These naughty potatoes up in Cambridge saw the little goat and thought they could intimidate him. Initially safetygoat was a bit scared…
But those spuds were no match for the safety skills! Woot!
Okay, I can do a bit of html. I can do a bit of styling as well. But here’s my big secret. Wow, this is embarrassing. Deep breath. Here it is….
I can’t code in tables.
There it is. In all actuality, I just don’t want to learn. I’m not interested. But I’ve been told to make an html template for emails and newsletters. And then you get all the different mail programs doing different things, and I hate testing MORE than I hate tables.
So I found this from mailchimp. First off, it’s free, and it’s right there. You can just grab the code, and change it to what you want! I mean, how much easier can it be to make a simple newsletter?? YAY!!!!
Tagged email template, free email template, newsletter template
Recently I had to work on a layout that had a lot of javascript in it, and because the structure of the html couldn’t change, I positioned things absolutely and relatively ( position: absolute; position: relative;) in order to get things in the right place. I was very pleased with the results and Firefox and IE7 looked exactly the same. Then came IE6. It was slightly off when I first loaded it in, so I did the typical thing and just did some conditional code for ie 6. Then, the next time I refreshed, things moved into random other places. And then again on the next refresh. And then not on the next refresh. And so on. How did I fix it? On today, the 7th birthday of IE6, when others are working hard to put ie6 on its death march, here’s a bit of code that made my life a little brighter… Read More »
Tagged haslayout, ie6 bug, ie6 random move, ie6 renders differently
While I didn’t watch as much of the olympics as I would have liked (Britain’s coverage really didn’t give me very much access to my canadian countrymen…), I have caught olympic fever. Yes, myself and Margaret, Irish girl from work, are competing in an 5-day olympic challenge in the first week of October. That means 5 weeks to train for events!
I’m sure you’re dying to know what the events are, so I couldn’t *not* tell you, could I? It’s 5 days… sooo…
1. Rowing 1km (her with a 12 second handicap as she has competed in rowing before)
2 & 3. Weights (spread over two days)– there’s 8 machines using all of the main muscle groups, and we get three attempts to lift as much as we can for 5 reps.
4. Running 5km
5. Swimming (10 laps for her, 12 laps for me as I’m a better swimmer)
Should be good! We’re also monitoring our bmi and our inch-loss, which will factor in to our ending score. We’re still not sure what the prize should be. Possibly a night out on the lash, possibly having to do something embarrassing. I will also be planning a chinese-style opening ceremonies.
Tagged competition, olympics
The obvious answer to this is, “as many as you can.” And with the web, you really can keep on going and going and there’s so much more to learn. You start learning photoshop and illustrator, and do your best to learn the tools, learn the rules of design. And then you decide you want to build a site, and start using dreamweaver, but things don’t turn out, so you learn to hand code your html and css. This opens up a whole new can, and now that you’re designing cool stuff, you want to learn how to make it “cool” for people to interact. So you put some javascript in using jquery, but things don’t work as you want them to, so you start rooting around to find out how to fix it. Suddenly you’re spending all your time coding and you’re not designing any more at all.
This is a problem. While I agree with (some of) the experts that all web designers should be able to do decent css and html, it becomes a problem when a designer has to spend all of his or her time coding. (The debate on learning both is still raging on this actually– some experts say designers should only do photoshop, others say they should have an understanding of the coding, but that’s beyond my expertise.) When there’s no one else to do it, how do you refuse to do it?
I have always been one of those people that likes to do and learn lots of new things. Hell, I’m learning how to spraypaint, how to sew clothes, how to use blender (a 3-D program), how to make silicon moulds, besides the fact that I play piano, would like to do gardening, and like to read a bit of philosophy. A person that stretches herself or himself too far– is he/she destined to never be an expert at anything? Have I stabbed myself in the foot by trying to do too much?
I lllooooooovvvvvve boxes. It used to be just little boxes, such as the ones you’d get for business cards, or new cartridges (they must be square or rectangular or pentagon, or octagon or round… not one of those terribly packaged products. Everyone must have standards!).
Lately it has just gotten worse. The boxes are BIG now. And I mean BIG. I have been cutting them apart for their cardboard to use for learning spraypainting. One box that I found on the street was so big that, even collapsed, took me 1/2 hour to get into my room (it kept getting lodged in the stairwells). My room is now PACKED with cardboard… it’s tucked behind my bed, behind my wardrobe, and behind my piano. It looks like my room is actually some sort of stock room.
So, for other box lovers, I thought I would find some links of things to do with boxes…. And, more importantly, some resources on how to spraypaint graffiti!
- 37 box related crafts for kids
- How to make a beautiful cardboard castle
- Make a safari miniature golf set (complete with elephants!)
- Make a desk!
- Disney’s list of all their cardboard box crafts
- Lyrics to Rebekah’s song, Cardboard boxes(and just for the record, Rebekah, they ARE cool!)
- Join the group to say that you want to learn how to paint graffiti on 43things.com
- Learn from some pros how to graffiti in easy lessons on this site
- Geeky examples of graffiti
- Video: How to draw graffiti-style people
- The cans festival official site. Amazing graffiti!
Go down to leak street in london to see what the hooligans have done
Tagged graffiti, resources
The project: to make multiple copies of the goat to attach to keychains. The question is, how does one do this? After inquiring around the UK about producing them from a 3-d model, smaller companies said they couldn’t do it. The other option was to get it produced in China. Minimum runs are at least 1000, and I wasn’t sure if I *REALLY* wanted 1000 plastic goats (now I think I do, but when I started all this, I was nervous about the number). So I started looking into making my own silicon mold, filled with poly-eurathane (plastic).
This post will go through my entire process of making a two sided mould, and detail all the stuff I learned, and show you my (limited) successes!
Read More »
Tagged casting, mold, moldmaking, polyurethane, safetygoat, silicon
Recently I received an article from the wall street journal entitled, “Men write code from mars, women write more helpful code from venus“, and as girl surrounded by quite a few male developers, I forwarded it to the dev team with some random comment about “Girls are great developers” and that they better be ready for it, because I had already commented the entire code base out with kisses. Meg, our other girl developer, said, “Girls are just better in general!” and we were all laughing, when Rob, another developer piped in, “Boys are better in specific!” to further laughs.
But he continued, “Girls aren’t good at specializing. Genetically that’s just the way it is. Scientific studies have proven it.”
Read More »
For some reason or another, I’ve decided to learn how to spray paint. Obviously, I really should have taken this up in my rebellious teenage years. That way I wouldn’t have to compare my stuff to a blindfolded 4-year old’s. This weekend I spent some time learning about shading and shadowing, and here’s my process. I’m not exactly proud of this work (she looks kind of weirdly proportioned) but it really taught me a lot about how spray paint works, and what I can and can’t do with it (yet!). Luckily I took a picture at every phase of the works.
Read More »
I’m just learning how to integrate css into jsps, but I’m lucky enough to have people around to help me out! As a designer, I want to make sure browsers degrade as gracefully as possible, and so I asked Dan, one of our developers, how you would replace png images for map markers into gifs for ie 6. Usually I would just declare this in the css, but here we were appending a number at the end of each image and then appending the .png. Looking online didn’t uncover any “beautiful” solutions (as Dan would say).
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Posted a photo from Tooting Broadway, UK 5 hours ago
