Very wet indeed
27·Jun·07
If you live in the UK you’ll know only too well just how wet things got over Monday and Tuesday this week.
fuzzyness
An experience. An experiment. A peppermint. (Me)
Freelance Freedom
13·Jun·07
It hasn’t been around for long but I already totally love Freelance Switch. Really great articles that frequently help me get a bit of perspective as a home-based web-worker.
I lose sight sometimes of just how much being my own boss rocks, and how totally lucky I am. The stuff on Freelance Switch is great for tuning back in to the right frequency.
Here are a few excellent recent strips they’ve featured, from graphic artist N.C Winters:
Another great site for freelance web-workers is Web Worker Daily – tends to make me feel like I’m part of a pretty special club, which frankly I’m all for : )
Digitizing books: one word at a time
25·May·07
A fantastic concept: kill 2 birds with 1 stone by having web users help to digitize old texts whilst they decipher online CAPTCHAs.
"About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books."
The Star Matrix Pre-Loaded
23·May·07
Achieving a 5 star ratings effect with CSS – no javascript required! Genius as ever from my mate, the guru Paul O’Brien.
Schmarticles
23·May·07
Just added a new article to the Definition website with more to come. Easy tiger.
Small talk is just something you say to make things less awkward
21·May·07
“As you might imagine, given my inability to relate to the rest of the human race on even the most cursory level, I’m somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I’ll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, “This room’s quite rectangular, isn’t it?” I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels.”
I’m socially inept, but I joined Facebook anyway (at the Guardian)
Squeezing tea bags
17·May·07
We’re having our hideously grotty hallway carpet pulled up to reveal the 100-year-old pine floorboards underneath. Generally, they look great, and with a bit of intense industrial sanding down have “come up lovely” (as my dear Nana used to say). Never mind that said intense industrial sanding has covered the entire house in a thin layer of dust…
4 of the floorboards were a bit manky though so we’ve replaced those with some new pine ones, which stand out gleaming (quite unattractively) in all their newness
So I’m by turns working today whilst also pottering down to the hallway every half-an-hour to squeeze a handful of tea bags and paint the resulting brown slop over the new floorboards, in a misguided effort to get the new boards looking as mature as the old ones.
It’s not really working too well I’d say, but by heck does squeezing tea bags over your hallway floor make you feel good! Highly recommended.
[UPDATE] 12 hours later, it’s 11:20pm, and I’m now on my hand and knees rubbing dirt from the garden into the boards. They look very dirty.
Slow Down Now
17·May·07
If you can slow down when all around you are speeding up, then you’re one of us. Be proud that you are one of us and not one of them. For they are fast, and we are slow. There are those that would urge us to speed. We resist!
We shall not flag or fail. We shall slow down in the office, and on the roads. We shall slow down with growing confidence when all those around us are in a shrill state of hyperactivity (signifying nothing). We shall defend our state of calm, whatever the cost may be. We shall slow down in the fields and in the streets, we shall slow down in the hills, we shall never surrender!
Why? Because if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly. Some are born to slowness—others have it thrust upon them. And still others know that lying in bed with a morning cup of tea is the supreme state for mankind.
From the awesome http://www.slowdownnow.org
Hosting Wufoo forms on your own server
20·Apr·07
Online form-building service Wufoo provide a fantastic set of tools for creating forms quickly and easily. Here’s how to host them on your own server using the Wufoo API.
Introducing the SuperTech iBlinker 2000
17·Apr·07
I have to sit in a dark office with the curtains shut tight all summer because the sun beats right down on my monitor, making it impossible to see the screen.
So it’s with great pleasure, after months of research and development, that I’m proud to present the SuperTech iBlinker 2000, the answer to everyone’s monitor screening needs.
Or you may want to just grab an empty manila folder and Blu-Tack® it to the side.
Mmmm… sunlight…
Forms, the Universe and Everything
15·Apr·07
Creating attractive, functional, accessible, easy-to-use forms can be a pain. There must be an easier way. I think there is.
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