03.19.08
Posted in Design, Personal, Work at 8:55 pm by Ben
Work:
- Lots of video editing. It’s been very interesting - especially managing client expectations.
- Various website designs and development, some coming soon
- Lots of pleased clients both internally and externally.
- The CHAMPS project continues to push back it’s completion date. I’d love to tell you all about this monster of a project but its both a political and sensitive subject due to the various entities involved.
Freelance:
- More icons for Maietta-Hatch Kinaesthetics
Personal:
- The wife and I will be moving to a new apartment come the first of May
- The new apartment has lots more space and central air.
Michigan Life:
- The weather is definitely heading towards spring although winter keeps trying to get a last hurrah in.
- The birds are all twitter-pated. The morning sounds are wonderful.
- Need to post some more photos. I’m thinking of building a Flash - XML powered web gallery and hooking it up somewhere on the site. I know, it’s been done before but hey - I’ll get to dust off my Flash skills and have some coding fun!
Anyway, that’s the recent doings as of March 2008.
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12.05.07
Posted in Stories, Work at 9:52 pm by Ben
Funny story from work: So a client had their website redesigned (after my redesign which got royally messed up by how many navigation buttons they wanted stick on) and they chose a different company to do it. The design looks good and does a great job of capturing the problematic navigation that killed my design. But as clients are wont, they decided to flip some colors around and add another button (obviously this client is predisposed to add buttons). The client didn’t want to use the original designer for whatever reason and decided to use us (again). The color switching and adding the new button went really well after we bought the missing font that the original designer had used. Anyway the images were fine and dandy. And this is now where the story gets funny. I’m looking at the HTML and CSS and find that there are a bjillion different stylesheets. Each page in the site has its own 2 stylesheets. Mind boggling crazy it becomes funny. But that’s not the worst of it. I drop in the images into the proper folder(s - don’t get me started on how they organized the file structure) and open up the appropriate style sheets to make some text color changes appropriate to the image color changes I’ve made. To make sure that I edit the correct style I also open up one of the html files - and I spot a <p class=”heading”>. I think, huh, that’s interesting, because generally one uses an <h> tag for headings…And as I look over the HTML code and the CSS I start to laugh as it becomes clear no <h> tags were used throughout the entire page! Although to be honest I didn’t search that hard. There’s nothing wrong with <p class=”heading”> but when it’s being used to replace an <h> tag, it’s not semantic or appropriate! That and the various non-breaking space code that littered the page made me laugh. Someone new to CSS perhaps?
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10.28.07
Posted in Personal, Technology, Work at 8:31 pm by Ben
Mac OS 10.5 is released. Mixed reviews. Many new features, lots of changed user interface. I currently do not have Leopard as I have an old tower that wouldn’t really run it well, a bunch of 3rd party applications that I require to work effectively, some reservations about some of the changes, and finally, no pressing need to “change”. But enough of that.
At work I will be assisting an internal marketing team and helping MPHI chart out a marketing plan, to diversify our funding/revenue streams so that we will be better protected against the fortunes of this poor state. (Hello Governor and Legislature: Fix. Budget. Now.)
This last Friday I played indoor soccer with the team Winners by Forfeit (made up of some of my co-workers and their friends and spouses). We were handily spanked, 10-0. But we managed to stay upright most of the night and there was no puking. Later as the team discussed how we played, we all agreed we could only get better as the season goes on.
Finally I helped put together a haunted house for our church’s Halloween Carnival. It was a smashing success with many kids going through multiple times and having a blast. Many thanks to Los Eldres.
Oh. And the black locus trees outside the residence have about depleted their leaves which means no more messy carpets strewn full of leaves. The vacuum cleaner sighs in relief.
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