Marbles

I cant believe after 30 years of having them i’ve went and lost my marbles.
Im so destroyed its not funny, i’ve looked everywhere….under the couch in the oven……even in the bed but with no luck.
I NEED MY MARBLES……….they are a variety of colours and are great fun when under the control of a genius………im sooo gutted that they could be wasting away in the gutter with no love….*sob*

Please please someone help me find my marbles, a small reward of an awkward cuddle should be sufficient.

lost laughter

hi,
was wondering if anyone has found my sense of humour..i seem to have lost it…
Many cheers,
L

Lost a dear friend

Her name is juan, short stubby little thing that u can hear from a mile away. I’m surprised i haven’t been able to hear her voice when out looking for her because she’s so loud…and jesus her laugh…i bet u could hear it from the next town. But, i don’t think shes laughing right now, ’cause she’s lost and probably scared out of her tits. Poor thing. Speaking of tits, shes not well-endowned (in the female context), that’s one way you can spot her. But i’m not suggesting you go checking out every girl’s breasts to see if they’re well-endowned. She’s about 5″3/4, likes to wear short shorts. Last time i saw her she was wearing shorts (black ones) and a t-shirt with a dancing monkey on it. Hm… what else…ah yes, shes oriental, knows a little english and likes to ask people ‘how aw wou?’ which if u come across her, means ‘how are you?’. If u get talking with her, she’s really bubbly, CRAZY, but bubbly. If u see this girl/lady wandering around looking lost, please let me know how whereabouts or send her back to me. Thank you : )

Have you lost your Plumber (staten Island)

I have a nice plumber for you.
Clean, neat, reliable and most of all he is cheep.
E.mail me with a phone #.
And i will give you all the info.

Thanks for looking

Threw my room mate’s personal correspondences to curbside recycling

CRAP I threw my room mate’s personal correspondences to curb side recycling a week ago. Is there a chance that it’d not have been processed? Where would they store paper recycling collected from curb side here in Brooklyn?

These are not tips to create nice designs, they’re vital base rules any good design should follow. Look at any good design, including any of mine, it’s likely they will follow most if not all of these rules. They also don’t focus on an overall design, instead simply the concepts and techniques used while designing, and can apply to print as well as web design.

New designers especially will often excentuate various elements of a design, such as corners, gradients and colors to make them stand out - and make people realize they’re there. But what you should be aiming for is subtle design touches that end-users don’t consciously notice, but provide a clean, usable experience.

Design is a creative process, which inherently has no boundaries - so remember these are ground rules and not intended to limit your creativity. But they must be followed, mainly.

1. Keep rounded corners to less than 6px corner radius
Otherwise they just look sleazy. This is a simple one, but incredibly effective, and a vital rule.

2. Keep your gradients simple; almost consciously invisible
The best and most effective gradients are those that people don’t consciously see. In general, keep the difference between the start and end of the gradient to less than 20-30% in lightness, assuming the hue on the start and end is the same. If it’s different, be vary gentle and careful - starting a gradient off in green and ending in blue will almost certainly look crap.

3. Don’t over-use the color pallete
One or two base colors, such as those for the body background and content background, along with a few highlight colors - generally contrasting with the backgrounds their on, and some text colors is enough. The text and highlight colors can be inverts of each other. Adding in some different lightness along the same hue of those colors for certain elements and areas is fine, but when a site starts to have 10 different colors flying around the place it can get messy. Of course this rule applies to design elements and text, not graphics or icons. There are exceptions - for example colorful text and highlights on a black or dark grey background can work well.

4. Don’t over-size body text
11 or 12 is generally fine. Larger text in small amounts is ok for attention-grabbing, but not for anything more than a few sentences.

5. Use no more than 3 fonts
2, ideally. This doesn’t include any fonts in a logo or graphical advertisements or promotions.

6. No animations
Minimize, and ideally eradicate all animations. There are exceptions - certain classy animations, product demos e.t.c. are fine - but little animated dinosaurs or advertisements should be avoided.

7. Borders
Borders around photos or box elements work. But they mustn’t be obvoious. Borders arund photos work best as a mid-tone grey when on white when directly around the graphic or a lighter grey with one or two pixels padding. These colors are not fixed rules, of course, just a general pointer. Borders around boxes or elements should be less than 25% darker than the background of the element they contain, and never lighter, unless the containing element AND the area behind it are darker than the proposed border.

8. Don’t over-elaborate on patterns
Patterns can be a great way to improve a design. But keep it subtle. This is like the gradient thing - make patterns consciously almost un-noticeable, and most of the time they’ll look 10 times better.

9. Don’t put photos next to each other
As in, don’t bunch photos in a line filmstrip-style. If you must, give them a few pixels margin, or give them around 5 pixels and round off the edges (following rule number 1, of course).

10. Create a defined structure
Unless you’re going for the “floating mashup” style, clearly defining the structure of a web page is absolutely vital. This can mean having containers, lines, boxes - anything that separates different parts of the content and defines each section.

So, what is Shazam? It’s a real simple (to use, that is) app that will recognize any music currently playing just by holding up your phones’ microphone up close enough to any music. It just rocks. From the iPhone app, you then get album art, the names of the artist, song and album, and best of all - one-click iTunes purchase!

Again, I know this is nothing new - but like many cool things can slip out of your mind. So if it has, try it out today and be amazed.

If you haven’t already, I suggest trying them out. I honestly found it more of a cool fad-type thing, and aren’t using it any more - but it was certainly cool to see a weeks’ worth of my computer-time.

Mashable has more..

The new code will let you benefit from a bunch of new features now, and in the future, as they won’t be rolling out any new features to sites using the current tracking code. The current code will continue to function for at least a year from the time they release ga.js.

Among the immediate features are a bunch of customization options to the script, such as cross-domain tracking, file download tracking, better e-commerce tracking and better virtual page tracking as well as automatic HTTPS detection, and a smaller, faster loading source file.

All you need to do is change this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    _uacct = "UA-12345-1";
    urchinTracker();
</script>

to:

<script type="text/javascript">
  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
  "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
  "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
   pageTracker._initData();
   pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

Obviously changing the red tracking number to your own.

Google has a more detailed integration guide, with info on how you can customize this code further for different uses here.

Important! Don’t use ga.js and urchin.js on the same page. They won’t work.

Microsoft’s channel 9 has more, including a video with IE’s GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson. Oh yeh, but you need silverlight to watch it. Doh.

Anyway, congrats to the IE team, and keep working hard at it. This is good news for both developers and users (which latest figures show are anything from 30% to 90% of web users).

Photo credit: Ben Crowder

I don’t know anything about this market, but it even sounds good to me. Especially when you consider IBM’s top manufacturing exec has joined them, they have $100m funding and already have orders to keep them at capacity for 18 months.

The company has more info here..

So here are my current hot picks for various budgets, and they’re all good cameras. This isn’t intended to be a big list, more a hand-picked selection of the best.

I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible here, but if you notice any errors, let me know. And if you have any experiences with any of these cameras, or you think there’s something else that deserves to be here, leave a comment..

More Info:
Nikon Coolpix S200: This is a sleek little camera, looks great and takes good photos. It feels good in hand, is ultra-compact very light at 125g (4.4oz) and is easy to use. It has the usual pretty standard 7.1MP & 3x zoom. Nice 2.5inch LCD screen and face tracking.

Canon Digital Rebel XTi: This is a great camera for the amateur photographer. It’s real easy to use, but also has all the advanced features you need to learn and take control of your shots. If it’s in your budget, and you’re looking for a good camera for learning pro photography, I highly recommend this one.

Sony TSC-T2: This is a new camera for 07, and it’s main draw is it’s styling. Other interesting points are it’s 4GB of built-in storage and nice touchscreen which fills almost all of the back face of the camera. 8MP, and the usual facial recognition e.t.c. Be warned, some people don’t like the touchscreens.

Sony DSC T100: A very nice camera, producing good quality photos in a neat little package. It has a nice 3 Inch touchscreen which covers the entire back face. Plenty of extras including video, auto red-eye reduction, in camera re-touching and more. Be warned, some people don’t like the touchscreens.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX33: Slightly more bulky design than some of the other cameras here, but still looks good at only 22mm thick. Nice image quality (as with all the cameras listed here).