Adobe Buys Macromedia
Can this be true? DAMN.
Alternative Text Generators
For when Lorem Ipsum just won’t do.
Faded New York Signage
I have an amateur collection of Baltimore signage, but this is good stuff.
Veen on interactivity
There are so many excellent points made here…go read.
Rounded box CSS generator
Brilliant. (via dominey)
Excellent T-shirt design.
RTFM! (via boingboing)
Progress. Let me know what you think of this here sketch for a new weblog. Anything broken? Out of alignment? on fire?
Funny to hear the correspondent on our local NPR affiliate’s technology show pronounce the word “stymied” as “stemmied” during a segment on older workers being afraid of newer technology. Perhaps we younger workers shouldn’t be afraid of dictionaries.
Inspiration. I’m in the middle of a creative funk. My plan was to have a new weblog (for the record, let me tell you that I hate that word) up and running on a new domain by the middle of the month. It’s turning out to be harder than I thought it would. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to design a new look for the site, and I want to build something beautiful, but I’m having a lot of problems making anything work. I was going to use a variation on one of the canned templates at first, but then I decided to make something new and clean. Most of my previous work has been very flat and one-dimensional, so I started playing with depth, which quickly looked gimmicky and trendy.
Then I played with a radical design, dropping a photo in the middle of the grid and running the columns around it. It was nice, but I want to get this thing live this year, and I know that wrestling the CSS/PHP to make it work the way I want would take too long—in between two freelance projects, this would be the bastard stepchild. So I went back to some of the photos I was taking last year to find a good unused subject to start from. I got depressed, because most of the photos I took last year were documentary (celebrations or home renovation) and not artistic like the ones I took in 2002-03, when I got my first camera and shot everything I saw. Yesterday I got an idea looking at the control panel on the elevator here at work to use it as navigation, but after an hour of Photoshop wrangling I decided to scrap it—I didn’t want white type on a black background anyway.
The other issue I have is what to keep and what to toss, and how to organize what stays in. Do I keep the month-based calendar for the archives, or toss it in favor of four year-based links? Do I make the music section a sideblog? (Yes.) Do I add a sideblog for links? (Probably.) Do I keep links to all the photos? (Not likely-it’ll be a separate page from now on.) Do I add a rotating photo somewhere? (possibly.)
Fortunately, some of the photos I was looking at that I took in 2003 started my brain working. As a sidenote, I have to underline what other people have said-it’s not the camera that takes good/bad pictures, it’s the photographer. Many of the shots I took with a crappy, second gen point-and-shoot are as good, if not better than the ones I shot with the G3.
Geek, Take Two. There’s a blue 400mhz iMac sitting in our basement without RAM, a hard drive, or a battery, because the screen is dead. A year ago I was in the middle of setting it up with OSX, and accidentally kicked out the power cord. After that, it ceased to work properly. I looked and looked for any kind of fixit advice online, and found nothing. Having stumbled across some new information this morning, I’m going to mount a rescue mission in the next couple of days to see if I can’t further my score in raising the dead.
I went back to work this morning, but I didn’t park in front of the same shapeless shoebox I’ve called home for four years. No, while we were gone, my humble employer packed up the tent and moved to a new campsite: the headquarters of a recently downsized defense contractor, not a half-mile up the street. The main floor of the space is a sprawling two-story greenhouse—a far cry from the cramped, low-ceilinged hovel we used to work from. Instead of the “welcome to my cousin’s basement” vibe our company used to have, now it looks like we actually produce something other than empty pizza boxes. Of course, for some reason that makes sense to people with larger paychecks than me, I’m banished to a different part of the building than the rest of the artists, who live down in the airy glassed-in section. Todd and I have been put upstairs in a section mostly populated by programmers, which isn’t bad, but a little demoralizing for me. There are a few perks: better workspace (still cubes, tho’), an on-site cafeteria, for the days we don’t feel like bringing or going out in the rain for food, better climate control (they’re still working out some kinks) and SPACE. Sweet, glorious space. Pictures will follow shortly.
Last summer we were privleged to have a houseful of idiot frat-boys renting the house across the street from ours. At all hours of the day and night we got to hear drunken arguments between couples, fart-can burnouts from Fast And The Furious wannabes, motocross races on the front lawn, and parties until five in the morning. (These complaints courtesy of the man who used to blow out TV picture tubes with a baseball bat at 11pm in his rental backyard for kicks. Oh, how the tables have turned.) The lawn was mowed bimonthly, the driveway was jammed full of cars, and the gutter that blew halfway off during Isabel stayed stranded on the front lawn for four months. We cursed the owner for being such a lousy landlord, and had no way of contacting him to complain.
This morning I crossed the street with a camera and a cup of coffee to meet the owner, who led me into the cluttered garage to look at a pile of parts bungeed to the near wall: the front clip of the MGA, a transmission standing on its flywheel, various boxes of rubber and chrome parts laying on a leaning steel shelf, rusty wire wheels stacked next to a pair of old motorcycles. I was told the engine is in Columbia. As he pulled apart the jumbled parts to show me specific items, I recalled browsing the internet last night for information. I happened upon a great MGA site with a ton of excellent advice on buying and restoring old British iron, and one paragraph struck me. The author mentioned that actually putting the body and the frame right is relatively easy—if you have an eye for detail, the bodywork really isn’t that bad (just time-consuming, provided you have a MIG welder), and the running gear is always the easiest stuff to have fixed. It’s when the time comes to buy the chrome, trim, and leather to finish off the car that 50% or more of the total project price is spent.
Which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense.
Given that the chrome I saw was very bad, and the rest of the finish was scattered around the garage in boxes and cans (and the frame was rusted, the nosecone looked like shit, the engine was in Columbia, etc.,) I decided I’d pass on this one as well. I didn’t even bother to take a picture to show you.