August 4, 2007
My friend Stacey lives in Minneapolis and luckily was not on the bridge over the river at the time of its collapse.
Which reminded me of the footage I’ve seen of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (also known, ominously, considering its fate, as “Galloping Gertie”) tearing itself to pieces in a high wind in 1940.
Category Architecture, Friends, Nature, Washington | Tags: | No Comments
July 18, 2007
My friend Arushi owns a publishing company and she entrusts me with designing some of her books. Right now I’m working on one for diabetes. These are four cover concepts I’ve come up with. Thoughts and feedback are welcome.
Category Design | Tags: | 5 Comments
July 8, 2007
Saturday Doc and I went out to Fort Worth to see the Ron Mueck sculpture exhibit at the Modern. This man is amazing. He sculpts people at either smaller than or larger than life size, puts them in realistic scenarios, sometimes with clothing, always with hair. They are hyperrealistic, down to the tiniest detail like dirt under the fingernails, stubble on the legs, faint veins under the skin, blemishes. I would not have been at all surprised if one of the sculptures had gotten up and walked off.
It is definitely worth the price of admission. Go see it.
Category Art | Tags: | No Comments
July 8, 2007
As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML.
One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home.
HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine.
A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users think poorly of your brand and your company.
What this means for me and countless other e-mail designers is that, because Outlook no longer supports a number of extremely basic HTML and CSS tags, we will now have to begin using outdated bloated code to assure that our e-mails display properly in Outlook 2007. It does not support, among other things, background images in divs and table cells, float positioning, and ALT TAGS. Yes, you read that right: it does not support alt tags. You know how when you get an email and the images don’t load, but a little bit of text displays in their place so you can tell what it’s supposed to be? That little text bitlet is an alt tag. And they’ve gone bye bye. And since background images are no longer supported, our emails will become much plainer and less attractive.
Microsoft’s reasoning is, apparently, that since the majority of their business users use Word to create HTML emails, then Outlook needs to use the same engine to display them.
I say, bullshit. There is NO REASON why Outlook should not make use of modern, standards compliant code rendering. If anything, they need to fucking update the craptastic Word rendering engine.
In both my professional and freelance lives, I am now going to have to begin redesigning everything I do to accommodate Outlook 2007. It will be more work for less payoff. We designers are used to having to write CSS that will degrade gracefully in older browsers; I never thought I’d have to write code that will degrade gracefully in the newest version of the most popular email program made by the largest software company in the world.
Way to go, Microsoft.
Category Design, Geek, Technology | Tags: | No Comments
May 6, 2007
Today after lunch I saw a car with a banana peel draped over its door handle:
I’ve been playing around with the nightshot mode on Doc’s camera. I like the effect I get when there’s still a little ambient light.
My garden is growing! Some of it, anyway. I may not have any tomatoes or morning glories, but by god I’m going to have lots and lots of zucchini this summer.
Category Car, Garden, Photography | Tags: | No Comments
April 23, 2007
At work, we have this cartoon posted inside some of our cubicles. We use it to play Designer Bingo. Top left square is free. Currently I’ve got the entire bottom row X’ed out, although I’ve experienced EVERY one of these at some point. BINGO!
However, I think this should have been a square…
MAKE THE LOGO BIGGER! (click to listen to pee-yer-pants-funny mp3)
A friend of a friend added some verses:
“I want my logo different,
Something nobody’s seen before!
Can you use the font Papyrus?
I’ve got it on my computer!”
Category Design | Tags: | 1 Comment
April 22, 2007
Doc and I like to take photo walks when the weather is nice. Usually we just start from our house and head off in a random direction and see what we can find that is interesting. Today we ended up at the YMCA pool in a park a mile or so from our house.
As I circled the pool looking for interesting things to photograph, I kept getting whiffs of strong pot smoke from a couple of guys sitting on a picnic bench near the treeline, smoking. Doc wondered aloud what kind of people come to a public park to smoke out. I said, “People who don’t want their parents to smell the smoke coming from their rooms.”
Category Nature, Photography | Tags: | 2 Comments
April 18, 2007
Piglet
This awesome little SmartCar parks in my parking lot at work sometimes after hours. The license plate says “PIGLET.” (I’ll wait for your cute fit to die down before continuing…)
They’re gas-powered, get incredible mileage (probably similar or better than my hybrid Prius), and cost about $25,000 US. Yes, you read that right, 25 grand for this car. I really truly wish that people in this country would get on the ball and buy smaller cars like this one (check out the monstrosity parked next to it) but for that kind of money, I’m not sure it’s going to happen for the SmartCar.
Squishy Little World
I’m not certain what this is, exactly, but I stepped on it. It made for a cool photo. Kind of like a little planet, sitting there on the concrete.
Category Car, Photography | Tags: | 5 Comments
March 26, 2007
Doc is in the process of putting his photography online. I spent several hours yesterday updating his website and creating a photography section for him. Bookmark this page; there will be more to come in the next few days!! I’m so jealous of his talent. He has an amazing way with light and composition.
Category Art, Doc, Photography | Tags: | No Comments
March 19, 2007
Almost exactly one year ago, we got 10 inches of rain in a 24 hour period. This creek runs behind my house, and a large portion of the embankment was washed away in the flood. Recently the city built a sandbag wall to try and hold the rest of it in place.
I also like the graffiti on the concrete: who is Steve, why is he acting that way, and what’s the secret??
Category Art | Tags: | No Comments
March 1, 2007
WOOHOO! I am now the proud owner of two tickets to the Police concert in Dallas in June!! Through an odd set of circumstances, I was able to obtain them through a special ticket pre-sale. I think that I will also try to get some tickets at the regular sale on Saturday, to sell on eBay and make my money back.
You seriously don’t want to know how much I paid for these tickets. I have NEVER spent this much money on concert tickets before. I sure hope that it will be worth it.
Recent updates:
I got a promotion and a raise at work, and to go along with that, I also get an employee of my very own: a junior designer. I will be shaping the mind and talents of a young artist. Wish me luck!!
Tuesday night I went out for dinner and drinks with Kathryn and Yvonne. I had a fantastic time. It was lovely patio weather once again, and great company.
Today is Brittney’s birthday. Happy birthday, if you’re reading this!!!!!
We visited our tax man this evening. We owe the government more money than we paid for our down payment on our house (we planned for it, and have enough). Ah, the joys of self employment. At least it wasn’t quite as big a bill as we’d thought that it would be.
I got an e-mail from a researcher at the USDA Wind Erosion Research Unit in Kansas, asking permission to publish the photo I took of the dust storm last Sunday on their web site. Pretty cool, eh?
I just made myself sick trying to take a spinny chair photo for my photo of the day. I had to stop because my tummy was churning dangerously.
I just realized that the word “etcetera” contains “cetera,” as in the singer Peter Cetera of Chicago fame. So I wonder, if your name was something like Edward Thomas Cetera, you could go by E.T. Cetera. That would be pretty damn funny.
Category Music, Photography, Storm, Weather, Work | Tags: | 3 Comments
February 20, 2007
It seems like all my brother did in grad school was write haiku, yet he still managed to get his PhD in mathematics last summer. The kid must be smart or something. :)
why topology?
there is only one reason
its spelled p. h. d.
statistics, haiku
both involve counting
only one is fun
dude! look at my hand
its so weird and colorful
oh my god i’m high!
2^3+20
= 24+4
a number haiku!
(x-π)^2
= x^2+π^2
-2πx
y=6x
implies 1/2 y =
x+x+x
just reading the book
is not an effective way
to teach to the class
haiku may have five
syllables on the last line
but bobku has one more
second hand smoke kills
says the surgeon general
so, i’ll stick to first
Category Family, Poetry | Tags: | No Comments
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