Just finished these for my good pal Thayer. They came out pretty sweet! Used some yellow ink, to be sure.

Ericka said I should put my paintings & stuff online, so here they are, on my portfolio page. I took most of these photos 1 year ago! It’s unbelievable how long I can let things go.

Watch The Amazing Water Organ

…after I sneezed. For the past two days I’ve been slowly hobbling around in pain. I thought I was all clear after a good-night’s sleep, but when I reached over to hit the snooze button a searing pain shot in me. So to avoid a repeat, I actually got up. I shuffled around fully awake, making breakfast while the rest of the world slept. Then it hit me- this is what it’s like to be old!

Well, in the spirit of my last post, I thought I’d mention this. I noticed some time ago that IE7 requires the user to click on a flash movie to “activate the ActiveX Control”. Grey boxes appear around all plugin content, (including Quicktime and Flash), and one way or another you must click to load the active content.

I hadn’t given it much thought, but this morning a client brought it up in reference to his site-in-progress. (And when a client mentions something like this, it instantly becomes critically important.) Anyway, I looked into it, and apparently this whole deal stems from a recent patent dispute between Microsoft and Eolas Technologies, a tiny little tech company. The David vs. Goliath aspect is frustrating when deciding where to place blame, but no worries! The fix is atypically easy.

The change affects just the object tag and embed pseudotag. The fix is as simple as using a javascript embed to call the flash movie. Here’s where to get the .js file and instructions. It was a free library called flashobject, but now it’s called swfobject. I mention this because Adobe forced the name change, essentially propagating the some brand of lawsuit-crazy bullcrap onto the generous programmer who created the gold-standard fix to the Eolas Problem (I love the sound of that…we should start calling it the Eolas Paradox).

In any case, the fix is very cool. It is valid (unlike the embed tag), and includes cool features for version testing and autoupdating. Go check it out, and get converting!

I just wanted to mention what Internet Explorer is like, for those who are not web designers and who do not experience anything comparable.

Imagine that your job is just as it is. Ups and downs, little fires to put out, long drawn-out projects, and all the rest of it. Only, every so often you are visited by a guy. He shows up at both random and predictable times, like just after you’ve completed a big chunk of work, for example. Then he flips a coin. If it’s tails, nothing happens; but if it’s heads… All your recent work looks like it’s been created by a maniac. An incompetent maniac. And you have to re-do absolutely everything, but instead of operating in a normal logical workflow, you are in some twilight zone alternate reality where bizarre rules apply. So now you’re blind, feeling around in the dark, pushing buttons and pulling levers. After hours- maybe days- of this, you approach the state you were in before the visitor showed up. Only some things weren’t completely fixed, and you feel a bit like a fraud. So you try to cover up the hacks and the problems that even hacks couldn’t remedy, while nervously waiting for the visitor to return. Because he will, oh he will…