This is a test

If you’ve ever designed a website for anyone you need to see this.  Every time I’ve worked with a client this is how it’s gone down.  Very true, very funny.

The Oatmeal also has a lot of other funny strips, so check those out while you’re there.

This has got to be one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in a while.  I found it on the Mozilla Drumbeat projects page the other day.  I really dig projects that try to blend art and technology in new, interesting ways.

When I work with lists in my HTML I usually will use a combination of padding/margin-right (if stacked horizontally) and padding/margin-bottom (if stacked vertically).  In many cases I will then have to go and set up li:last-child in my CSS to remove the padding/margin from the last item in the list.  When testing in IE7/8 I realized that they did not support the :last-child pseudo selector.  To fix this I went and threw a class=”last” to all the last elements of a set to fix the issue, hoping that IE would eventually implement the selector and I could remove the classes.

Recently I found that IE7/8 does support the :first-child selector, so I’ve now started using padding/margin-top and -left instead.  This prevents me from having to bloat my code with needless classes, and in the end I still get the same final result.  It forces me to think about things a little differently while I’m coding because I feel like I’m styling them backwards (:last-child always felt more natural to me), but it works across more browsers which is always a plus.  I’m not sure why Microsoft chose to support one and not the other, seems like a pretty bizarre choice.  I could make a joke about fictitious monsters demanding the first-child, but that wouldn’t be very professional of me, so I won’t.

Hopefully I’m not the only bonehead who didn’t realize this sooner, and maybe this post could help some others.

“As we all know the willy does go in the valley.”

This past September I spent a week in London, and saw the funniest game show I’ve ever seen called Celebrity Juice.  I probably laughed more during this show than I have laughed at anything else on TV.  An American network should really syndicate this because I would love to watch it.  At the bottom of this post I’ve embedded the episode I saw.

“It’s tough to be a baby.”

I can’t be the only one who remembers this music video, can I?  Thankfully Google/Youtube were there to help me find it when it randomly popped in my head the other day.  How did the world survive the 90’s?  I can’t lie, it was pretty lame for the most part.

To be completely honest, I don’t really consider myself knowledgable enough to make any code based contributions to any open source projects… yet.  Luckily for me this had nothing to do with code, and it still makes me feel good.

Now when I say “imperceptibly small,” I mean it quite literally.  It is a tiny commit, not published by me, for which I am not even credited (I’m not asking to be either), yet I feel that I had a role to play in its manifestation.

I was working on my project Fourstep which I am writing in Ruby on Rails, when I tried implementing a function from a particular open source gem.  The gem was written by and is maintained by a very big player in the tech industry right now (hint: their name is a sound a bird makes).  I went over the documentation a few times and thought I was doing everything correctly but for some reason I could not get the function to work properly.  I chalked it up to my inexperience with the framework, and decided to email one of the developers half expecting never to hear back.  Surprisingly enough a few days later I got an email explaining how to get the function working.  I responded with the suggestion that they update their documentation as I am sure there are other programmers at a similar skill level to me who might have the same troubles.

The documentation for the gem has since been updated with more clarity, and I feel like I might have been the catalyst.  And although I didn’t write any code, I still feel good about being bad at something and asking for help because it might help others.

I’ve played games like this before on Facebook (FarmVille, CafeWorld, FishVille, et al.), and I’ve always stopped playing them in fairly short order.  FarmVille is the one I stuck with the longest as I had a lot of friends who played it and we were pretty competitive about it.  We Rule is the complete opposite - I do not have one single friend playing it - yet every 12 hours or so I spend a couple minutes harvesting and replanting my kingdom.  It doesn’t take any significant amount of my time, and there really is no gratification, so I’m not entirely sure why I do it.  My only guess is that it’s a few minutes of quiet before I leave for work and when I get home, and it probably helps me clear my mind and relax.  It’s almost become a habit at this point and I reach for my iPad without even thinking about it when it’s harvest time.

Web Designers vs. Web Developers

Seeing as I consider myself both, I guess I do fit squarely in the middle here.  The most amusing part is that I actually did bring my own keyboard to work.

Interesting product, not sure how well it will do in the marketplace.  I think the dual-screen idea worked great in a smaller form factor with the Microsoft Courier (R.I.P.), not sure if one this size is going to work out well for Acer.  Perhaps a little too ambitious.

UPDATE 12/10/10: They’ve announced a price of €1,499.  That is almost $2,000 USD!  Not a chance this thing is going to sell well.  If you’re ready to spend that much on a computer, get a MacBook Pro or something.