Which explains a whole lot of things. As this site points out the house that is not from Oz, the movie, was built by some distant relative. My Great Grandfather Jennison is from Liberal Kansas.
Count of Monte Cristo
I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo (Buy it at Amazon.com) last night at 12:40 or so. Great book, but I’m incredibbly tired now (that’s a lie, I’m not that tired, but I will be this afternoon). The ending had me realing, I was just wondering “what?!” Not because it was a bad ending, it just caught me off-guard, which is fabulous. In the end you see that even Edmond, who is after revenge, is still susceptable to error and his actions have a weighty consequence. Very good reading and if you don’t want to buy it, it is available at Project Gutenberg as a text file. Also, you could get it at your local library. Whatever the case, after reading this I want to read some more fiction. Jessica and I are considering the ‘Bourne Identity’ since we liked that movie as well.
FireFox 0.9 Installer
The latest Mozilla Firefox browser is just round the corner and I’ve installed the 0.9 beta. The installer is beautiful. It gives me all of the options I want. I’ve recently been thinking more and more about installers and am convinced that they are just as vital a piece of your software as anything else. Witness the wonder that WordPress’s 5 minute Installer instills. It actually does only take that long, and for a web application, that’s a beatiful thing.
The graphics of the Firefox 0.9 installer incorporate the new branding and I’m confident that this branding will increase market share. Why? Because it is attractive. Millions of women surf the net every day and I tell you that as superficial as it sounds, the blue ‘e’ is not sexy enough to hold people while a cute fox is sure to get some attention! Furthermore the installer lets you pick a custom set of options for installable components, whether or not to place shortcuts in various parts of your Windows interface (Programs Menu, Desktop and Quick Launch). This is a great step forward for Firefox!
Disciplers.org Update
The www.disciplers.org site is updated now to use alt attributes for its images so that handicapped users can have their screen readers read them and so that people with their browsers not rendering images can still see where the links are going. The material on this site was really helpful in my spiritual growth.
Stopdesign Redesign Phase II
Stopdesign
has updated ‘their’ look. And when I say ‘their’ it’s like I say ‘we’ for Randy Peterman. Because primarily I work alone. Doug has done a good job of keeping it nice and clean, but I also think that he needs to widen up his middle column on the front page because otherwise it’s just too narrow and I have a hard time focusing in on what is sub-navigation, what is content etc.
Furthermore, in this impromptu critique I love his navigation link mouseovers on the ‘seealso‘ page. Each section of the site has its own look which allows Doug to show off his design style without asking you to pick a stylesheet (a la CSSzengarden.com).
Good stuff over all.
JLo Gets Married…… Again
I had thought I’d heard something of this, but apparently it’s true (see: evidence?
). Yeah, that’s going to last. The timing of the new hubby’s divorce finalization and JLo’s recently getting over Ben makes me pretty certain that this is going to last for at least 2-3 weeks.
Reagan Passes
Ronny is dead. Whether you’re a conservative or liberal the guy was a president and he had quite an impact on America.
Shrek Too
This weekend on Saturday night Jessica and I went to see ‘Shrek 2’ AKA ‘The Ogre Movie.’ Why is it AKA ‘The Ogre Movie?’ Because Abby loves the donkey in the movie and if we say, “Shrek,” she runs around saying, “Funny Donkey!” over and over until our ears hurt and we lament having mentioned Shrek. However, we don’t lament seeing the movie, which in my opinion was way funnier than I had expected. Lets just say that when they parody something, they parody with great style. The ‘Sir Justin’ poster in Mrs. Shrek’s bedroom was classic (Cameron Diaz beau is/was Justin Timberlake). It definitely was good and way outranked Ballistic by about 3 million on a scale from 0 to 1.
Michael Moore Hates America
Or does he? I don’t know, but they’re
making a movie with that as a title.
Usability Testing
I am excited because with one of my clients I’ll get to do some basic usability testing. This means that I get to put my software I’ve been working on in front of someone and say. “Use it.” All I get to do at this point in time is observe them. If the user gets stuck, can’t accomplish a task or runs into an error, I’ll get to take notes, but that is it. I’m very excited about the opportunity to see things in action with a ‘tabula rasa’ [blank slate]. I’m eager to actually get to do some of the things that I’ve only read or learned about because I think that it will 1) help me grow my skills as a designer 2) help me be a better planner 3) help me think like an end user. I often approach things as a designer (yes, including online ordering and administration) which is a weakness. I may post what happens just for fun (since a few readers of this blog are also developers).