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fifty years have ridden off into the sunset
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I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of
the right words to say
I know they don't sound the way
I planned them to be
But if you wait around a while
I'll make you fall for me
I promise, I promise you I will
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I ate lunch at Jasmine in the Wang Center today. As usual, it was quite good - hands down the best food on campus certainly. And it's not really that busy; I'm thinking it'll be kind of nice.
At any rate, on a whim after I ate I went out into the courtyard in the Wang Center. As soon as the door shut I heard birds. Birds. At Stony Brook.
Wow.
It was really quite peaceful, and just a breath of fresh air. No need to worry about classes for a while, no need to do anything except just wander through the courtyard and look at the pool, the plants, the fish ... to just be.
I may have to spend a lot of time in there.
"What's inside there?"
"One moment of perfect beauty."
--Sheridan and Kosh, "There All The Honor Lies"
-David
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New York Times article by Ron Suskind. Possibly the best quote from the article:
"Where people often get lost is on this very point," he said after a moment of thought. "Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not-not ever-to the thing we as humans so very much want ... easy certainty."
-David
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So in between studying for ESE 319 and doing some other random junk, I'm hitting "Next Blog" on the Blogger taskbar. I actually do this a lot, for a few reasons, not the least of which is to see how other people have done web design. Interestingly enough, I actually randomly found the blog of someone I know here at SBU by clicking off SFB ...
... but anyway.
This is Conceptual Web Design 101. The title of this course is: The Ten Commandments of Web Design. Examples of violations will be provided. Some of the examples will violate one or more Commandments. This is wholly due to their authors' incompetence.
1. Thou shalt have no other windows before me.
If you absolutely must use an inline window instead of actually using the entire space of the page, you'd better bloody well make sure you don't have stuff which is causing horizontal scroll bars. It's bad enough that someone will have to scroll down to read your second post; they should not have to scroll right as well. And how about that vertical scroll bar that doesn't work because you messed up the browser with your overly wide image?
Example: http://meijuan6may.blogspot.com
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any JavaScript popups, or any likeness of any thing that is a JavaScript popup. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
JavaScript popups that spawn when someone comes to your page are a definite no. This is true whether you have one, two, three, forty, or you're that guy who programmed the website with an endless loop of script popups. Either way, it's short bus material.
Example: http://shenzeqishi.blogspot.com
3. Thou shalt not take the code of tables thy textboxes in vain.
50-pixel-wide text columns are illegible. More than that, they make you look like you don't know what the heck you're doing. Admittedly many of you don't, but even so. You have plenty of space. 95% of your viewers are running on a resolution of 800x600 or better. This means you have roughly 700-750 pixels of usable space. So use it.
Example: http://innocencelove.blogspot.com
4. Remember the bottom border, to keep it holy.
Inline borders are cool. When done properly. So do them properly. Check your vertical attributes and make sure you've written your CSS to have the text flow UNDER the background when it's supposed to. Either that, or don't put a bottom on the frame. But if your text runs out of the frame, it looks sloppy.
Example: http://lonesomestar.blogspot.com
5. Honor thy spelling and thy grammar.
13-year old Asian girls (and many Asian guys) take note: English is not a cow that has been bred and fattened and grazed for the specific purpose of you butchering it as horribly as possible. Please write so people can actually read it. If you suffer from delusions that you are writing properly, please sign up for Remedial English as soon as possible, preferably yesterday.
Example: Pick the blog of a (pre-)teen Asian girl. Here's one. http://dunoewatodo.blogspot.com
6. Thou shalt not kill by abuse of colors.
Colors make things look good when used properly. Colors make things look very, very bad when you change colors every other word. Black text on a black background is especially bad, for some strange and unknown reason.
Example: http://powergurl.blogspot.com
7. Thou shalt commit adultery with many, many web browsers.
Internet Exploder may be the most popular web browser out there, but this is primarily due to ignorance and apathy. It is by no means the BEST web browser out there. Opera, Safari, and Firefox all compete for that honor. Microsoft adds proprietary functions which do not function across other browsers. More importantly, what looks good in IE may not look good in another browser, and vice-versa. When it comes to testing your pages, adultery with browsers is a GOOD thing.
Example: http://meircale.blogspot.com
8. Thou shalt not steal prebuilt templates without removing formatting helpers.
It is perfectly acceptable to use prebuilt templates -- not everyone has the time, inclination, or ability to study web design and then build their own site. There is no problem with this. There is, however, a problem with people who fail to remove "LINK GOES HERE LINK GOES HERE LINK GOES HERE" from said prebuilt templates. The delete button is your friend. Use it. This Commandment does not apply to commented HTML.
Example: http://adoreble.blogspot.com
9. Thou shalt not bear inline music against thy neighbor.
Even disregarding the legality of playing someone's copyrighted music on your site (this probably violates some obscure law), forcing your viewers to hear your music is a major sin. If you absolutely must embed music into your page, you'd better set the autostart to false -- forcing me to hit the Stop button is one more button than a viewer should have to click to not listen to your music. With the huge increase in popularity of computer-based music players, this is absolutely vital. Embedded MIDI files were cool and novel ten years ago. We're past the "OMG this thing plays music too?!" stage of the Internet, ladies and gentlemen, so let's start acting like it. This Commandment does not apply to a band's web site.
Example: http://honeymastura.blogspot.com
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's bandwidth, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's images, nor his poetry, nor his essays, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.
Bandwidth is very, very, very expensive. Very. There are several image hosting websites out there. Google probably turns up hundreds. Download the image and upload it to your own website, but going along with the coveting theme -- make sure the image is not under a restricted copyright. If a friend is hosting an image for you, fine. If you're leeching bandwidth, expect an expletive-filled image to replace "your" pretty banner as soon as the host checks his hit logs. Or expect the image to disappear as soon as the host fails out said image.
Going along with that, if someone writes something that strikes you, don't steal it and repost it as your own! Credit, credit, credit. Better yet, link to their site instead of reposting it.
If something doesn't belong to you ... don't just take it. Remember what Mommy told you about stealing? So listen to her and bloody well ask permission.
Example: http://slatta.blogspot.com
Now that you've read the Ten Commandments, here's a quick test for you. How many of the Commandments does this violate?
-David
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| Eh |
| 11:59 PM, Friday, October 22, 2004 |
I'll post something interesting tomorrow. Maybe.
-David
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So I finally got my phone connected to my computer. Now if I had my COMPLETE music library instead of this half-complete backup, I could have a whole slew of decent ringtones. Instead I have Champagne High ... not that this is necessarily a BAD thing. But some of the stuff from .hack would be kinda nice to have too.
Oh well. It's better than the bloody Cingular tune.
Oh, and I can now download photos from my phone. Finally. Whee.
-David
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| On weeks |
| 11:14 PM, Saturday, October 09, 2004 |
This week has been killer. Ugh ... I've had so little time with God, and almost no time to breathe or sleep.
I'm so glad it's over.
-David
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The title pretty much sums it up. I had to take my laptop into the Apple Store to see if they could do anything with it. Was dreading the prospect as the "Genius Bar" tends to be populated by snotty and rather unhelpful people who don't know any more than I do about computers.
However the one at Chestnut Hill is actually rather good. I was pleasantly surprised.
At any rate, the logic board is definitely bad -- sounds like the RAM slots might be busted. Beyond that, it appears that the hard drive has gotten corrupted. Le sigh.
So some of my data is still good, and some ... well, isn't. Everything on that drive is completely unaccessible, which means I'm left to my very incomplete backups. Le double sigh.
This was going to cost me $320.50 to fix -- flat rate for parts, labor, and all. I was not very happy. Then the guy says, "Let me just check your serial number to make sure you don't have AppleCare" -- I thought mine had expired after a year.
Turns out it hadn't. I apparently have a three-year warranty on that computer. So instead of costing me $300, it'll cost me $0.
On the other hand, I got a quote from a data recovery service and they want $500-$2700 to recover my hard drive. How about ... not.
So my laptop is bust, my other computer is great, and I'm half-and-half happy.
-David
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Well ... it's not just the boot tree on my laptop, it's a progressive failure of ... well, looks like everything. This is A Bad Thing.
On the plus side, my new computer works like a charm. So now all I have to do is make the old one work and I'll be happy. I'll also have more computing power in my dorm room than many third-world countries have in their capital. Not that this is, I think, A Bad Thing.
-David
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