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