite radio station for a particular musician: Yo Yo Ma site:kusc.org.

FedEx | Track

Tracking my Newgy robot.

Again.

Hired

After 2 years as a contractor for Baxter BioScience I have finally been hired, and for thrice my age annualized plus a signing bonus. Begrudging thanks are due to Mister Jon, for leaving and making them afraid. Thanks as well to Sabah and Jeff for using that fear to twist arms.

Lemmings!

in dhtml

:::: F E R I C S T U D I O ::::

fascinating illustrations / animations.

Butterfly Blades Comparison Chart [megaspin.net]

Not that I'm in the market for a new blade right now, both the cost (I'd most likely have to get new rubber as well) and the need to let my game evolve, will keep me from getting one now. But here are two that look very interesting, given that I'm looking for a medium/soft touch with a high degree of both power and control. Oh by the way, my current blade is a Madash:

Speed: 8.8 Control: 7.0 Feel: Medium

Kong Linghui Special

This new addition in the very popular line of rackets designed with the help of the 2000 Olympic Men's Champion, Kong Linghui, offers the best speed to control ratio in the Offensive Class of Blades. Used by Kong Linghui himself, the unique Arylate-Carbon and 3 ply-wood construction of this blade produces the perfect blend of control, speed, and maneuverability for the off-the-bounce quick attacking style of play. The soft feel of Arylate blended with the power of Carbon, this blade has it all.

Speed: 8.0 Control: 8.0 Feel: Soft

Michael Maze

Denmark's rising young star, Michael Maze helped design and plays with this Arylate/Carbon blade. Similar to our popular Timo Boll Spirt model, this blade offers a little more speed and even more control. With a med-hard feel this is a perfect blade for hard hitters. Its good speed to control ratio make the M. Maze destined to become a classic.

Speed: 8.5 Control: 8.0 Feel: Medium

CSS Property - font-size - HTML Dog

ok, while still not as useful a reference as an actual book, it's so cool that the example uses sane css typography.

Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election

mr kottle and readership have put together a handy guide to voting. managed to drag my ass out for the whole governor vote thingy, definitely have to make it out for this one. could try to persuade Cybil to register as well, but is the inconvenience of having to vote really worth the penalty of having to do jury duty?

Hand Shadows by Henry Bursill

what a fascinating book to have out there in the public domain. shadow puppets and bunnies are a running theme in the fantasy series i'm reading right now. ummm, that's all, just noting a connection, nothing clever being thought here.

Serenity

The movie is shot!

COMEDY CENTRAL : South Park 27 Greatest

vote for 613 - The Return of the Lord of the Rings to the Two Towers

Zach Braff's Garden State Blog

Haven't made it to see the final cut of this movie, but what we saw must have been a near final draft. Not bad. Felt a bit like a play at times, but it's a first film and a bit on the artsy side, so can't blame it. Anyway, Scrubs fucking rules, and here's a Zack Braff quote from his blog:

Answer to a tricky SAT word problem: B) Jane would have serviced 11 sailors in 4 hours aboard the carrier.

Watchcow.net > An Amazon price watchcow for the syndicated generation.

Made an RSS feed out of my amazon wish list. Now I can monitor price change history, how cool is that? via jfred.

I Found Some Of Your Life

i shoulda thought of this. via tantek.

pentagon.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

conspiracy theories are fun. i'll have to get jill's take on this (x-military, lives in baltimore).

JavaScript DOM

javadoc style documentation of the W3C DOM. via jfred.

Springfield Map

For Simpsons fans.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Pill propelled into abortion debate

With scary shit like this going on: "This year 12 states took steps to try to introduce so-called conscience clauses.", I'm making BBC NEWS | Americas my news source for what's going on in the states.

Photos of the New Apartment

Update:

That's the Newgy Robot, head set on topspin with a touch of side. Thanks to everyone who contributed towards it for my birthday.

And here is the laminate tile floor I installed in the new apartment:

That's a quick snap of the ping pong table in our new apartment. I've been meaning to put up pictures of the new place for some time, this'll have to do for now.

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About

so i've been reading this for 2 days now. it's still hilarious and i'm not halfway done yet. slow reader, true, but also reading everything, not skimming. and pretending to work.

Origami Underground - Erotic Origami

although websense hasn't caught this yet, our slow network makes it un-viewable.

ITTF President Forum

Some things have changed since last I played.

RNC NOT WELCOME IN NYC!

almost makes me with i was back east. via glassdog.

Black & Decker Ocillating Fans - Silent Force Blade technology

When decided to kick down the extra $10 for this fan what I thought I was paying for was the thermostat control, which I have come to enjoy in a box fan that we have, but what I got was the most ass kicking volume of airflow from a household fan I've ever felt, and it's quite to boot.

glassdog: "What's Wrong With: BitTorrent"

[T]he BitTorrent community needs to pull its collective head out of its socket and realize that real people want to accomplish real things with their little toy. And that can't happen until they stop playing with it, hose it off and put a pretty pink ribbon around its neck, so it's not so scary.

On my list of things to do once I get my office set up is install a bittorrent client. Sounds like it's gonna be lots of fun. Luckily I know people who know where there are good books on tape and such, so my learning curve won't be too bad. That said, why does open source software user experience have to suck so much? Are there no UE people willing to donate their time? Are there just so many fewer UE people out there that the community hasn't reached a critical mass where we work on projects together on the side? These are just brewing thoughts, maybe they'll distill, maybe they won't.

Training on Web Standards

Working on a required reading list for a new contractor starting soon here at work. Debating how much more context to give here. Let's just say it's really hard to find a front end developer who is technically qualified and available. In the end I chose the most articulate person that we interviewed, whom I see eye-to-eye with philosophically, but will require a little ramp up on the advanced JavaScript coding and CSS layout, which he was honest about, scoring big points for not just nodding his head and saying yes like a good little ______ (am i not a racist if i don't finish this statement, or is it the thought that counts against me?). In the end intelligence and willingness/ability to learn are the most important things to have in an employee, though damn do I miss having a mentor at work!

Required reading for Web Standards development:

• designing with web standards
• the first 3 chapters of Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference (with the rest as the best CSS reference out there)
• Separating behavior and structure
• Separating Behavior and Presentation

and getting more specific, at work we use these:

• Conditional comments
• JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)

and then of course there are some important resources:

• Explorer Exposed!
• JavaScript Lint
• and last but not least, QuirksMode.

What did I miss? Should the Meyer "On CSS" books be on there?

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

i did something like this in college. didn't get nearly enough people to try it. don't remember what my variables were, didn't know so much about typography at the time.

Usability News - 6.2 2004 -- Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts

i did something like this in college. didn't get nearly enough people to try it. don't remember what my variables were, didn't know so much about typography at the time.

X-Entertainment - Spider-Man Reviews Crayons! Part 1 of 3.

best viewed at high resolution sitting well back from your monitor. CRAYONS! RAH!

Alton Brown.com Rants & Raves

Alton Brown has a blog! via SimpleBits.

The Skeleton Shop

a cross between that old game "tanks" and and Nightmare Before Christmas.

Streamingmedia.com: Patently Absurd? Streaming Users Face Acacia Patent Fight

I learned about this through Cybil's mom, who works as a project manager at FIDM. They are being sued for streaming media over their website. And it looks like they're just going to fork over the money. Fucking absurd. Does this mean they can just go after anyone who happens to stream a video, or music, on their website? Will they attack radio stations like KUSC that I listen to at work? What's next, attacking any site that uses Flash? Intellectual property law, intended to protect the rights of inventors, has been corrupted to the point where it's just another means for corrupt people to sick their lawyers on innocent bystanders.

Update: http://fightthepatent.com/

team america

I've been waiting for the next South Park movie, here we have it.

BATMAN BEGINS

How bad-ass is that new metal bat logo? And the new car kicks. Christian Bale has played in 3 of my all time favorite movies, Henry V, American Psycho and Equilibrium. The supporting cast are also phenominal serious actors, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Morgon Freeman, and the doppleganger Gary Oldman, who I never recognize because he never plays himself, he's always in the role. Kinda makes one wonder how they ended up stuck with Katie Holmes. Not to end on such a down note, check out the trailer (you'll have to un-block the popup). It's dark and clever, a nice departure from the crappy-campy direction the last couple installments took.

GirlKnights.com (gamer porn)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

I have more than one monitor on my computer, can I have a tablet for each monitor?

what a sick idea. a 22" CRT for my 6"x8" tablet, and then a 17" LCD and a 4"x5" tablet of the same model so that i can use both tablets with the same pen. it would be just wrong.

ViewSonic: Products: Desktop Displays: CRT Monitors: Graphic Series: G220fB

thinking something like this would be nice. dunno if my crappy little desk would hold it.

ViewSonic: Products: Desktop Displays: CRT Monitors: Graphic Series: G220fB

thinking something like this would be nice. dunno if my crappy little desk would hold it.

..::: House Gymnastics :::..

this one's for nick, the jedi physicist, next time i catch him online.

The Political Compass

suppose that makes me an anarchistic communist

Good Experience - Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience

weekend reading

Techbargains.com - New Dell Biz Deals

looking for a new computer for home. gonna dump money on monitor(/s) and ram, the rest isn't so big a deal.

OCR B

faking product box info for some user testing at work. jon suggested this font.

Haier XQBM22-C Washing Machine Review at Epinions.com

a freakishly thorough review

KODAK: Taken On The Road-American Mile Markers

How wide is America? Check out the Picture Viewer.

MEHGAN HEANEY-GRIER, Olympic free-diver

...did Keira Knightley’s underwater stunts in Pirates of the Caribbean

Google Local

Have to compare the results here with those of switchboard.com. I find switchboard to often be out of date. Moving to a new location we'll have plenty of oprtunity to try them out.

ESPN.com: Olympics

There are actually a number of interesting sports at the summer olympics. While it's nice to see Tennis' popularity growing, the majority of air time still seems to be devoted to the boring few mainstream american sports. Here are the games I'm going to try to catch more of this August:

• Archery
• Badminton
• Canoe and Kayak
• Fencing
• Handball
• Judo and Taekwondo
• Table Tennis
• Tennis
• Volleyball
• Wrestling

Apartment Floorplan

One of the major changes in my daily life starting in the beginning of August is a move to a new apartment in Sherman Oaks. I've gotten a bit of a head start by measuring the major rooms and drawing up a floorplan (GIF Image, 900x582 pixels). It still needs some work aside from the fact that I've left of the kitchen, bathroom, and all the closets/cupboards due to time constraints when I was doing the measuring. Still have to figure out what to do about bookcases and/or hanging bookshelves, and where all the paintings are going to go. Not satisfied with the living room setup, and even though the bed theoretically ought to go where I put it in that floorplan, I'm going to move it out from under the window so the cats don't knock the fan onto my head (again!).

It's going to be nice having a kitchen large enough for 2 people and an office that's not taking up one wall of the bedroom. This place is basically a two bedroom going for the price of a one. Not thrilled about moving during the hottest month of the year, but as with the other major change, for some things there is no opportune time.

Update: a crazy new scheme from Cybil (as a counter proposal to a foosball table), a full sized ping pong table that would get stored against the wall and fold out to take up the whole living room. It's going to be tight, with 5 feet clearance on either end. Might buy a little more space when I take down the railing along the edge of the loft (room that's a 6" step up off the living room where we're putting the office). Two ways I see of looking at it, 1) anything is better than a stupid quarter-size table, and 2) I need to work on tightening up my swings anyway to increase recovery time between shots.

castlevania

i've mentioned how great it is when games have proper key commands, but this one goes above and beyond. you get to set the controls yourself when the game starts.

Smell of Earth and Clay: East Greenland Songs, translated by Lawrence Millman

Drum-Song Against an Angry Husband, Bad Hunter's Drum-Song and Kuk-ook's Song are particularly fun. Eastern Greenlandic Songs of a wife stealer, a small-penised bad hunter, and a nasty little person.

Update: Michael took my suggestion and added anchors to the individual poems/songs so that people can link to specific ones. I have now done so.

RE. Design News Reluct.com design and architecture news

foo on mister jon and his leaving to work someplace else where he'll get to work with an industrial design vendor. here be a new design blog, and note the feed.

The Polyphonic Spree - The Quest For The Rest

this woulda been cooler if i'd found it before the album, but doug should get a kick out of it nonetheless.

JavaScript optimization examples - Optimizing JavaScript for Execution Speed improves performance for faster optimize javascript speed - Chapter 10

Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, by Andrew B. King

JavaScript Optimization

- Jeff Greenberg

Boxes and Arrows: Are Useful Requirements Just A Fairy Tale? (and why an IA should care)

you know what, i'm actually going to print this out on paper and read it, might be a good one to pass around work.

jadeleeauthor.com

And another site launches: Jade Lee, Erotic Romance Author. Writing a short piece on where I found the inspiration for the design, and another piece on the technical side of the CSS trickery (no JS!) involved in making a full screen fixed position layout are both on my to do list, right after migrating Rakehell over to PHP.

Also in the works is an update to my portfolio with the following projects:

• advoy.com
• advancingbiosurgery.com
• baxter-concours.be
• cr2004.com
• jadeleeauthor.com
• leifdevine.com
• demo.xinasoft.org

And then, if I'm still alive after all that, and moving to a new apartment, I've been thinking about writing up a business plan and making those shoe-string personal/author sites a regular thing. The design is invigorating, the one-on-one work with a client is improving my professional soft-skills, and the extra cash is nice too. Might even be able to pick up a real monitor to use at home; I'm getting totally spoiled by the 22" at work, the Jade Lee site wasn't even possible to fully debug running 1024x678, even though the design works on smaller than 800x600.

hottpants

all panties, all the time.

Recommended Dragonlance Reading List

Lately I've been hanging out with my old high school companions. This guide to the series is helping me to re-build my library, as well as introducing the fifth age a the war of the souls. (link updated)

LeifDevine.com

After finding the inspiration a couple months I have finally finished my brother's site, 445 days past the original launch date.

To design the header I took a piece of construction paper, folded it in half, and drew a bunch of curves and points. Then I cut it out, unfolded it, and traced it with my tablet. I've found it's easier to draw a good curved by erasing extra "ink" than by painting it, so when I colored in my tracing I went over the lines. Then I chopped it back to the curve by flipping the pen and using the eraser end. Here's a step by step walk-through with images:

1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 

1. Trace the shape, going over tricky curves several times*
2. Fill in the lines, being generous with the paint
3. Erase the excess paint
4. Hide the trace lines

*"Don't be afraid to build scaffolding" - Jon

Not much to say about the coding except that a) there are background images on a number of elements and b) it was a bitch getting everything to line up in the center of the page (still off by 1 pixel in IE). Oh, and one other thing; the design works with images turned off.

Monster raindrops delight experts

to taunt jfred. poor bastard having the hardest time coming up with a name for his company.

The Swedish Schoolnet: Lexin - Swedish-English dictionary

yes, blogging as a substitute to taking good notes about work related stuff again. this Swedish - English Dictionary could be helpful here, as we at times take translation into our own hands.

gridlock

a shifting maze (flash). this is my kinda puzzle.

The Japan Hierarchy

in case you're reading this Isaac

Losing Sleep Over a To-Do List

Couldn't sleep. Jon would say I was trying to hold too much state in my head. Dunno if that makes sense if you're not a geek. Had to break out the white board:

That bottom right quarter of the board is lurking somewhere, I'm going to try to sleep on it.

Ah! That's it. A list of all the things I've been meaning to write about in my blog.

Weddington Apartment

We had to turn down an apartment today. It was this gorgeous little duplex style place on Weddington in Sherman Oaks, a small residential street in a convenient location. The place is well kept, has it's own water heater, convenient laundry facilities, hardwood floors, an efficient air conditioner, shade trees but also good light, high ceilings, and even a freakin' front lawn. The problem was, it's just too small. I even went so far as to go back and measure the living room and bedroom, measure all of our furniture and draw up a floorplan. I managed to fit our stuff, but there wasn't any room left for storage. It has no closets to speak of, and minimal cupboard space. There isn't enough space on the counters for our appliances, and I couldn't figure out where the hell the cat boxes could go.

So we're still searching. I've been doing a lot of thinking about all the different factors that influence our decisions to choose a place. Here are the things I've thought of so far,

1. size
2. geographic location
3. neighborhood
4. nice/well kept
5. accepts cats
6. amenities (A/C, laundry, dishwasher)
7. and last but not least, price

We each of course put different amounts of emphasis on different things. Cybil wants a big place, she's got a total gym and a large volume of books. I'm currently concerned about location and neighborhood, the commute to westlake is dragging me down, and I hate the heat so I'm looking for someplace with trees.

Are there any other general factors that you consider when looking for a place?

Web Applications, promise or hype?

weekend reading

racing game

flash game with an astroids feel, zero-g with friction. excellent key commands, nice to see in a flach game. hit Enter.

Spite Your Face Productions Ltd. - Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock

the exciting new animated short from Spite Your Face Productions Ltd, commisioned by Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios/The Lego Group to accompany the release of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2.

Maxim hometown hotties

cast your vote! if only presidential elections were this easy on the eyes..

• Bethany
  Portland, ME
• Jen
  Los Angeles, CA
• Amber
  Bellevue, WA
• Desiree
  New Brighton, MN
• Michelle
  Savannah, GA
• Rhea
  Brookshire, TX
• Nikki
  Marina Del Rey, CA
• Sylvia
  Hillsborough, NJ
• Jamie
  Modesto, CA
• Gina
  Hermosa Beach, CA

Are the Browser Wars Back? - How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer. By Paul Boutin

and this from a microsoft owned magazine

Fixed Positioning for Internet Explorer on Windows

this could be a clean solution to my layout problem. i really would rather find a CSS solution than hack it with javascript, but i'll do what i have to to acheive the design. that's the problem with coding my own design, i can't go back to the designer and say, "sorry, that can't be done."

The Low Carb Luxury Online Magazine: No Excuses

No Excuses: nothing should stop you from exercising... by Cybil Solyn. Cybil got an article published! It's just an online magizine at the moment, but they're getting bought out by a publisher. Oh, and her article made the cover.

Pushing the CSS Envelope

My latest photoshop design has me doing some Viewport experiments and pushing some elements around based on Viewport properties. I'm anticipating it being completely broken in Mac IE, and also anticipating myself not caring. If I do decide to give a shit I'll just have to use that Mac IE hack to select the offending elements and set them to display: none;

Details on my rather heinous hacking coming soon...

CSS minimum and maximum sizes

going to experiment with using min-height and max-width in my latest freelance project.

Fritz Stuck in a Box

This is Fritz,

he got stuck in a box today,

and Cybil took a picture while he pleaded to be freed.

Serenity

Rock! There's such a cult following for this show that the movie will do well. Then we can all hope it gets picked up again.

Behr.com Explore Color

some fun color pickers

Die Wagenschenke - Das Partyzelt am Albanifest in Winterthur.

Drunk walk. move your mouse side to side.

hollywood.com redesign

The hollywood.com redesign is so abhorent, not to mention broken to the point of unusability in Firefox, that I refuse to use it anymore. I would rather not go to the movies.

But that's not going to happen. And now that the Movie View (advanced screenings) execs are getting all pissy about us going all the time (it's not our fault they let MTV totally fuck up the Spiderman 2 screening) we're not going to as many free screenings for a little while. So with this new resolution to boycott hollywood.com I needed to find alternatives for basic movie info and reviews. Google to the rescue, easily turning up losangelesmovietimes.com for showtimes and rottentomatoes has a page with all the Kit Bowen Reviews, the reviewer we trust most of the time.

Now I've gotta remember to see if anyone wants to catch Fahrenheit 9/11 after work on Friday.

Boxes and Arrows Redesign

this here be the most challenging re-design content i've seen. the bar starts out really high, and the audience is the elite of the User Experience field. i have some things that i would personally like to improve on the home page, mostly having to with link clarity and content freshness.

Skin Deep, A safety assesment of ingredients in personal care products

so this application is perhaps the slowest I have ever encountered (they must have their time out settings cranked), but has some good information if you're willing to wait.

Import Your Mbox or Maildir Files into GMail

This is a note to myself on the off chance that I decide to do something with my old email backup. I haven't even opened up outlook and imported my old email since I reformatted a couple weekends ago. Have moved all conversations to webmail (gmail and my old college account) and have had no need for pop. In fact, since me email isn't tied to a particular computer anymore I've been able to leave my laptop home.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Fifteen Minutes

THE KIDS:

*hug threesomely*

ALFONSO CUARÓN:

I think I directed a porno like this once.

First private astronaut reaches space

Woohoo!

KindGirls. Clean pictures galleries of nude girls

Free Met-Art galleries. More tasteful than my usual fair, but hot nonetheless.

Exercise in Customer Experience

customer satisfaction vs. branding

Helping a client choose between web standards and backwards compatibility

I was presented with a challenge last weekend while working on project specs for a freelance client. She is a extraordinarily talented and multi-faceted person (award winning novelist, once ranked 10th in the nation at racquetball), but technical requirements are just not her thing. I had a long list of technical questions that I needed her feedback on, and one of them was browser support. Instead of taking the technologies approach and talk about web standards by tossing around acronyms, I chose to talk about benefits and audiences.

Web Standards

Browser Support:

• Internet Explorer 5.5+
• Netscape 6+
• Mozilla/Firebird
• Opera

These are the "modern browsers." The vast majority of users will have them. The focus of this method is providing code that is fast to download, easy to maintain (you could learn to edit the code yourself), and easy to make site-wide design/layout changes.

The audiences that benefit most from Web Standards are disabled people (blind, visually impaired, mobility impaired) and Search Engines. Search Engines such as Google are for all practical purposes a blind visitor. They look at the code of the site in the same way that a screen reading program does for a blind person. Good search engine optimization pretty much requires Web Standards.

Backwards Compatible

Browsers supported include the four listed about plus these:

• Internet Explorer 5.0
• Netscape 4

By coding in such a way that our layout is maintained in these old browsers we basically have to compromise each of the benefits listed above to some degree.

The audiences that benefit most from Backwards Compatibility are people using really old computers, most often found in schools and libraries.

Notes:

Let me make it clear that this decision has mostly to do with which audiences will see the intended layout of the site. If you choose Web Standards the Backwards Compatible audience will still be presented with the content of the site (I make it a rule to not excluding anyone), the site would simply look a lot more like a Word document, with it's headers and lists, than a website.

I chose to cover operating system support in another section.

2 Columns, Content First, Floats with Clearing Footer

A brilliant solution in that it uses two innovative techniques combines. First, it uses negative margins on floats. From the article and my reading elsewhere I still don't fully understand the intricacies of floats, especially when it comes to things like their treatment of margins. But it works. Second, it uses nesting rather than wrapping to solve a problem. Most CSS layout solutions involve wrapping two elements within a container, but this solution pulls from an old school table layout set of tools, and nests a copy div within a container.

The only difficulty I had with the article actually was the naming of a div id, and I think came from the way the article was written, by reverse engineering the solution rather than guiding the reader through it. My problem started with the original HTML code example. The main text was wrapped in a div called "container". This is a name usually reserved for divs that hold within them other divs, making the structure of the page. My question was, why isn't it div id="content" or "copy". My question was answered with the solution to the overlapping text problem in example two. We needed another div inside "container" called "copy", to give the text a right margin. Now, the way he explained it did involve less code changing than starting out with a "copy" div and wrapping a "container" div around it, and shifting the CSS around, but personally I find following the complete path to the solution of a problem just as important as learning the answer. By messing with the solution process by basing the initial example on knowledge gained later in the solution it makes following along more difficult.

Innovation Landscapes

3D graphs mapping the innovation efforts in several industries.

Buckling Leather Cock-Ring

Sparing you the details, these are far the most bang for your buck of any sex toy I've encountered thus far.

W3C DOM - Form error messages

This is exactly what I was talking to Jon about the other day. I'd like to use something like this for contextual help as well as error messages. Only problem I see with the way he's doing it is that it inserts text into the flow of the page, which could be awkward if the error message or help text is long.

Styling Form Widgets

Very "clickable". I like this very simple approach. I've seen people bend the CSS&HTML into contortions to get the corners round, but that's just overkill. The one addition that I would make the cursor a hand: style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer;"

Embracing Best Practice

While the language makes me cringe (current employer is all about that best-whatever crap, they've bought the business consultant lingo but not the underlying ideas), but I think this is moving in the right direction. I'd like to see less pontificating about standards and more presenting of new practices, with pros and cons, leaving the determination of what is best for a given project up to the end user. Also, rambling about how it's all a balancing act doesn't do it for me either. I want to hear a strong case for a given solution. I know that there is rarely one standard solution that will work everywhere. Give me an argument for your way, and if you're really good you'll discuss both sides.

Urban (slang) Dictionary

For those of us who were raised in isolation from society and therefore don't know what the fuck people are talking about sometimes. Also just a great place to stop by and learn new ways of saying bad things.

taxonomy of evil

It'll work just like Amway, with a percentage of evil flowing back up the pyramid.

Talk dirty

think i read some great SOE stuff on this site once too. Yes. I did: Help the Googlebot understand your web site

Naked Loft Party

I miss the early days of Nerve.com, before they sold out and the site got to the point where I couldn't stand looking at it anymore. Fleshbot too is wearing thin. Perhaps good writing is what I'm looking for, and, as it is not yet blocked at work by websense, this site might hit the spot (with the right edge of the browser off screen to hide the ads).

Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban

it successfully transports the audience to a place that is truly magical

Exactly what I've been saying. The new director has created a fantasy world on film that is awe inspiring, not just campy fun.

HBO's Deadwood

There are so few shows worth watching anymore, if it weren't for HBO and HGTV I'd drop cable and go back on Netflix for a while. But HBO continues to come out with weekly shows that are better than most of the movies hollywood keeps pumping out (after dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator).

Nigritude Ultramarine

SEO (in the tricking google sense of the words) is no better than spam. Go Anil! Oh, and to make this text relevant to the words Nigritude and Ultramarine, here are their definitions from dictionary.com:

nigritude

Blackness; the state of being black

ultramarine

A vivid or strong blue to purplish blue.

Yes. DorkBlue should be ashamed of sponsoring such a contest.

Web Standards ROI

Some actual numbers. Granted, it's all anecdotal, but it's great to see a cost/time breakdown.

glassdog

Glassdog is back with a vengeance! Gaudy clashing design, and content to match. Delightfully obscene. Wish more people would run uncensored.

Sparklines (or Worldlines) updated

Tufte has updated his page on "Sparklines: Intense, Simple, Word-Sized Graphics"

Plastic Balls

A flash game with new take on breakout. Gravity is in the center. Easier to control with mouse than keyboard.

PixIcons:: eats est percipi

an entire type face of 9x9 pixel icons. via mister jon.

Ideal Day Job

With [reasons deleted] I thought I'd put together my day job priorities. These include both aspects of a workplace environment and personal career goals. The vast majority of these conditions exist in my job at the moment.

At my ideal job I would...

• work with a talented team in an open office (not cube farm) environment that encourages cross-pollination of ideas between a variety of roles.
• be constantly learning, thinking and challenged.
• work on projects that are important, projects that accomplish goals and serve needs.
• have a to-do list that is long enough that I'm always busy (with a reasonable ebb and flow to the stress level).
• conduct user testing, or at least work on interfaces where user feedback is received and valued.
• spend more time working with people on problems than dealing with problem people. On the same note, I would spend more time being productive than in meetings.
• have influence on internal workflows, be able to change a process if it is clearly causing problems and be able to experiment with alternative ways of doing the job.
• solve problems creatively, not just fulfill requirements.
• be involved with requirements on at least a consulting level.
• invent new products.
• work on interfaces in variety of media.
• both design (wireframes, photoshop mockups, etc.) and code (front end: html, css, dom scripting).

What other things make a job or workplace environment really great?

Simon Willison: Executing JavaScript on page load

note to self for next time pull together a dhtmlapi.js

Comments on mezzoblue v4

comments to be read and comment to be made before they get turned off. suspect there will be a number of "it looks unpolished" but nobody actually discussing the contrast issues (high contrast design, low contrast content).

Sons of Suckerfish

code to be read

Colour Schemes

I used to do the technical thing, picking two complimentary colors. Lately I've been doing what the first commentor suggests, pick a color, then come up with a harmious colors, often going monochrome with various shades of the first color, then throwing in a strong compliment to pop the links/headers. I'd really like to start using the selecting colours from nature technique.

Non-Standard Code Hurts The Bottom Line

I just want to work on fun projects and do the right thing, code them with standards. But ROI is a necessary evil if you want to stay in business.

'Fictitious' author publishes the first book without verbs

My book would have no sentences subjects. Context is so mundane.

via kottle.

Cryptography Meets Typography

via V-2.

Information Architecture Tools

Fuel for an emerging document junkie. Also to be read: a boxes and arrows article on Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success

Internationalization

This is a lot of what I do here at work, I'll have to give these a read and see how well the guidelines mesh with reality.

Blogger and Progressive Disclosure

I was trying to put my finger on just exactly why this new release of blogger is so cool. It's more than the friendly rounded design, the powerful new dashboards, the proper use of client-side scripting, or even the improved workflows (there are no dead-ends, it always suggests a logical next step). I rambled on about it to Jon for a while and couldn't remember the UI term. When I finally gave up and sat down at my computer the words just popped into my head: Progressive Disclosure. Others have already explained it better than I would:

• UI Patterns and Techniques: Progressive Disclosure
• Progressive Disclosure- the best interaction design technique?

The new blogger also hides more advanced features, or just features that are not part of the fundimental workflow, using front end technologies. That leads fairly directly into an article that I have had in the works for about a month now: Using JavaScript to Change the Mode of User Interface. Yes, it's still not done.

Workplace Incompetence

How should we deal with people at work who lack competency in their supposed field of expertise, or even worse, who have been given roles outside their specialty or ability?

Examples abound at work, past and present. A database administrator attempts to function as a business analyst. A business analyst lacks English grammar skills (and yet it is their native tongue and they're always jabbering away on the phone). And worse, a system administrator who does more harm than good when doing work on the server, which itself is a rare occurrence.

There are two basic tacks; we could be constructive or we could be destructive. At work, being a rather cliquish group, we lean towards the later. Because working with people outside our core team (or at least offloading work onto others and not having to do it all over again ourselves later) is an important skill for us to develop I will attempt to outline a course of action for dealing with those who lack the skill to do their jobs. That said, if they lack either the ability or the desire to succeed then there isn't much we can do. We take pride in our work, if someone doesn't they can be replaced.

1. Point out the problems in their work to them. If they don't know our expectations how can they meet them?
2. Give them the resources with which to fill the gaps in their skillset. For example: In Plain English, Designing with Web Standards or the book I borrowed to get up to speed when I first joined the team: Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference.
3. Discuss problems regarding their working habits or communication differences. We work as a team, people who don't openly communicate when they have questions don't last very long.
4. It almost goes without saying that we will talk shit about them behind their backs. Ummm, what I meant was we compare notes to make sure that it isn't an individual personality issue.
5. At this point there is enough of a communication gap that it is time to raise the problem with the project manager.
6. Next we bring the issue up with the person in charge of hiring as a serious concern with the performance of their job.
7. Lastly we begin to actively try to replace the person.

Please fill in anything I missed, or clarify anything that I didn't get quite right in the comments.

semiautomatic syntax checking of javascript

This is the stuff that puts Cybil to sleep.

The Worm Within

If you have not recently eaten and do not plan to shortly you will find this story fascinating (in a repulsive medical experience sort of way). via Mister Jon.

Design Inspiration: Packaging

Finally got the cradle for our camera (took several months for them to get one in stock). When it arrived it was in this really cool box, here's a photo of a bit of it:

My first thought upon seeing the box was, wow, those colors are perfect for that enhancement that legal will never let me build for our hemophilia therapy management application at work:

But since Blood Blogs will never be built, and it was my brother's birthday last Saturday (his 21st) and the anniversary of the day that I had originally said I would design his site by, I decided that this design would be perfect for his site as well:

I'm going to do two variants of the design, one clean one (as shown below), and then another that bleeds. The very first thing that I drew with my tablet was blood, it works so well.

Pornzilla: Free tools for surfing porn with Mozilla Firefox

 

Stellar screenshots in print pieces

We get this one all the time, and the usual answer is, "tough luck," or "go shuvit," but now there's a real answer! I'll have to play with it with the laserjet here at work.

WRATH

A truly divine game. Hit the arrow in the top right of the scroll when it's unclear what to do next.

Pac Manhattan

it's like freshman year in the hampshire dorms all over again, except in the city with cellphones.

75mph

View Larger Image

<rant>

On the Los Angeles freeways the speed limit is 65mph, but it is not safe to drive that slow. The flow of traffic when it is not bumper to bumper averages around 75mph. The slow drivers that hold up traffic until people start cutting around them on all sides are going 70, while the people doing the cutting around are going 80. We're not talking edge cases here, the sports car drivers weaving through traffic at 85+, the shit boxes barely sustaining 60+, or the motorcycles making their own lanes driving on the paint; these are average drivers going average speeds safely within the flow of traffic. That is why I am somewhat annoyed at having been given a speeding ticket for going 78mph last Friday morning at 7am. That said, I was going a few miles an hour faster than I should have been and I should have known better, the 101 outside Thousand Oaks is crawling with cops, especially at the end of the month when they're filling their quotas.

So now I have to take driving school. One of Cybil's friends took it online on Cybil's computer. They googled all the questions, taking the 8 hour course in 2, and saved the answers. But now I have to go, what is it, 18 months without getting another ticket or my insurance goes up? And so I have a new driving resolution. My open highway max cruising speed has always been 80 since I came to Los Angeles. My new top speed will be 75mph. On the drive into work early in the morning (the only time the freeways are clear) I will not drive in the fast lane, nor will I cruise by the traffic congestion using the rightmost lane. And outside of Thousand Oaks I will slow down to 70 and flip off the cops in their fucking speed traps.

</rant>

About the digital water color above, it's a ripoff of Jasper John's numbers (Jon got me to go to his exhibition at LACMA). I'm learning how to use my new wacom tablet. I took Jasper's 7 and 5 stencil paintings, traced them with the pencil tool, then painted them in with a brush that I modified to behave like paint by setting the opacity to fade and increasing the brush size with pressure. When I get better I'll be able to freehand more, but for now I'm still learning to control the thing. Haven't been able to get it to mimic pencil behavior yet (my preferred offline medium), but maybe I'll get into the whole watercolors thing, always found painting in the real world too much of a bother.

Hummingbird Trail

Photos of Hummingbird Trail, Simi Valley, Spring 2004 following the 2003 California wild fires

Hike Number 24 in Day Hikes Around Los Angeles.

My hat kicks ass (last photo). I forgot to put on sunscreen but did not burn my pasty white face or neck, but my forearms turned bright red.

Typophile Forums: Top 10 typefaces

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.

Robert Bringhurst

Creeping towards the top of my to-do list is the task of organizing my fonts. Ideally when I am done there will be only 10 or 12 fonts on my computer, but realistically it's probably going to be more like 20 given my need to keep the set of rather mundane web fonts.

Mountaintop Corners: A List Apart

Started reading this thinking he'd come up with some clever CSS trick like the breakthroughs into geometry made with borders a while ago (culminating with CSS House). But no, it's just the ragged transparent gif rounded corner thing, Jon did that two years ago at work. It's nice to see it taken main stream, it's a fairly versatile technique (although I don't like the fixed-width take) but it's nothing new.

Side note: never ever comment on A List Apart. The people who comment there are so stupid. Now I've been trying to be a little less of an elitist snob (outwardly at least, and only when I need to get work out of people) but the reactions to this simple article are so outright imbecilic I was a little taken aback.

Identify a Font

Man. My first try got me a really shit font. Wish you could weight choices, this font is a joke: Eyeballs.

Ok, second try I answered "not sure" on all the ones I didn't care about and got a much better font: Baskerville Caps. Remove the leaves from the solid varient and that's what I was looking for. Here we go: Baskerville (BT). Very smart they were to put a feedback form on the results page.

link via jfred.

300 Images From 1800 Sites

collection of icons from around the web. nifty negative letter-spacing, though the grey on white is illegible on my LCD monitor. via eric meyer

ShaunInman.com // Commentary // IFR: Revisited and Revised

i may have done something similar to this on advancingbiosurgery.com, but i'll have to give it a more thorough read later.

Exilim Support

finally got the cradle, need to find the right twain and such.

Dean Kamen's latest inventions

Here's what the Segway should have been: iBot Mobility System. Only problem is your average disabled person isn't rich, so this invention will mostly just benefit old people.

With the world's water problems, this Water Purifier that runs off whatever fuel is handy, might be usefully in the future in what are today's 1st world countries, as well as now in today's 3rd world nations.

Cat House

Photos: Exotic Feline Breeding Compound

We went to the Twilight Tour at the Feline Conservation Center in the desert north of LA. It's an 18 and older event. Usually when you go to the zoo the cats are all lulling about in the sun, but as the sun goes down they become active. The keepers give them cardboard boxes sprinkled with allspice, and they go crazy just like kittens do, except that they're much bigger than the boxes. Except for Cezar, the tiger, they gave him a washer/dryer size box to fight with. The event is only 3 times a year, plan to bring more people in June.

Uma Thurman vs. Crazy 88

A most excellent Flash bloodbath. Click the button that says "hrat".

BOB DYLAN'S SEX GEAR AD FOR VICTORIA'S SECRET

my dad just tipped me off to this one. never been a huge dylan fan, but i've always aspired to be a lecherous old man learing at half naked women. my favorite quote from a song is from Jethro Tull's Aqualung, "Sitting on a park bench / eyeing little girls with bad intent"

Qualia: so very much to chew on

So what if it's a flavor-of-the-month buzzword, I'd tell myself, a simplistic notion cribbed from an inflight magazine. It's a good simplistic notion.

Let them eat cake: Accessibility and usability, brought together through the DOM and CSS

My favorite! A self-documenting document. Like Zen Garden.

Slashdot | Documentation Strategies?

a relevant slashdot article. yeah, so my job description's expanded to include business analyst type requirements. oh well. i dig the requirements development.

Advoy Park

Advoy Park (wide .gif image)

Courtesy of google's cache we passed around this South Park character generator at work yesterday. Some of us did our own, others were victims of team effort caricatures. Then they were handed over to Mister Jon and myself for photoshop touchups, and finally this morning Jon put together the team picture. I guess we've lost a few since Advoy launched in France, but not too many considering.

The Disability Rights Commission - Formal Investigation report: web accessibility

gotta print this out using company ink. The HTML version isn't up yet nad the pdf is a pain to read.

LittleGreenFootballs or Late German Fascists? (the LGF quiz)

from the Sensual Liberation Army

HENTAI dictionary: japanese perversions, fetishes, and AV terms

A Blowfish caught in the net worthy link. (via Mister Jon)

Trailering a Canoe Behind a Bicycle

The Solyns have a timeshare that they've traded in for a week in Tahoe mid-May. Assuming I can get off work it's going to be a blast canoeing, hiking, and playing boardgames in a cabin in the woods. The cabin was touted as "on lake Tahoe," but in reality is four miles away. That made me think renting a bike might be a good idea.

At that point I departed short term reality and thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could pull a canoe, just a small solo one, behind a bike? Then when you got to the water you could throw the hitch, cart and bike into the canoe and paddle away.

A Google search reveals that a Dartmouth student had the same idea and figured out how to do it, for his canoe anyway. One day, when I own a house outside of town not too far from a body of water I will have to do the same for my own Tripper (which I don't have yet either).

Abigail's Big Table Of Latin Phrases

Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.

Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out.

Is my obsession a feature or a bug?

Caught myself the other day exhibiting a behaviour that reminded me distictly of one of my dad's lower functioning clients at the group home he used to manage. I could be slipping off the deep end, or maybe my behaviour filter is just faltering.

Yahoo! Groups > Hemophilia

this is not the proper place to put notes for work but i'm doing it anyway

Exorcist

The Exorcist in 30 seconds with bunnies.

Classic '80s Games

flash versions of the good old games, before they became all complicated when nintendo came out.

ACTION COMICS NO. 1

Superman scanned!

In Plain English

The original title of my Division II at Hampshire was "In Plain English." The thought was that I'd learn a bunch of technical computer stuff, and write about it in layman terms. As it turns out my focus shifted to interface design and away from writing, so I never learned how to write as clearly as I might.

At work we're struggling with the legal language in our app. Whereas most privacy policies are all about hidden ways that the company can screw you, ours actually has positive things like: our company does not even have access the servers containing your personally identifiable medical information. We bend over backwards to lock ourselves out from the database, and even the production servers, but do we tell them that? No. The policy is all about edge-cases, "Under these special circumstances we can do this," and other such disclaimers. The language itself is cumbersome to read, and there's just too much of it.

To convey the message that is hidden in our privacy policy to the end users are working on an enhancement (Whahooo! My unofficial job description has been expanded to include requirements, one of my long term goals and the next natural step in my career path) to increase the "Perception of Privacy/Security" in our application. The focus is on perception because the current reality is, and has been, that our application is highly secure and private, but we haven't done enough to signal to people that this is true. The enhancement will require some writing, some icon design, and some serious thought about our content strategy. Lots of fun.

Here is my mission. Read this article: How to write in plain English and apply the ideas to my own writing, both at work and at home.

Iraq Coalition Casualties

We were just talking at work the other day, when they strung up those charred bodies, about how much that's going on over there that nobody is telling us about. Well here's the data and the news reports that mainstream media aren't running.

oA - FOLLOW THE POPE FOR A BETTER LIFE

orangeAfro: "Should I take this Nazi gold in exchange for not objecting to their racist invasion of several countries? Yes."

sla : nudepower

Not blocked by WebSense, but SO should be, that's why I'm blogging it. Lefty politics + porn blog, could make the daily "Entertainment" section on my links page. I'll have to do some catch-up reading and then follow it for a few days.

The Passivator

A bookmarklet that highlights adverbs and writing that could be in the passive voice. Given my predilection for weakly worded sentences this could be quite helpful. It has a number of caveats, but they could actually be useful as well. This bookmarklet is not compatible with Internet Explorer, but that's no big loss. (via Simon Wilson)

NakedText.com

unless they're getting a bunch of money for the special requests doesn't look like these are business majors. It must be costing them more than $5-7 a shot when you factor in overhead, the time it takes to run the website, and how long it takes to write on each other, take a picture, wash up and dry for the next picture, and process the pictures. But if their parents paid for the camera and computers and, being students, they've got free time anyway, it's a really cool concept and should be taken advantage of while it's still cheap.

Opera, IBM voice

Just the other day I suggested that Cybil upgrade her grandfather's browser to Opera, even though I rarely use it or even test for it, because he's running at 800x600 on a large monitor and can't see it well enough to read. Opera is the only browser I know of with screen zoom, not just text zoom, and now on top of that it's getting a built in text reader. Combine the accessibility support with the moves it's making on the mobile browsing market I'm no longer so supprised at the rumor I heard that they are going public. Only concern now is that they may be like a 3rd party candidate in a two party system. I'll have to think about it, is promoting Opera like throwing your vote away to Nadar? Might it be idiologically the best option, but wind up being just like you'd voted for bush/gates. Or is promoting absolutely anybody other than MS the best thing to do?

Combining BookCrossing and Geocaching

Two things that are on my "would like to do someday" list combined together, although I'd rather use a topo and maybe an altimeter instead of a GPS, seems like cheating somehow, though I guess they are finicky enough to be a challenge. Also of note to the web designers who read this, how cool is this link shortening technique? http://webpages.charter.net/---/caches.html. much sexier than using CSS overflow: hidden;

100 MOVIES THAT DESERVE MORE LOVE

Gotta pull this up next time we're on Netflix.

Design by Fire: The Great Photoshop CS Giveaway

Anyone who knows the answer to even one of these questions already has Photoshop CS and probably knows the engineers personally. I'm intrigued to hear the answers, but I think the contest is too much of an insider thing and misses the benefit to the design community that it could have had.

I have been trying not to complain about things unless I have a positive suggestion as an alternative. Here's my idea: if the questions were more oriented towards design trivia or art history they might be better for the aspiring designer who hasn't been able to afford Photoshop, let alone the latest version.

The challenge in creating the quiz would then have been to find knowledge that isn't readily available via Google. The insider knowledge approach steps around that problem of the ready availability of information, but doesn't accomplish the greater good that having a people whose lives could really be changed by owning a copy of Photoshop researching information that whether they win or not would increase the knowledge of design within the web design community. And I'm not being bitter because I don't stand a chance, PS7 is serving me fine.

Recalling Forgotten Passages

I found it! My favorite passage from Shakespeare's Richard II. Actually, one of my favorite passages period, from anything.

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father:
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
HA!

[I.ii.232-43]

I used to have a ton of poems and passages memorized: some of the "dark lady" sonnets, Edgar Allen Poe's The Bells, Gollums riddles from The Hobbit, and more stuff I don't even remember anymore, all good for hanging out around campfires, which if you know anything about my high school years I did more often than not. But now I don't even remember what it was I used to know, let alone the words themselves. Except maybe for this one, it stuck for some reason. Digging through some old stuff I came across a little plastic envelope with a bunch of scraps of paper in it. It was a collection of the stuff I was trying to learn, or had just learned, including the passage above. So, while I may never find the e.e. cummings style parody of the "summer rose" sonnet, at least I have this, which really is my favorite. It's like a rape fantasy played out in the mainstream entertainment of it's day. Fuck the FCC.

Update: I found the notebook with my complete collection and have started a podcast, Spoken by Firelight. To listen to a reading of this passage go to Was ever woman? Act 1, Scene II of Richard III

The Broadmoor Online Reservations in oneScreen(TM)

Polar opposite of inductive user interface. Wish it weren't in flash, or they'd at least picked crisper fonts. (via a Jeffrey Veen presentation)

Xina Design

Sunday afternoon I took a few hours to design a default template for Xina, a CMS+ system that I have periodically done interface work on over the last several years. Don't bother looking under the hood at the source, it's a mongrel of a transitional layout, complete with brute force old dhtml navigation whose only saving grace is that it even has a noscript version.

The whole premise was actually kind of challenging. Build an un-branded site using only HTML text for logos, taglines, etc. It had to be an understated simple design, with no colors or shapes giving it away as specifically either corporate, personal, or not-for-profit. As you can see from my last couple designs (and this site), subtle and understated isn't something that I've done a lot of recently.

Usually I approach a design with a layout or theme in mind, sketched in a notebook or at least in my head. For this design I went at it more organically. I pulled all the text into photoshop, then just started pushing stuff around, filling backgrounds with colors and gradients I picked using Pixy's Color Scheme. I chose two different harmonious schemes that worked well together, took them into photoshop and muted them. At one point while filling in backgrounds I went a little too far with the gradients. Realizing that I'd hit the point of having over worked the design I just backed up a couple steps in history and saw that it was done. Simple as that.

I pulled the content for the mockup from the XinaSoft.org site and the Xina demo. Michelle, the inventor and primary developer of Xina, has decided that she like the design enough to make it the new template for both of those sites. And one of her co-workers saw the design and is going to contact me next time they need design work done.

I never got around to planning my future, but things seem to be falling into place. I'm playing with requirements at work, drawing in my spare time, and doing design work both freelance and at my day job.

"Who cares what you think?"

This one's been circulating for 3 years now I guess. Just leaves me hoping that we get some real debates this election that are engaging enough to not be fended off with canned responses written by mr. cunthair's speech writers.

DVD Collection

Having gotten the new battery from my warranty I was free to roam about the house with the laptop. The ever so exciting result of this was I pulled out all our DVDs, organized them, and typed them all into a DVD Collection archive page. If anyone (that I see on at least a weekly basis) wants to borrow anything you are welcome.

Right Watch

This little site with a CSS layout, my first, must have gone live at some point. It's hopefully not highly publicized as there are numerous typos in the copy and empty pages. The footer is jammed down below the fold (always below the fold, the nav has a height of 100%), and I'm not sure how I ever got it to pass bobby with a nav made up of a bunch of anchors one after another. Poking around on our server I see that the .css file was last modified on 10/20/2002, so I have a date for when I first started dabbling in CSS for layout. A year and a half. I was intentionally late to the game those days since my boss at the time used NS4 on her mac.

The Unofficial Nohands Gallery!

I've been running a lot of google image searches lately to find animals to draw. This last search just turned up a picture that I recognized from a recent ala article. I followed it to the site it came from (which had moved) and found this whole phenominon of photoshop jobs using this kitten. Other end of the spectrum from the last photoshop jobs (pun not intended) link I pointed out.

Wizard's Duel - Elemental Symbols Board

Took some time out from drawing cards to enhance the game board with the elemental symbols that appear in the lower right of the cards. Take a look at this picture of the center tier to see how different elements co-exist on various spaces. Drawing the elements directly onto each space removes any ambiguity about what spaces a player may move onto based on the animal they are currently playing. It greatly simplifies writing the rules, and allows for players to focus on playing the game, not figuring out what moves are legal.

Speaking of which, it's getting about time to start putting more energy into writing the rules than drawing the cards. I think I'll finish the deck sans-illustrations and pencil in the names of the animals so I can change them if I find a better photo of a similar animal. Need to fill in that empty lower left corner with animals speeds translated into board scale and split into sprint and endurance. It's not going to be an exact science by any means. The numbers will have to vary enough to discourage stalling behavior. Only playtesting will tell whether I'm on the right track, so it's time to move production along at faster than my drawing pace.

Videos (and websites) for Cats

Karen, my dad's girlfriend, has these birdwatching videos that her cats love. I don't remember if they have a sound track though.

Photoshoped Cumshots

Warning! Read the title before you click on the link. Don't come all whining to me that I made you look at something gross. So Jennifer Garner's not at all happy with her situation, but Liv Tyler is just slighty melencholy. But I bet when the camera's away she's a demon in the sack. And for the doves' X-Files collection, Gillian Anderson.

Application Archetypes

For example, "Longhorn" enables Web sites to deliver smart clients that offer a degree of interactivity beyond what is normally possible in Web pages today.

Now I'm getting really concerned that MS is moving down the road of closing off its part of the internet, moving away from the standards of the web and encouraging proprietary applications by providing simple/stupid tools with which to build e-commerce applications that are specific to the OS, further leveraging their monopoly.

The solution is two-fold. Expand the market share of alternative browsers with a positive benifits oriented marketing campaign (the negative aspects of IE go without saying). The second part is to provide more resources for developers struggling with the web standards learning curve, and lead by example by not doing what fucking LockerGnome did and taking a step backwards towards crap front-end development practices.

The Aesthetics of Revelation

I like the way this guy thinks. Quality metaphors. Now I want to come up with better examples. Perhaps a dashboard on the gateway page of an app works. Show useful summary data up front, tantalize us with an overview of the raw data beneath. Doesn't get much geekier than that.

Design Trends

Trends in popular design should be collections of things that we should not be doing. Or things we look at and say, "ok, I see what they're doing, how can I do it better, what's the next step in the evolution of the trend, or how can I take what's good about what they've done and integrate it into my own personal style."

Take the CSS Zen Garden Oceans Apart. Now this is gorgeous design, don't get me wrong. It is the culmination of a design trend that began back with Golden Mean, combined with the now trendy dropshadow borders. But it has been some time since Douglas Bowman came out with his golden design and it's time for the next new innovation. And don't tell me it's post modern eclectic, that is nothing new by definition.

There are some days when I wish I was still working with Claudia Palmira. She was always one step ahead of the mob. She would do something, and then a few months later you'd see it in a major national advertising campaign. Too bad she alienated everyone she worked with in the Northampton/Amherst area and crawled back to her parents in Manhattan.

Slightly related note, just read a Blog Survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability (via SuperfluousBanter). I guess I am of the do not give a flying fuck philosophy, using full names and saying whatever I want by default, only censoring when it comes to work related stuff so as not to get fired.

Getting back to my subject, it's time for a-symmetry, raggedness, unique colors, and texture. I'll point out good examples as I find them. And when Mister Jon finally gets his site up he will enlighten us with a more intelligent and focused discussion of design trends.

<<< Guido Sterkendries >>>

wildlife photography

Yetisport 3 - Penguin Throw

because abusing foolish animals is funny

Dave Barry's Blog

He's sindicated right, not just an east coast humor columnist? While this is purely a weblog deal, it does have a link to his column as well.

Project Gutenburg Redesign Finalists

Surprised that people voted for the Macromedia site look alike, doesn't really have anything unique going for it. Bright Corner is the one that's obviously going to win, being the most usable and nicely designed as well, and Minz Meyer is an awesome artist (zen garden 037), so it's no surprise he makes the finals, but the fact that it's a completely impractical design will see it lose in the end. Somebody suggested to move the search up a bit, then it might be better. It is an intriguing and unique design with potential for greatness given some UI tweaking.

OK/Cancel

Penny Arcade cameo.

group hug // anonymous online confessions

Ok, so everyone's probably seen this already since it won a SXSW award, but that's why I made this link log, so I could echo "have you seen this one yet" a month late when nobody cares. But now that I've echoed I can't confess anything that somebody might pin on me until some time has past. So this post is even less than worthless. So how about that OK/Cancel comic strip, pretty funny stuff, eh?

"Five hundred dead soldiers support Bush-Cheney '04."

"But not if you're gay!"

"One Dick, One Bush as God Intended"

"Don't Settle for the Lesser of Two Evils"

"I Wasn't Using Those Rights Anyway"

"Don't Switch Horses Mid Apocalypse"

"Don't switch gangs mid bang."

Best Buy Laptop Warranties Blow

"This Plan does not cover repairs caused by accidental or intentional physical damage... "

Let's think about that statement from my extended 3 year service plan on my Sony Vaio purchased from Best Buy. [P]hysical damage, what other kind of damage can be done to a laptop? Emotional damage? Not that I wouldn't be surprised given what I subject this machine to. So good, we know that Best Buy will pay for a psychologist for my laptop, but not for anything that's broken. And what's with the accidental or intentional part? How could damage possibly not be either one of those? You either meant to break it or you didn't. Maybe if I was temporarily insane and broke it, it wouldn't be an accident but I didn't mean to either, then they would cover it. So we're back to the therapy again. Good to know that a Best Buy warranty will pay for a shrink, but they will not repair anything that's broken, except if some internal part seized up spontaneously, they might think about fixing it.

So yeah, Best Buy won't fix the latch on my monitor, or the little kick-stand foot thing on the bottom. But to their credit they will replace the battery, but only because the warranty specifically states that it will cover that, though not anything else as far as I can tell.

And they wouldn't help the poor lady in line next to me who had popped her N key off. She hadn't even lost the little horseshoes, they could've just popped it back on. I could have too (I've switched my whole keyboard to DVORAK) but it really wasn't my place to barge in, and I didn't want to break it in front of everyone, they're delicate little pieces.

Moral of the story: buy a Dell. The only reason I purchased from Best Buy was for the warranty because Sony only offered a 30 day guarantee, which is a total joke. I went with the Sony because I'm an interface guy, and Sony has the best monitors, keyboard layout and touchpad feel. But this total lack of customer care is the price that I pay. If you want the piece of mind that somebody will actually fix your machine then buy a Dell, and stear clear of Best Buy's fake $220 warranty, because that's too much to pay for a 3 year battery replacement plan unless you're getting a new one every year (which I probably should have, mine's been dead for a couple years).

Avalanche Company: The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army

this one's for josher. what was your count before they sent you home?

It's Richard Brautigan's birthday - poetry.about.com

And for a taste of Brautigan himself, Nils T. Devine claims to have posted "the largest collection of Richard Brautigan poetry on the Web" -- at least until Brautigan's estate asks that the texts be taken down.

And it's true.

OkCupid - The False Messiah

And I have NO matches, not in the greater Los Angeles area, not even in the world. Cybil got The Nymph, who I am supposed to pursue. The Nymph in turn is supposed to ALWAYS AVOID The False Messiah. Jen, Cybil's best friend from Hampshire from before we dated (who I used to have a crush on) got Peach, polar opposite of Nymph, but coincidentally are supposed to DREAD The False Messiah.

Clever quize actually, feeds you different questions based on previous answers. They slip registration information in with the quize so when you're done you're registered. When you log in you can imrove your matches (as if I had any) by answering more questions. There's a curve rating match accuracy that you initially move very quickly up to the 70% range quickly, but the curve starts leveling off so each question only gets you another 1%. The questions themselves are good. You answer it for yourself, then for your potiential match, and rate how important the answer would be. It's fun when it points out double standards in your beleifs. Like, I beleive X, but I would want her to believe Y.

There are any number of great and amusing questions, but the best one is this: "Are you ok with a potential match having a STD?" The only answer is click here, here being a link to match.com.

Breakthrough Ideas - Wizard's Duel

I had two new ideas for the game this morning. Both of them are really exciting in that they are the reality equivalent of the fantasy action being played.

For the combat system I had been thinking of going with coin tosses, but coin tosses aren't that hard to control the outcome, and after reading an article about how they aren't as random as one might think I've been trying to come up with an alternative. Here it is.

When the attacker moves his piece onto the defender's spot the defender takes his playing piece off the board and behind his back. The piece is secretly hidden in one hand. Both hands are then presented as fists. The attacker picks a hand, and if it's the one with the piece the attack succeeds. The metaphor is perfect, the defender hides and if the attacker finds him he gets nabbed.

An alternative more skill based version would be to hide the piece under one of three cups. The defender mixes them up while the attacker tries to follow. The attacker then tries to pick the right cup. The odds become 1 in 3 if the defender is sufficiently skilled with the cups. It does add an element of physical dexterity to the game, but haven't you always wanted to learn this carnival trick?

The other idea has to do with cheating. I have been planning on having an advanced play option where you can pull from an animal set that is "against the rules", imaginary creatures like dragons and such. They wouldn't be available until later in the game and were going to be a separate stack of cards. My idea is that these cards will be obviously marked on the back, black dots in corners or black borders. The stack of "cheat cards" are placed on the bottom of the main deck. Then, when it comes time that you could cheat you deal to yourself off the bottom of the deck.

Project Gutenberg Redesign

So I guess you get 3 votes, here they are:

1. Bright Corner - this one's all about usability, but subtle as well. What useit.com should be if Neilson would get his head out of his ass and learn a thing or two about information design.
2. Geert De Deckere - subtle color and texture, but usable as well. If Bright Corner's wasn't just so damn usable this would be my first choice.
3. Minz Meyer - mostly just enjoy the design of this one. I like it when a designer chooses a color theme and then uses multiple shades of the colors within that theme.

With honorable mention going to:

4. Mathieu Sylvain - 'cause I'm a sucker for a theme, even if it is rough around the edges.

My first choice puts usability first, but does not fail to create a pleasing esthetic. Actually, the design fits the purpose of the site more closely than any of the others. My second choice strikes a balance between design and usability. My third choice I just like the design, the IA isn't any good. There is little of value and nothing of function within the top 400 pixels.

Flashback

This is one for Mr. Jon, who I believe has been seeking a versioning system for personal use.

Matchstick Rockets

Quality fun! Small enough scale to play with in current cramped urban living conditions, but fun with fire. Might just have to use strick anywhere matches though *grin*. via inflight correction.

Graphic of the Day: Road and exit numbering

Edward Tufte starts off a discussion of road numbering systems. I'm so glad California is finally going to add exit numbers. Let's hope they use the intelligent system, relating the numbers to the distance between them, rather than just making them sequential. Right now, in So. Cal at least, the street signs are well designed (large and over the road), but named like shit, in that they have no numbers and most of the street names are in fucking Mexican (pardon my canadian french). BTW, I'll add cartographer to the list along with architect of fields I might have pursued if it weren't for the web.

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Short on the heels of Dan Cederholm's book anouncement. I've been waiting for this one for a while, had to buy Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference to tide me over.

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

Curious how much will be redundant if you've been following SimpleQuiz. Will probably wait until Amazon let's me look inside, or I see it in the store. Might be worth purchasing just to support writing in the web standards field.

Week of Wizard's Duel Cards

Cards on Board I've been drawing animals for about week now. I was shooting for three a day, but it's been more like two. The land mammals are the most challenging. I don't know if it's the blending of shades of brown — I have four and none of them ever seem to go together right — or that since I live with two highly photogenic furry beasts my standards are higher. I've always enjoyed drawing birds, and it's much easier to find photos of them it action. The sea animals have simpler texture and colors that make them easier to draw, but can be hard to find in action. That is the key for me, finding a photograph of an animal in motion, like you've just caught a glimpse of it as it moves in or out of the frame.

I've almost filled in my animal lists. I need some more fast little guys. Have to add links to the photos I'm using so that I can tell which ones I still need to look for.

Ghost Town

Chernobyl photo journal. The haunting silent struck me the most. Can you imagine LA without noise? link via Simon Wilson.

Hand Drawn Maps

Just in case your wanderlust wasn't geared up already. link via kottle.

Planning your future by Erin Malone

I used to follow Erin's blog, Design Writings. It was nice to stumble accross an article by her at boxes and arrows. Here's a reminder to myself to answer these questions. I've been moving towards a few career goals, but articulating them in writing will help me to focus. These kind of things are hard these days when you never know if you'll be working two months from now, or who you may be working for, so the goals themselves need to be independant of current employer, even if the initial steps involve them. I think it's doable.

Wildlife Action Shots

The best drawings I've done so far for the Wizard's Duel cards have been the ones with a lot of dynamic motion. These photos are all of animals in action, with pathetic right-click protection that Firefox simply ignores.

Where / What Vision Systems and Visual Design

An excellent way to point out to clients why their animated gif idea sucks.

Wizard's Duel Animals

Here are tables of the animals that I have drawn and plan to draw for the Wizard's Duel game. It has a blatant lack of any sort of key or legend, and since I lack a comments system you'll have to email me (ndevine@rakehell.com) or catch me on AIM (DivineNTD) to suggest animals to add to the list.

Animal pictures Archives

Just hit a jackpot of animal pictures. Not that google image search hasn't been yeilding great results, it's just nice to be able to be able to browse. This is for my game Wizard's Duel, despite what some "furry" obsessed co-workers may think (Kelly).

Baseline Grid on the Web

With cr2004.com I got to experiment with taking the print layout principle of baseline grid and applying it to the web.

What is Baseline Grid?

First off, here's an example grid using the CR design. The basic concept is that the baselines of your text line up across all of the columns. The baseline is the bottom of the letters, not including the tails that hang down from letters like "g" and "j". The grid is based on the line height of your text. So if your line height is say, 18 pixels, every line of text will land on a grid of horizontal lines 18 pixels apart. But if your text is not all the same size, say a header is set in a 27 pixel font, you have to increase the white space above the text until you fall down on the next grid line. This white space is the goal of baseline grid, not to create a rigidly geometric design, but to provide for a harmonious evenness of vertical motion.

How I did it

I began designing the site in Photoshop. I chose my font, Georgia, my font size, 13 pixels, and my line height, 18 pixels. Then I set up my grid of horizontal guidelines every 18 pixels, see the example to follow along. With two headers of different sizes for the two columns I had to push the smaller one down until it aligned with the baseline of the larger header which was sitting on the grid. I used margins, padding and design elements to push the header of the right hand column down. The rule for achieving baseline grid becomes this: whenever the text is made larger than the size that is intended to fit on the grid you have to increase the margin above the text until it falls down onto the next gridline. It is often necessary to also add an extra gridline worth of space below the larger text as well.

Having designed the page exactly as I wanted it in Photoshop, I then slapped it together with divs, header tags, lists and paragraphs, using CSS to put them where I wanted them. This was done cross-browser and with much pain caused by IE float and border bugs. Then I put background colors on the various elements and removed all their margins and padding. I took a screenshot of the page as it was and brought it into Photoshop. Then I measured exactly how many pixels the first header needed to be pushed down, made the change to the CSS, and took another screenshot. Working in Mozilla only I went back and forth tweaking CSS and measuring screenshots until I had everything lined up pixel perfect.

Then I pulled up the page in Internet Explorer. Everything was a little bit off. At this point I could have stopped and said good enough. The underlying goal of baseline grid, even whitespacing, had been accomplished. Everything was just off by a few pixels here and there. That is exactly what I decided to do for Mac browsers, but for Internet Explorer on the PC, used by everyone in my audience except for Cybil, I wanted it to be perfect. I created a CSS file that adjusted a few margins here and there and called it in using conditional comments. Again I took screenshots and measuring the differences between them and my original in Photoshop to find the adjustments.

Further examination shows that it may be Mozilla who is poorly handling the padding around text wrapped in a span within a header tag, but it's easier to just fix IE with a forward compatible proprietary hack.

So I guess that's it; my flawed and rather rudimentary guess and check system for applying baseline grid. It could be done in a more calculated manner, as Eric Meyer does in On CSS, and it really should be done using em's for font sizes and padding to increase accessibility. But determining that it can be done was my objective, and that has been accomplished.