pres.umptuo.us

It’s fun writing comments in my CSS code for the IE workarounds:

div.call_to_action {
   clear: left;
   height: 1%;	/* I hate IE with a passion */
   padding: 20px;
   background: #DFF0FD;
   }

Ta-Da!

Introductions Are In Order…

It finally set upon me that calling the site “Boredom” and having the web address be valloq.com wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. At first I was gonna grab www.riclim.com and make my site into e.riclim.com, but being able to have the entire url spell out the site name is so much cooler.

You’d be amazed at how many .us domains are taken — www.icio.us (by del.icio.us, of course), www.aculo.us (by script.aculo.us), and practically all the good ones are gone. I lucked upon www.umptuo.us when I tried searching for s.umptuo.us and almost settled for that, but pres.umptuo.us is such a sweeter name.

So here we are, a brand new name, brand new address, but the same ol’ content.

I Can Use Photoshop

I’m hoping everyone finds this new design a lot more pleasing. The old boredom look was just feeling too spaced out and unorganized. Working at a design firm for the past year has really helped me in understanding the basics behind design. Everything is pretty close to final now from what you’re seeing, although I imagine I’ll tweak it here and there, and if anyone sees something that’s off, please let me know.

Yes, They’re Coming Back

I know, everyone wants the babes back. They’ll be back soon. When? I don’t know…the launch of pres.umptuo.us took me about a month, so I’d expect the same amount of time for the babes to be back. And yes, they’ll have a new name as well.

Ooh I’m switching from Movabletype to Wordpress! Give me some time while I figure this thing out.

Holy crap, I’ve succumbed to pressure and made a MySpace profile. A pretty sweet one too, if I do say so myself. One of my projects at work actually had me partaking in some “viral marketing” and creating MySpace profiles for some characters from a website we had made, and thus led to my “hacking” of their profiles to create something relatively design-y.

So add me as a friend if you’d like, and if anyone is interested in the stylesheet, just drop me a line and I’ll send it over.

Next step: add annoying music video that plays on load.

This is about a month late, but I didn’t have a need to visit gap.com until last week, only to find that their site had been completely overhauled.

No more tables. They’ve gone CSS and XHTML (Strict none the less) friendly, and little bits of AJAX are sprinkled about to make things very user-friendly. There isn’t anything all that groundbreaking about what they’re using; what’s worth getting excited over is the fact that a big company is willing to take the risk and use some very new and innovative technology which is very much going against the norm of most big sites on the web.

Check out the “Quicklook” feature in the product listings, and the way that size and color availability is shown with a quick hover. Job well done.

A couple of more in-depth reviews of the site at Speak Up > To Shop or Not To Shop and every breath death defying: Gap.com’s new, innovative QuickLook widgets

After much speculation and anticipation, Google Talk has been released. I’m finding it to be a very natural extension of Gmail, with the built-in email button and how a gmail account doubles as a Google Talk account. The interface has some nifty features — Click the titlebar of a chat to “windowshade” it; If another window is active and a IM arrives, it automatically displays in the bottom right like a notification. Windows dock together as well, although tabbing might work better.

It’ll be interesting to see how this fares against AIM and MSN Messenger.

I’ve been given an early warning from the powers that be that the server this site is hosted on may be moving in the past next few days and may suffer from some down time, so you’ve all been properly warned.

The server this site is hosted on went down over the weekend and finally made its way back online late last night. They’re working on moving to a better and faster server though, so some downtime may occur in the near future. Hooray to free and stolen hosting!

A nondescript sedan creeps up behind us as we walk across the parking lot. It honks, making us aware of its presence, and we move to let it pass even though the parking lot is deserted.

The two recruiters don’t even introduce themselves. “You guys want to join the Army?” they ask, dressed in their camoflauge fatigues. Those fatigues really help them blend in with the Winchell’s donuts in Costa Mesa.

“No thanks,” we say.

“Good luck in life.” They drive away.

Fucking murderers.

Ta-Da! A return to boredom’s roots with this new look, as I tried to keep things very plain and simple once again, although this time I was able to use my XHTML and CSS skills to get everything perfect and as close to standards-compliant as possible. Doing CSS full-time has really helped quite a bit, and I’m really happy with the way this one turned out.

I’m in the process of slowly converting all the “Morning Post” entries into quickies, and reserving the left column for actual entries and not just little links of the day. I found the three-column layout necessary to accomodate that and the obsessions. People will notice the outgoing links (wannabes and friends) have been reorganized once again.

Movable Type gave me a headache, as usual. The pages were all layed out perfectly, but when it came time to turning them into templates I ran into the typical obscure issues, in this case the showstopper involved comments and thus the preview page does not look as I would like. I’ll work on that one.

Everything but the search should be working though, so let me know your thoughts on the new look and if anything looks off.

Just upgraded Movabletype to version 3.16. Let’s hope it went well.

Everyone’s played with Google Maps by now and been totally wowed by the slick interface. Then they added satellite imaging. And now, someone’s combined Google Maps with Craigslist apartment listings in what could be the most ingenius and useful, um…use of the web, ever.

Something I’ve been working on/off for the past couple of months, I finally did the launch last night of the redesigned Writer’s Block. The hardest part came in figuring out the right template tags to enter into my html code, and the archives are a sort of hack job at the current moment.

The search templates still haven’t been designed, and I think a comment preview template as well, but they’ll come in due time. My main emphasis here was to just get the text as readable as possible seeing as how that’s the point of the site. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of how the site looked before, but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t cause it seriously looked like crap.

Hopefully a redesign of my site should be down the line, but with my productivity levels, I wouldn’t be surprised to not see one until the summer.

I am obsessed with organizing things in my life. I pride myself on my management of iTunes, which I promise to get into another time, but recently I’ve discovered a wonderful plugin called Audioscrobbler that works for iTunes as well as Winamp and a myriad of other mp3 players.

The premise is simple. Create account. Install plugin. Play music. Now watch as Audioscrobbler collects statistics on what you’re listening to, who your favorite artists are, and then recommends music to you based on your favorites and even connect you with other people who share similar tastes in music.

For anyone interested, here is my Audioscrobbler page. Damn that Iron & Wine, I don’t even listen to it that much, I think it just happened to come up in my playlist. Feel free to add me as a friend.

Next up is del.icio.us, dubbed a “social bookmarks” manager. Create an account, and then go bookmarking away. The latest bookmarked pages are shown on the main del.icio.us page, but the revolutionary feature is the ability to add “tags” to bookmarks.

Rather than the hierarchical structure that is more commonly used where bookmarks are sorted into folders in an attempt to categorize them, tags allows you to apply as many tags are needed to describe an item. Tags are separated by spaces, so for example, tags for my site might like look “blog babes wasteoftime”, or something similar. Definitely something so simple yet ingenius that it’s amazing nobody had thought of it earlier.

Again, for anyone interested, here is my del.iciou.us page.

From the description:

Howtoons are one-page cartoons showing 5-to-15 year-old kids “How To” build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all, including the pre-literate.

These comics are really neatly drawn, and not even all that cheesy considering their audience. The videos on the side are really nifty too. Who wants to build a hovercraft?

My brother showed me how Opera had a feature for mouse gestures quite a ways back, but I always thought it to be just too inaccurate and too much effort for me to memorize all the different gestures. I gave it a try on Firefox though, and holy crap is it sweet. It almost eliminates the need for a mouse with lots of fancy buttons. Everyone’s completely amazed when I do it too…kinda cool for showing off.

Link here, enjoy. It should be rather self-explanatory. On a related note, I now count six people that I have successfully converted from IE to Firefox.

I’m just so tired these days that I don’t really feel like blogging too much. Work to 6, get home, eat dinner, and then try to get done…whatever it is I want to try to get done. Usually a lot of senseless computer stuff and watching TV, occasionally some reading which I need to improve on.

That last thing’s kinda bugging me. I really need to get to reading and writing more. I spent something like four hours the other day trying to debug some template I wrote for Photoshop’s Web Gallery feature. I almost wanted to just pick up the LCD in front of me and start bashing it.

Ah, how I had forgotten how much I hate programming. Who wants to change careers? *Raises hand*

On another note, I saw these Sumajin Smartwraps and just went, “OMG, I need to have them cause they’re so nifty!”, and they finally came in the mail today. Pretty nifty if I do say so, a lot smaller than expected and really squishy and fun.

We’ve had SBC Yahoo! DSL (That’s a mouthful) for the past four years here at our house, and all along we’ve only gotten mediocre transfer rates with a connection that occasionally went down. Our downloads maxed out at a whopping 32k/sec and sometimes the connection would go down if we simply answered the phone (Yes, we had the filters plugged in). Well cable internet prices in our neighborhood finally dropped to rates that are even lower than DSL’s, and we made the switch to Charter last week.

We now download at a steady 330k/sec and the service hasn’t gone down once. Who would have thought that being so far away from the phone terminal would have that big of an impact on my internet speeds. The customer service reps even said that if I wanted to upgrade to the higher plan, it wasn’t available and couldn’t be ordered for me.

Side note: Cable television is so sweet when it comes at such a low price ;-)

Thanks to everyone who celebrated my 22nd birthday with me: Andrea, Jennie, Nathan, Richard, Tommy, Tim, and Evan. And everyone else who wished me a happy birthday.

So I come across this link to a forum thread, where supposedly someone found a digital camera while hiking in the woods. He downloaded the pics that were in the cam and posted them up for people to see, and there’s reflections and freaky silhouettes that people start pointing out.

I hate scary shit. Scares the crap out of me. Saw What Lies Beneath a while back and was paranoid everytime I took a shower for at least a week afterwards. So naturally I kept reading the thread as people kept finding more stuff. And then they find a corrupted image from the camera’s memory and attempt to recover what’s on it. And then the person who posted the pics says he’s going back with a bunch of his friends and BB guns. This was good stuff.

Then a few pages later on people link back to the original thread where this is from in another forum, and it’s a hoax. They were laughing their asses off. Really good stuff though.

I’m sure everyone’s too lazy to go through the whole thread, but basically around page 14 or so is when people start calling it a hoax. And finally on page 24 is when they link back to the original thread where it first started. And here’s the excellent photoshopping of the “corrupted image”. Fake, sure, but entertained me for a good hour or so.

I’ve started visiting kottke.org as part of my morning sites to visit session. I’ve come across some great links there, among them:

Programmer fonts. Anyone who writes a lot of code (HTML or real code) might have noticed that the default fonts used in Windows are a pain in the ass to code with. Courier New and System are just plain ugly if you ask me. The first few links on that page are really handy, and I’ve been using Sheldon myself for my programming purposes. Works like a charm.

Tricks of the Trade. I like this one:

Graphic Designer

If you have a client who is unable to approve a proposed design without putting her stamp on it, just put an obvious error in the proposal: a logo that’s too large, a font that’s too small, or a few judiciously seeded typos. The client requests the change and feels she’s done her part, and your design, which was perfect all along, sails through to approval.