New Years Resolutions for 2006

December 30th, 2005

As 2005 draws to a close, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t need to lose weight or quit smoking, and even if I did—those wouldn’t be very interesting for you to read about. What would be interesting—and by interesting, I also mean challenging—is to resolve to complete a number of different creative projects and post about them here on my blog.

Creative Project Resolutions

  1. Comic
    After having worked with so many comic artists, been involved in a comic collective, helped start a comic printing company, and contributed to a book on comics, it’s somewhat surprising that I’ve never created one of my own.
  2. Design
    Redesign this site. Yes, this is an inevitable one…
  3. Game
    Over the last year I’ve been doing a lot of reading about game design theory, and working on some ideas for what I think would make a fun board-game. This year I’m going to turn those ideas into a finished game and publish it.
  4. Music
    Learn to play some type of musical instrument. The Ukelele is looking like a real contender here.
  5. Painting
    At least 2 paintings I feel good enough about to put in frames.
  6. Software
    It’s been a while since I’ve done much coding, so in 2006 I’m going to make sure I produce at least one interesting script, plugin, extension, or widget.
  7. Video
    It’s been much too long since I shot and edited any video. This year I’m going to finish a 5 minute creative video and submit it to some type of competition or festival.
  8. Writing
    Over the next year I’m going to try and improve the quality, quantity and frequency of my writing—both for this website and for other projects—whether they’re technical articles, creative writing, or contributions to collaborative projects.

Let’s see how well I can keep these resolutions. Wish me luck!

See some other people’s .

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Posted in designmeme | 4 Comments »

Traditional Christmas Carrot Pudding

December 19th, 2005

This is my wife Catherine’s recipe for Christmas Pudding. Her grandmother gave it to her, and it’s been in her family for at least 100 years. She was looking for Christmas recipes online tonight and couldn’t find very many for Christmas Pudding. We thought it would be a nice thing to make available for people wanting to make a traditional holiday dessert.

Ingredients

1 cup Brown Sugar
1 cup Raisins
1 cup Dates
1 cup Currants
1 cup Margarine* (scant — just under 1 cup)
1 cup Shredded Carrot
1 cup Grated Potato
1 1/4 cups Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 pinch Salt

* Traditionally Suet would have been used instead of Margarine

Directions

  1. Mix all the ingredients together in large bowl
  2. Cover the bowl with tinfoil
  3. Steam for 3 hours**

** To steam the pudding, you can use a large pot with a small amount of water in the bottom. We use an inverted pyrex bowl in the bottom of the pot to keep the bowl with the pudding above the level of the water. Make sure you continue to carefully add small amounts of water to the pot so that it doesn’t boil dry.

Serve with a Brown Sugar Sauce or Custard. Merry Christmas!

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Top 5 Firefox Extensions for Web Designers

December 15th, 2005

One of the best features of Firefox is that it can be expanded with a wide range of optional extensions. There are extensions to help with blogging, privacy, working with RSS files, or just having fun. Here’s my list of the 5 extensions I find most useful when doing web design work:

  1. Web Developer
    Adds a menu and toolbar with many useful tools. Simply being able to open the CSS of a page for live editing makes it essential any web designer or developer. This extension is like an entire toolbox of extensions, and provides numerous useful features.
  2. GreaseMonkey
    Greasemonkey’s user scripts let you customize any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction. Hundreds of user scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites are available and very easy to install.
  3. del.icio.us
    This extension integrates del.icio.us with Firefox. Del.icio.us is an excellent way to find new tips, tutorials and resources—which are important for any web designer or developer.
  4. Aardvark
    When activated, this extension outlines and provides class or id names for any element under the cursor. You can then choose to remove or isolate specific elements on a page. The most useful feature is being able to quickly view the source code of the selected element.
  5. Colorzilla
    Adds an advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program.

If you haven’t tried it already— Firefox is free, easy to use, and a relatively small download.

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Posted in tools, web design | 27 Comments »

Current Events

December 14th, 2005

Ali G — no not him, this guy—was one of the artists involved in yesterday’s identity theft fiasco. The thieves were trying to pass off his comic as their own creation—but they were just linking to the image files on his server. After looking at his website stats Ali realize something weird was going on and mentioned it to DJ Coffman, who in turn let the rest of us know about it. Today’s HousD comic makes light of the entire strange incident.

My brother Kevin Robertson has also started posting comics. He’s added them to his blog and they’re about whatever happens to be going on in current events. The first two involve Cronulla and the Sydney Race Riots riots and Brokeback Mountain — so it’s probably safe to say he’s going to cover a lot of different things. I lent him my copy of Webcomics : Tools and Techniques for Digital Cartooning a couple of weeks ago and have been giving him some tips on running his blog, so it’s great to see his stuff online so soon.

And while I’m posting about current events, I should mention that the contact form has once again returned to the site. If you were wondering how to email me, now you can.

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Posted in designmeme | 7 Comments »

Doppleganger Gang

December 13th, 2005

I’m not sure if this is some sort of strange sub-culture that I’m unaware of—but I just don’t understand why a group of kids would create websites and message boards where they make-believe that they’re myself and some of my friends. I mean, while it’s true that my life is filled with movie premieres and trips to Monte Carlo to play celebrity poker games, and it’s reasonable to expect people would want to day dream they’re doing that too, these kids wouldn’t know any of that. All they know about me is that I’m a web designer, living in Ontario, and I’ve written some articles on CSS.

Instead of pretending to be civil war soldiers or medieval knights, they’ve got some strange type of web designer / font creator / cartoonist / digital artist reenactment group. Fortunately that kind of “fun” goes against the terms of use of most web hosting companies, and those sites are soon shut down.

But the question remains—why would people do this? While it might not be a realistic goal to one day become a movie star or celebrity poker champion like me, they could easily spend the time they’ve wasted on make believing they’re a web designer or cartoonist—to actually become one. Now that I think of it my friends and I have all written articles that would help people do that too.

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Konfabulator rebranded as Yahoo! Widgets

December 12th, 2005

Today Konfabulator prompted me to upgrade to the latest version and I was somewhat surprised to see it rebranded as Yahoo! Widget Engine. I’ve been using Konfabulator for a while now to put both a small picture frame on my desktop with photos of my family, as well as a handy controller for iTunes. I’ve also been using the Weather and RSS news channels in the Conpose Heads up Display you get by hitting ‘F8’.

Konfabulator Yahoo! Widgets are one of those applications I forget that I use everyday — they’re always there, but I don’t think about them as seperate from the OS itself. It’s almost enough to make me sign up for some of Yahoo’s other services to take greater advantage of the integration they’re claiming in this version… but I think I’ll wait on that for a bit. I’m very happy with Gmail and don’t feel like starting another account for web based email at the moment.

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Posted in tools | 3 Comments »