Archive for January, 2009

Posted on Uncategorised

And by jerks I mean shaun

I submit that some people can be jerks. Haha, I totally just sniped Shaun’s title and turned it into what he would call a sick burn.

Basically it’s like he was a smoker hiding in the bushes. He’s all hacking and coughing up green smoke, basically just choking on his over-sized tongue while being generally ashamed of his appearance when all of a sudden I exploded his head with a well-placed shot from the hunting rifle.

One minute he was thinking about which of my friends to tongue, and the next he was waiting to respawn as a boomer.

As Laurence would say: Merry Christmas. Also his name might be Francis.
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Posted on Business

Once upon a tooth

I know a guy who knows a tooth. In fact, he knows more than one.

Dr. Jonathan Tsang

Dr. Tsang needed a black and white logo he could have printed on a bag. I designed a matching business card (front, back), and will eventually do a letterhead as well. There are some other card designs we’re working on, but that’s my current favourite.
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Snow Day

I haven’t blogged for a while.

But, you know — today it snowed. It was, they say, a “snow day”.

Resultingly, classes were canceled. It happens sometimes. All the schedules enter disarray; syllabi are crumpled and rewritten.

I had a dilemma, however. I had a lab due today. A lab I had forgotten about until this morning. A lab, that is expected handed in by the start of the next class session — the next class session scheduled today, at 11:45 AM. And a professor that accepts submission by e-mail.
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Sometimes people do interesting things!

Facebook. The other day, Jeff and I noticed their footer bar – let’s call it the presence bar, since that is how they’ve identified the div – behaves differently with different browsers!

In Safari, Opera, and Chrome it works normally. You click a link, the page reloads, and the presence bar opens to where you’d left it.

In IE (6 and 7), as well as in Firefox, not so much. The links only alter the part of the URL succeeding the hash mark. The page never reloads.
New content is loaded via an invisible iframe. On completion, the data is extracted from the iframe and inserted into the main section of the page – which doesn’t include the presence bar.

Facebook can use JS to read the section of the URL after the # and load the appropriate page, which allows pasted URLs and bookmarks to work, as well as the back and forward buttons.
If you inspect their HTML, you will notice that the links’ destinations are identical for either set. They probably use Javascript to hijack clicks via eventlisteners.

I have no idea why they’ve decided facebook should behave differently based on browser. Maybe they ran into some sort of problem? Ideas?

I prefer the first approach, but they could have done much worse with the second. They’ve made sure it preserves usage assumptions common to web applications, and degrades gracefully.

 

Posted on Uncategorised

The dream of daily blogs is dead pt 2

And so here we are, 11:50pm January 26th, and not a blog too be seen. Well I for one will not stand for it. I have 9 minutes to blog, and I’m going to blog the hell out of this blog.

I just finished playing Gears of War 2’s co-operative “Horde” mode. In many ways I find it remeniscient of Left 4 Dead, and I think I am quickly realizing that I have a strong affinity for co-operative gaming. In fact, I would go so far as to say that any form of competitive game just doesn’t interest me.

See with competitive games I end up in either one of two situations: I am the best, or I am not. If I am the best, no one will play with me, because I keep beating them. If I am not the best, I don’t have very much fun. I like to think I’m a pretty good sport, but let’s face it, losing just isn’t as much fun as winning. With co-operative games you aren’t succeeding at the expense of someone with whom you are friends.

You might say “then just play against people you don’t know, you won’t feel bad about beating them!” You’d be right, I don’t feel bad about beating them. I also don’t feel good about beating them either. I have tried playing against random people on the internet before, and I just don’t see the appeal. If I don’t know the people I’m playing with I get bored. I’d rather play a game alone than with strangers.

Some people don’t play games at all! To those people I say: quit being a jerk and get Left 4 Dead so you can play with me and Brad.

 

Posted on Business

consistency in branding

As you probably know, I designed the logo for Aquaflora Nurseries. In many ways, it has changed a lot from my original submission. Aquaflora very much wanted to use Arial Rounded MT Bold in their logo, which was not at all the fontograph I’d chosen. I switched it to VAG Rounded Std, and no one ever has to know.

Turns out they liked the change anyway, so that was a bonus.
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Posted on Uncategorised

Today is Shaun’s birthday. Zombies will come to fear it.

So many zombies died to see this post home to the interblog. But don’t you cry for them; they gave their psuedolives for a worthy cause, as I have much to share.

First: Shaun and the one called Leebert spent this special day together, reaffirming the bonds of friendship. Perhaps not the most shocking of news, nor the most unexpected, but how – I ask you, gentle reader – how do we feel about this? Leave your comment today, and perhaps we could together construct a graph — a pie chart is a definite possibility.

That is all; thoughts?