And I don’t care. Officially. I’ve taken precedent (kind of) from Mike Davidson, and am purposefully leaving my site erroneous(in some eyes). Just to let everyone know, I’ll be including a link in the footer to this article. That’s right, each and every page will announce that my site doesn’t play well with others… and by “others” I mean specifically Microsoft Internet Expolorer. I hearby officially end my support for IE until some things change.

More details when I have time to finish this post.

If it weren’t for the presence of the best grocery store ever, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I would visit Knoxville’s Turkey Creek shopping district in a year. Sadly, as it is I find myself visiting at least once a week. If you aren’t familiar with Turkey Creek, there is probably a similar place somewhere in your nearest metropolitan area. It is, for all intents and purposes a shopping mall without the convenience of a mall. It is a miniature city unto itself, complete with the sprawl. The whole area, which must be around 50 acres to my knowledge contains but one crosswalk, thus forcing the shopper to get in their car and drive from shop to shop, rather than walking. This type of development is a sad trend I have noticed in just about every sizable city I have visited. For added enjoyment, all this driving also increases the amount of time spent waiting in traffic, which if you know me is one of my least favorite past-times ever. But I digress…

I ventured out to Turkey Creek this evening (rather than this morning) to test a theory. There was a UT Football game tonight, and banking on my experience with the campus-area ghost-town phenomenon during games I decided to do my shopping during this window. The only waiting I had to do the entire trip was at traffic lights (up at the light). I now know when I will do my shopping on game-days from this point forward. I have never been so glad that I bleed red rather than orange.

—d

Is it just me, or is it HOT outside? Don’t answer that. YES. It is hot. Read the rest of this post »

It is a web designer’s duty to communicate as clearly, accessibly and articulately as possible. I will admit, as the Internet has become ever-pervasive into our daily lives designers are working harder than ever to make this dissemination of information as digestible as possible, and for the most part on most “credible” sites one visits are mostly successful in this venture. It is on occasion that I happen upon something that makes me sit back and wonder what was going through the minds of the people that created what I am looking at. Case in point: go to any number of retailers online and make a purchase. When prompted to enter your credit card information, I give it a 50/50 chance that in the area concerning the expiration date, selecting the month requires going through not a list of numbers, but of the actual names of the months. I don’t understand this practice. I have never seen “August 200x” on a credit card, debit card, ATM card, any kind of card. I have found myself actually counting on my fingers to arrive at the correct month. Why? Not only does it take more time to construct a form with the names of months vs. the numbers, but it takes up more real-estate on the page making it not only inconvenient in the usage but also in the execution.

I propose this: all web designers, developers, back-end coders PLEASE, do not use the name of the month in the expiration date field. Use the numbers instead. It is faster, easier to design around, and an easier experience for your audience.

-d

This pretty much hits the nail on the head with respect to my relationship to the top-40 music industry. Thank you, Jamie Kilstien for putting it not-quite-so eloquently.

A side note, if you ever wondered if it would be weird if you spontaneously cycled between three sets of clothing while talking, the answer is yes (see video).
Read the rest of this post »

Something is very wrong with me. For the past few days, I have had trouble sleeping, my eyes have hurt, my throat sore and inflamed, a chronic sneeze and nagging headaches. My first suspicion was that I had come down with some kind of bug, but as I noticed small flowers starting to shoot up out of the ground and small buds forming on the trees around me the situation be came eerily clear; I have been suffering from my seasonal allergies… almost two months to the day from the first day of spring. This is very unsettling, especially when this unusually long warm spell ends and all of this spring life that is appearing freezes and dies. On the other hand, if the weather continues to be warm the way it has, we could have plagues of insects to deal with. This is indeed troubling to me.

Apparently, this strange weather is not localized anywhere, but more of a global phenomena. Some scientists point to the El Niño effect, but others are citing global warming, one of the more polarizing buzz words there is. Whether this is an isolated, normal weather pattern or the terrible Global Warming monster’s first wide-reaching and highly-noticible stompings will only be known (and accepted) with time. One thing is certain, I won’t be buying a Snowboard like I was planning to this season.

Article Links:
On point : Freaky Wonderland
The Weather Outside is Frightful - washingtonpost.com

—d