• Nothing drives me crazy like guitar tones. I’m still on an eternal search for the perfect guitar tone— it has to be heavy enough for mindless chugging, but clean and bright enough for fancy riffs.
• I’m straight-edge. Look it up if you don’t know what it means.
• I’m atheist. No, that doesn’t mean I don’t have morals, it just means that I can live a full life without worshipping some zombie or imaginary friend.
• I love offensive jokes. The more cruel and heartless, the more funny they are in my opinion. For example, this blog has been pretty lifeless recently, much like most of Haiti.
• Every month or so I somehow end up at the Apple store. It’s like a regular pilgrimage of some sort.
• I prefer cheeseburgers and soda over just about anything in a five-star restaurant. Like last summer I got to eat fancy rich people food nearly every week, and I found myself wishing for a burger most of the time.
• I’m 5′11″ and 155lbs. And yes, I see the irony in the above statement in relation to this one.
• I enjoy drawing on my arm. Nearly every other day it’s covered in some random doodles.
• I hate ghetto people, and the whole ghetto thing in general. White middle-class all day
• I say “it’s all good” and “but yeah” way too much in real life, along with abusing the word brutal to describe just about any situation.

That’s it for this half-assed post. I’m still writing a real post, so expect that soon. And I updated the about page for all you stalker types out there.

How does this relate to web design? Simple, make your interfaces work quickly, don’t put any lag or delay. On certain websites you have to hover over a dropdown nav button for 3-5 seconds for the dropdown to appear. That’s really annoying, so don’t do it.

I was feeling bored so I was typing in “Obama is a moron,” but before I was able to finish, these helpful suggestions popped up. Just goes to show, if you want to see how people really think, just Google it!

Apple finally announced the iPad today which is great and all, but the best thing about it is the end of all those rumors that have been littering my RSS subscriptions. After looking around the blogs that were lucky enough to get a hands-on, here are my thoughts on the iPad.

The Good

• Starts at only $499, which is a lot more reasonable than the rumored $999.
• Runs all iPhone apps pretty well.
• Powerful CPU. From the presentation everything looked really smooth, thanks to that fancy 1GHz Apple A4 chip.
• Keynote/Pages/Numbers. If I ever get one I’ll be able to do my reports at the very last minute. Score one for procrastinators!
• 10 hour battery life. Even if it is a little exaggerated, that’s not bad at all. Definitely enough to get through a full school day.
• 9.7 inch screen. Think of all the possibilities! Besides the obvious HD pron, apps like Brushes seem a lot more useful. Why with a pogo stylus, it could very well replace a sketchbook for some people.
• Books. With several major publishers, we might start seeing academic textbooks soon.
• Unlocked, with an optional contract-free $29.95 unlimited data plan from AT&T.

The Bad

• It’s $629 for the cheapest model with 3G.
• Some iPhone apps might look screwy or stretched out.
• Still no flash support. With a processor like that and a screen that big, surely Flash wouldn’t be too hard to implement?
• It weighs 1.5 pounds, which is like a textbook.
• iPad? Seriously? Cabel from Panic had a better idea in my opinion— Canvas. The latter sounds like a quality product, whereas the former sounds a little tacky and unoriginal.
• No multitasking? Lame. However this may well be fixed in iPhone OS 4.0.
• No OLED display? If even the Zune HD has one, surely it’s time for Apple to go OLED.
• The design, which looks rushed. Apple basically took the top half of a MacBook, slapped a large multitouch screen in it, and called it the iPad.

The Wifi-only models will ship in 60 days, whereas the 3G models will ship in 90 days. Although some may criticize them for taking so long, it’s a rather wise move in my opinion. The time as well as the release of the iPad SDK will give developers a chance to fix their apps for the iPad, so that when they finally arrive the apps will be ready.

Will it sell? Originally nobody believed in the iPhone either. Heck, I was laughing when I heard about it back in 2007- “No buttons, haha that’ll sell!” Only time will tell, but I’m willing to bet that it’s going to sell pretty well.

Image taken from Apple. Please don’t sue me.

• Use proper English and grammar. This goes a long way in making your response seem more mature and professional.
• Don’t curse or badmouth the sender; you don’t need to stoop to their level.
• Calmly debate whatever the sender dislikes so much, and don’t lose your cool.

These work well for the hatemail that is semi-intelligent. For hatemail that looks like:

Fuck you, you moronic pig-ballsack.

Just reply politely and say something like:

Thank you for your feedback, now talk to me when you can form a sentence without using swear words.

I’m writing this from a prior experience, and the above quote was taken from an actual hatemail. I replied politely and the sender then apologized for his actions. It’s much like in real life— a little bit of courtesy will get you a long way.

People have asked me to “hack” their MySpace layouts for them in the past, and that’s just always annoyed me. Here’s the list of what is and isn’t hacking.

Not Hacking

• Getting into somebody’s Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/AIM account. That’s just the owner’s fault for putting such an easy-to-guess password or leaving the account logged in on a public computer.
• MySpace layouts. It’s all HTML and CSS, not hacking.
• Web Design. Yes, people have told me “wow you’re such a hacker, making websites.” No, just no.
• Getting onto a website like Facebook through somebody else’s proxy server.

Hacking

• Getting into a database in order to get passwords and usernames.
• Getting into bank accounts and wiring money to your Swiss bank account.
• Breaking into a person’s computer via the internet and using it for illegal purposes.

Note that the activities in the latter could get you into serious trouble. That’s what hacking really is, a criminal activity, originally started for fun by geeks, which later turned into a more malicious criminal activity. When you call technically-savvy people “hackers” it’s not really a complement— it’s more of an ignorant insult than anything.

I incorporated a boatload of CSS3 into this design, as promised. The green is gone as well. I feel this design marks a step in a different direction. The previous three or four themes were just evolutions of each other, but this one was a total rewrite from the ground up. It’s still not perfect, and if you guys find any bugs, let me know in the comments.

Anyways, Happy New Year everybody! Enjoy the design— I’m off to slave over my portfolio…

I got a pretty good haul this year: a Lowepro camera/laptop backpack, a set of Microns and Rapidographs, and a new flatiron (don’t ask).