Have you ever needed to test a site for IE 6 but didn’t feel like booting up a clunky PC or waiting for browsershots to work? Well this is where IE NetRenderer comes in. It’s kind of like browsershots, but it only deals with IE 5.5 – IE 8. It loads almost instantly, with no waiting time. Here’s what the blog looks like in IE 5.5:
IE 5.5 Render
And in IE 6?
IE 6 Render
Surprisingly, IE 5.5 messes it up less than IE 6. Anyways, happy sunday to you all.
Thanks to NY and its pointless Regents examinations, I have next week off from school. Since the semester ends on Monday, that means there’ll be no homework for the whole week. I have no idea what I’m going to do for an entire week at home, but it’s gonna be awesome.
On the subject of politics, Obama won the right to own and use a Blackberry-esque smartphone. Here’s what it’s going to look like:
Obama's New Phone
It’s the Humvee of smartphones, and is estimated to cost around $3000, give or take a few hundred. It’s manufactured by General Dynamics, the same company that made the F-16.
In other news, when Obama’s media team came to the White House, what they found was a bit shocking…“The team members, who were used to working on Mac systems, found computers with very old versions of Windows installed and in fact not enough computers for use. Laptops were also assigned to only a few people.”Source: Neowin
I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. The SAT is the example that I’ll be using in this rant. The SAT is a terribly pointless examination in my honest opinion, as it does not accurately mesasure one’s intellect. The test only covers English and Math, meaning if your skills and smarts are in another field, you don’t do very well. For example, I can make websites and I know more about computers than your IT specialist. Does that count for anything on the SAT? Of course not. You could be a brilliant artist or programmer, but if you get a less-than perfect SAT score, people and colleges will look down on you. That’s one reason why the SAT fails.
The next problem is the amount of time alloted for each section. It’s completely insane how little time you get. The sadistic people who thought up the SAT gave about 20 minutes (give or take 5 minutes depending on which section) per section. It’s simply not enough time to do anything. Now if they gave 40 minutes per section, I’m sure people would get much higher scores. I mean, where in life will you need to calculate a complex equation involving square roots in less than a minute?!
The only people who get really high scores (2000 +) on the SAT are either people who: A) Study for 3-4 years, memorizing everything by heart or B) People who can afford those insanely expensive SAT tutors. It’s not fair for the rest of us slackers.
On a different topic, web design education is way outdated in most schools. While I’m lucky that my school doesn’t teach design with tables anymore, a lot of other schools still do. Some even go as far as teaching Micrsosoft Frontpage. Bleh. The main word in web design class is “Dreamweaver.” It’s a truly dreadful program that is entirely useless and produces horrific amounts of junk if you use the design view. Even though Adobe keeps making improvements to Dreamweaver, the quality of the generated code will never even come close to what is possible with hand-coding.
I have a whole week off from school next week, so I might just get something done. Athough I’m kind of unsure about the 3Cogs layout… at this point I’m thinking of scrapping the design altogether and starting from scratch.
Obama was sworn into office today at around noon. I watched the inauguration ceremony at school, at least until the crappy Dell broadcasting it crashed. The brainless IT “specialists” couldn’t fix it all…
With Obama’s new reign, the whitehouse.gov website has been completely redone. I have to say, it’s looking pretty good. Hopefully, all the other icky government websites will get a makeover. Out with the old, in with the new.
On the topic of new websites, the new design has arrived. It’s completely borked in IE, but it looks good in other standards-compliant browsers. And now (for real this time) back to working on 3Cogs.
Obama’s inauguration is tomorrow, and it’s going to be a pretty historical event. My school’s actually going to stream the entire speech through the PA system.
In other news, I’ve finished the design for the blog. Time to integrate it into WordPress. Hopefully, I’ll finish this late tonight or early tomorrow. Here’s a mockup of what it should look like when finished:
DZine-Studios 7.5
7.5 already? Wow. I’ll probably be up to 38.0 by 2010…
Steve Jobs, the beloved Apple CEO, is taking a temporary leave, to recover from his undisclosed health condition. Naturally, Apple stocks fell as soon as this was announced. Let’s hope Steve recovers quickly!
I’ve also gotten my DSLR back, after loaning it for about a year. Feels good to have it back, as my crappy little point-and-shoot camera was driving me nuts with its terrible quality. You might even see a few pictures here and there 
Now for the rant(s). If it seems like a lot, it’s because I have multiple things to discuss. Whenever I have an idea or topic to write about, I quickly whip out my iPod Touch and jot down a few words.
The first victim is name-brand clothing. Now I’m not talking about ordinary, affordable brand names like Nike, DKNY, and such. I’m talking about the brand names that charge several hundred (or thousand) for their bargain-bin quality garbage. Gucci is an example. How can you justify paying $1000 for a damn handbag?! How can you sleep at night, knowing you paid $500 for those jeans? It’s all a waste of money, as super-expensive clothes wear out just as quickly as cheapo clothes. It’s just one of those irrevocable stupidities in society today.
The next thing is something from Apple. While I’m usually not one to criticize Apple, their default headphones are quite terrible. First off, they’re terribly uncomfortable, and they don’t last very long at all. I recently started using the Apple headphones that came with my iPod Touch. They lasted me about 3 weeks before falling apart. I thought I solved the problem by super-gluing the parts together, but then the right earbud stopped working completely. Even cheap $5 headphones from your local convenience store would probably last longer.
I’ve also noticed more and more security cameras in public lately. A lot of the NYC public buses are practically covered in security cameras, and they’re in plain sight. It’s getting closer and closer to “1984.”
Another annoyance is the standard font requirement in schools and colleges. There are always those teachers who whine about 1 standard font, usually Times New Roman. I once used Georgia, a much nicer serif font, and I actually lost points for not using Times New Roman. Although I should be grateful that none of my teachers are cruel enough to require Comic Sans.
Also, if any of you web designers want a really good laugh, go to the following two links: Class A and Class B. Those are the websites that the kids in the web design class made. I did the “school” website in Class A, just so you know.