Time for a change...

I feel like this guy...

But every time I think about interviewing, I'm worried I'll come across like this guy...


Wish me luck!

Time for a change...

And Further More...

Currently reading "Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix" in which a drunk-on-power government leader slowly wears away at Hogwarts students' rights "for their own good" all the while denying the existence of the real enemy and obfuscating a conflict that is threatening the wizarding world's existence. Hmmm...
By page 300 I was checking the publication date. 2003. Hmmm.
Anyway, here's some "Order of the Phoenix" eye candy to tide you over.
Note: if you want something that loads faster, go here.

And Further More...

Girls Rule!

Sometimes out of curiousity I go to my local Chamber of Commerce site and check up on my colleagues' sites to see what's going on. Then, I noticed something, the ladies outnumber the guys around here. Funny, I was just reading about how everyone seems to think it's the opposite(comment #68).

Girls Rule!

This Ain't No Walk in the Park

Trial and error, rinse, repeat…
Things are getting down to the wire for launching my first CSS-based design onto the web. After aeons of coding, tweaking and tweaking, and testing in Safari and Firefox, then checking IE and balling up my fists and sobbing, then tweaking again, things are coming together in a good way. It’s not going to end up on Webcreme, but hey, it’s an insurance site. I figure that people go to insurance company websites for basically two reasons; either they want to get a quote on insuring some aspect of their lives, or they need to file a claim because of some sort of calamity. They probably won’t be in the mood to marvel at pretty colors and fancy animations. So I focused on making the information as clear as possible, and putting in lots of useful links.
Here’s what I learned:
1) Just because the client says something looks fine, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to need changing eventually. A.K.D.F. Always Keep Design Flexible.
2) Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Case in point, the client wanted a form like the one on the “big” company’s site(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was going to do the "big" site a favor and link back to them, but luckily I tested the link and it "traps" the browser so one can't go back, which further proves my point!). I dutifully went to the url they sent me to check it out and it was a sticky mess of tables, inaccessibility and non-usability. I kept trying to explain that simple was better. After all, the “big” site’s form only had room for 2 or 3 questions per page and there was no way to go forward and check to see how much the user was getting into! Plus, it was pretty difficult to locate it on the company’s site.
3) Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference. I spent 15 minutes tearing my hair out over changing a div’s border to a nicer color only to realize that DreamWeaver’s “code-hint” tool had neglected to include the semicolon on the end of the attribute. One keystroke, and everything worked again.
4) When in doubt, go to a site that you know has the format you are going for and hit View>Source.
5) When nothing seems to be working right, go take a walk.

This Ain't No Walk in the Park

An Unholy Cabal in an unexpected place

How to spot a web designers’ convocation
It’s funny how things come together sometimes. I went to this event in Cambridge yesterday, and ran into 2 people who practice the same kind of digital voodoo that I do and we realized that we all live within a triangle of Salem about 1 mile square.

At any rate, I had a great time and it was cool to talk shop/commiserate with other people who hunch over a keyboard all day. Actually, when I looked around, there were almost more people hunched over some kind of digital device than there were drinking and talking with each other. I highly recommend the Spring Training IPA.

An Unholy Cabal in an unexpected place

Making Google Cry Uncle.

I just did a search for “Harry Potter” on Google and I think I broke their hard drives. At any rate, the browser window seized up for about 3 minutes and then shut down with a faint whimpering noise.

No, I haven’t been living under a rock for the past 10 years, I’ve just been ignoring most of the hype.
But then my father was talking about the books and how they were more involved than the films and I was intrigued. After all, this was the guy who gave me“The Chronicles of Narnia”
(author’s note, take the quiz on this site to find out if you are a bigger geek than me!)
for Christmas when I was 7 and had original hardcovers of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy laying around the house.
. And then Salem, originally just a town I had moved to for spatial-economic reasons, hosted a Harry Potter convention
complete with a Quidditch tournament, played in true Hogwarts style: in the pouring rain. I started noticing people walking around Essex St. wearing cloaks and pointed hats like it was no big thing.
So now that I’m already on “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, when I walk around downtown, it’s unsettlingly like visiting Hogsmeade.
You’ve got your magic shop , your corner tavern, and you can take your pick from the dozens of stores selling anything from broomsticks to dragon figurines. Judging from the frequent sightings of people in capes and robes, (usually worn over an XXXL tiedyed ensemble), a lot of other people think so too. It’s fun to watch, but I’m like one of those people who live in NYC their whole lives and never go to the Statue of Liberty. It just isn’t done. If someone asks, though, I can tell them where to find a good deal on a crystal ball or where to find an ounce of wolf’s fur.

Making Google Cry Uncle.