My latest Tweet:

SpoCOOL: A "pub" is going into the old Hotel Lusso 360. #spoeats

On Last.FM I last rocked out to Tenebre (Reprise) by Simonetti - Morante - Pignatelli.

image tagged with <p>I really need to get somewhere warm.</p> image tagged with <p>The smoothie was easily the best part of the meal. Pretty dang awesome.</p> image tagged with image tagged with image tagged with image tagged with <p>From Hacienda las Flores.</p> image tagged with image tagged with <p>Ooh la la!</p> image tagged with <p>Uh, yeah... That's me. Thanks.</p> image tagged with <p>Alton Brown recipe.</p> image tagged with image tagged with

Jun 10th, '09 1 Comment

There are certain things that have almost limitless ways of being displayed. A map, interestingly enough, is one of them. It’s kind of strange, seeing how key aspects of a map, be it towns or roads or whatever, has to always sit in a specific location for the map to make any sense. Yet go into a map store, and you’ll find literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different designs, many of them vastly different from eachother.

Safi Airways has a good example on its website, where it shows an accurate flight map in a very stylish and modern way.

Safi Airways map

Most importantly, the map is accurate. Cities are placed exactly where they should be, and the white lines represent flight routes, with the thinner ones representing less frequent routes.

Safi, then, has used its logo to represent a map accurately. And that’s kind of cool.

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Jun 8th, '09 1 Comment

To begin with the end: I like it. Quite a bit. First impression is that it might not be quite up there with Firefox in terms of features, but it definitely is more elegant. I’ve decided to use it as my main browser this week, and see if I will want to switch.

Pros

Really, really, really fast rendering engine. I mean visible to the human eye, not just stats and number. And it has a nice standard support too.

Elegant. Stays out of your face. The antithesis of IE8 in other words.

Loading wheelSome people, including myself, had issues with the beta version’s “loading wheel.” It was hard to see if a page was still loading or not. That’s not an issue anymore

The top-mounted tabs, a la Chrome, are gone. Thank god. Never been a fan of them, and the reasoning behind them makes little sense, other than saving 1/4 of an inch of screen space.

“Top Sites” looks awesome. As does the “Cover Flow” feature in Bookmarks and History.

Cons

No “Awesome Bar” features, i.e. no wildcard URL/title search in the address bar. Too bad, as I use this religiously in Firefox.

No bookmark keywords. For example, in Firefox I have Internet Movie Database registered to “imdb %s.” This lets me type in “imdb Cary Grant” in the location bar, and an IMDb search for Cary Grant will show up.

No add-ons.

Conclusion

The more I use it, the more I like it. Safari might be my browser of choice come next week.

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Apr 28th, '09 1 Comment

So the new SFB launched, and oh so happy we all are!

In terms of design I went in a very different direction than where I mostly have been going lately, and definitely went for something other than the (dreaded jargon coming up) Web 2.0 look. While I’m decidedly into clean designs — this site definitely follows those principles — I wanted to do something that looked a bit more fun and, I suppose, “messy” this time around. Too many sites takes themselves too seriously, and I really wanted to get away from that.

The challenge was to not just maintain the ease of navigation from the previous design, but both make it easier to navigate and adding new features to the site. While there are still some tweaks I want to add to the navigation, I think everything works fairly well as it is. Plus I got to add my favorite Buddha to the design!

Other than that… Most of the rounded corners are done in the CSS, which, of course, means everybody’s favorite browser, Internet Explorer, will just display squares. But really, with a site that on most days get only about 150-200 unique hits where less than 25% use IE… I’ll just go with the Better Taster browser.

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Apr 23rd, '09 No Comments

I’m currently finishing up the new design for Spokane Food Blog, one that will replace the rather ancient current design. The name of the template, “Day Man VS Night Man,” is not just a reference to everybody’s favorite Philly-based show, but also a reference to the design being based on times. More specifically, depending on what time of day you visit the site, the header will change accordingly.

dayman

This is the first time I’ve messed with time-based designs, though it probably won’t be the last. It’s a good way to kick up a site’s look, and make it more interesting, by having things change around depending on what time of day it is. It is also simple. You can find the time for sunset and sunrise by using Weather.com’s web services, which doubles as a great excuse to display weather on your site.

No.

Seriously.

People love weather. I’m going to say with some certainty that you’ll get return hits just because you display weather icons on your site.

But I digress.

By simply checking what time of day it is, I can decide to use either a “day” or a “night” CSS class. Using that, I set the background as well as other little details in the header. My personal favorite is changing the Twitter bird to a Twitter owl.

So for all my two readers, look forward to a brand new and exciting Spokane Food Blog early next week!

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Mar 30th, '09 4 Comments

Far be it from me to ignore the requests of the site’s one reader! I give you 7UP vs Sprite!

Sprite

I’m sorry, I just don’t get Sprite. I get sprites, but not Sprite, the beverage. It kinda just tastes like a bunch of chemicals mixed together. OK, so that’s what most of them, but the more chemically they taste, the worse they are. And few are worse than Sprite.

7UP

947249649-00Remember the game Cool Spot? I loved that game! If Mario knew what was good for him, he would have been the 7UP mascot. But he wasn’t. Cool Spot was! Cool Spot wasn’t just a spot, he was cool, and for a while he made 7UP cool too. Oh, as for the drink? I like Mexican 7UP, it’s pretty good.

The Winner

Sierra Mist. Yeah. It’s more refreshing than either Sprite or 7UP.

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Mar 27th, '09 2 Comments

Oh, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, you have done it again! After rolling out two Seinfeld ads that went nowhere (and you would have to be be drinking the Kool Aid as heavily as Paul Thurrott to believe that was the plan all along!), and then telling the world that even 4, 7, and 11 year olds can use Vista’s photo feature (apparently the only feature worthwhile advertising), we now get this…

Where to start… First, “Lauren” is not a “real” person, but an actress. Shocking, I know, but Microsoft and CP+B is trying to tell the world otherwise. And far be it from me to point out how little aforementioned Thurrott knows about marketing, but when he says The message, obviously, is that by ‘cool enough’ she means ‘rich enough.’ Not quite that simple. The reason they picked Lauren, with her green scarf and denim jacket, is that she kinda sorta does look cool. And the message Microsoft is trying to sell is that you can be cool and buy a PC for a cheaper price. The message is that PC users are cool and down to earth and budget conscious, while Mac users are paying a higher price to feel cool. Obviously.

This comes back to why Microsoft hired CP+B to start of with. CP+B, like Microsoft, really really really wants to be cool. They want to be the iPod of the advertising industry. And seeing that can never happen, they’ve gone with… the Zune… Not that I blame them, of course, Microsoft is a big contract and all. But when an uncool ad agency is trying to make an uncool company look cool, it really just comes off as a poser ad agency trying to make a company of stodgy old business men look like posers.

The message I came away with after watching this ad? “PCs are for posers.”

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Mar 25th, '09 2 Comments

Times are tough all around, and even those of us who are still fortunate enough to enjoy steady employment over the past ten years aren’t safe. It sucks, but that’s life.

I have been on a few hiring committees over the years, and am kind of surprised how ill-prepared job seekers are, even during the best of times. Here are four quick tips of what at least I would look for in a Web developer.

  • Have a personal web site. Just like this — kind of a portfolio Web site. Show that you have enough interest in what you do for it to be more than just a job.
  • Let the site speak for itself. Sure, link to some of your work from the site, but remember the site is also your work. In fact, it is the probably the first work a potential employer would see, so put some effort into it.
  • Be part of social networks. Twitter has been around for a long time, but it has really only recently taken off into the mainstream. To me it probably should be the social network of choice for most web developers now, seeing that it’s the buzz-kid on the blockĀ  (with all respect to 97bottles!) sort of like what Facebook was a year ago.
  • Tout the aforementioned. A potential employer shouldn’t have to Google you to find you. Tout your website; show that you have a true passion for web development.

Just a few friendly tips from me to you there!

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Mar 24th, '09 1 Comment

kirklandReaders of the most wonderful Spokane Food Blog will already know I’m not a huge fan of Kirkland Signature beer. Hey, it’s my opinion! More interesting than the brew, though, is the label, which follows a common trend of trying to evoke a less than generic feeling for a decidedly generic product. Nothing wrong with that of course, but the way Kirkland (and many other companies) has gone, is to copy a non-generic product’s label. In this case, Redhook.

Now, it’s not a carbon copy, and the pictures I picked don’t fully show how similar the colors actually are. But when I first saw Kirkland’s new beer, I instantly thought of Redhook, and while I would have picked up a case at any rate — for heaven’s sake, it’s COSTCO beer! — I can’t help but wonder what level of an initial positive impression the Redhook association might have given me. The solid colored bottom with the name of the beer, the textured warm colors of the top 2/3… There is a visual identification there.

The Kirkland beer is not brewed by Redhook — one sip in, and that becomes abundantly clear — but it’s pretty clear that COSTCO wants to sell the experience of a Washington microbrew. (Funnily enough the Kirkland beer is brewed in California.) And really, from a visual perspective they do a good job at that, and probably lure many people in to that ever-important first purchase.

How many second-time buyers they’ll get is a completely different question.

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Mar 18th, '09 5 Comments

I’m sure many of you — this site gets like eight hits a day after all — have mucked around trying to figure out some of the mechanics behind the site. Anything else would be a bit silly!

As many others have started doing, I have started moving away from using standalone images to sprites. In other words, instead of having one file per image, I have gathered a bunch of images into one file. It’s still a work in progress, but a good example is the Twitter thingy up in the left corner. It’s all in one file.

There are a few advantages doing this. First of all you reduce HTTP requests, which is a pretty big deal for sites like Yahoo! and Google and sites that gets eight daily visitors. I’ve also found it helpful in terms of editing, as well as adding “states” to an image. (Like the Twitter icon which has a default state and a hover state.)

The disadvantage? Photoshop doesn’t exactly optimize PNGs in any fantastic way, but run the file through PngThing and things will look better.

So I like sprites. They make sense. And they remind me of the Amiga!

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Mar 17th, '09 No Comments

And about time, because the world owes me the future Hollywood has promised me!

But no, really, the 3.0 iPhone software update which is heading here in June is impressive if Apple’s presentation is anything to go by.

Some of my thoughts about the new features:

  • Copy/paste: About time, and it will make grabbing info from the web and sending it in an SMS… Well, it’ll make it possible. Which is awesome.
  • MMS: Honestly, I’m fine using e-mail for multimedia messages, but it’ll be nice being able to receive e-mail instead of using the inanely bad system of using browser with some crazy username and password.
  • Spotlight: Nice. Sometimes I forget if I received something via SMS or e-mail, and this will fix that issue.
  • Peer to Peer: Hey, fair is fair, the Zune came up with that one first!
  • Accessories: The fact that apps can be developed for accessories could be interesting. Speaker docks, for example, can be revved up quite a bit now, instead of being limited to a basic remote or whatever.
  • Minor updates: Seems to be quite a few of those, my favorite involving anything related to shaking the phone. I don’t know. I just like shaking things.

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