the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for August, 2008
A Little Off Subject…
Aug 30th
So a coworker and I are always talking about code. Not terribly interesting (especially for people who aren't in the biz…), but sometimes we make ourselves laugh. Yes, I know. I am a huge nerd for finding conversations about code to be funny…
But anyway, the other day we were talking about XHTML validation (you're welcome to start sleeping about right now, if you wish) and how validation fails if there are markup tags that are not "closed" (e.g., a "div" tag that hold an image, text, etc. needs to have a "closing" tag to tell the browser what it's dealing with).
Somehow, the comment was made that life feels like failed XHTML validation–replete with open "tags" of disappointment that never close…
Boy, I made myself bored just writing this. Appartently my line of work is dorky and lame. Oh well.
Share this: On Becoming a Better Web Designer – Project vs. Hourly Billing
Aug 24th
One question among a million has plagued humanity for thousands of years, and still remains without an answer. No, it's not theological, and it has nothing to do with chickens and their alleged eggs. Rather. it is the question of whether you should bid out your next job based on number of hours or a project basis.
This question is tricky, and I know every designer has a lot of different opinions about the subject. And in all fairness, all sides probably have a legitimate argument. So instead of arguing for a particular perspective, I'm going to simply explain my own view.
From the moment I began freelancing, I have always quoted my jobs on a project basis. Here's a few reasons why:
First, I worked for nearly three years in a law firm where everything was billed by the hour. While legitimate work was done, a standard practice in legal billing is to assign certain number of minutes (or hours) to certain tasks. So for example, every phone call is billable for 10 minutes worth of time, even if it's 45 seconds long.
Now in my last post, I argued that a legitimate part of billing your customer is for your expertise, and More >
On Becoming a Better Web Designer – 7th Detour
Aug 19th
Okay, I'm going to take a bit of a detour here from the "series-in-a-series" that I've been doing to quickly blog about an invaluable CSS trick that every designer needs to use as often as possible.
So here's the scenario: You have a blog that's going to have pictures in it. The thing is, you want to be able to float the images either to the right or to the left with some margins applied. Oh yeah, you also want to have, say, seven different border-color options. And did I forget to mention that you also want different padding between the image and border?
What to do, what to do? When I first started, I would have sat down and mapped out a class for each "scenario." For example, for the left-blue-2px-bordered option, I would have created something like "img.leftbluetwoborder." While this will, of course, work, it's not usable. Who can remember "leftbluetwoborder", not to mention the 23 other similarly named classes? So what's the alternative to this terrible mess?
Enter what I call "class overloading." What is this? Simply, it is applying more than one class to whatever you're applying classes to. So if I have an image with "class='myimage'", with More >
Quick-'n-Dirty Thumbnail Image Sizing
Aug 12th
Okay, so at some point as a web designer you're going to come across a project where you have to design some kind of gallery with image thumbnails.
In an ideal world (e.g., Photoshop), all of the thumbnails will be precisely the same size, so plugging them into nice little skins (the "pretty" that you put around them) is cake. Unfortunately, the real world ain't like that. In the real world, you have hundreds of thumbnails to deal with, none of which will probably ever be exactly the same size.
Now, of course, the thumbnail skins still have to work. So what should you do?
The first thing to NOT do is hard-code the "width" and "height" attributes of the <img> tag. Super bad idea. Okay, not a TERRIBLE idea, but it will inevitably lead to some funny looking thumbnails as the img tag will stretch or shrink your image to fit these values.
So what's the alternative? Well, ideally, you'd be using Coldfusion 8 and could use the super-cool built-in image manipulation tools to properly scale and crop every image to be the same size. Ah, but we're not in an ideal world!
The second alterative I've found that works to a limited More >
The Diminution of God's Glory…Possible?
Aug 11th
Wow. I haven't posted here since the middle of May.
Well, I've been busy…and whatnot.
For the last several months, I've been extremely busy with my company, Singularity Concepts. I've launched several websites and currently have some "bigguns" in progress.
But for some reason, I've gotten the theology bug recently. So here goes.
The other day, I came across a post talking about problems with Arminian theology. As was once my practice, I jumped into the fray, gunning down the arguments of my Calvinist detractors (not to difficult, but good sport nonetheless). At one point, one of the Arminians actually defended the Reformed view of the atonement, and pointed me to a post somewhere which he believed was a "great" defense of PSA theory from a non-Reformed perspective.
Needless to say, the argument highlighted was terrifically weak and philosophically thin, but one point did pique my interest. One of the fundamental arguments made by the author for his view of atonement is that sin damages God's glory, and that this glory must be restored.
Obviously, this is nothing new. Beginning primarily with Anselm, theologians have thought this way about atonement. Simply, they suggest that in the fall and continuing sinfulness, humanity degrades the glory of More >
