saulrosenbaum.com / 2007 / November

My dear friend Dawn pointed me to this excellent Chris Cornell cover of a classic MJ song, it’s certainly worthy of a few listens, I don’t recall him sounding this good in Soundgarden.

Yet another song that have been significant in my life.

Not much I can say about this song other than it reminds me of my wife. I like the Dire Straits version best, but Matt Nathanson does a great job performing this live.

I want to start by saying that I seldom use Photoshop for web production, I may use it for some visualization and image editing but as a general rule, everything ends up in Fireworks for any layout or slice and dice that may need to happen. Yesterday in what I can only describe as a momentary loss of sanity, I cranked out a few dozen graphics for a promotional blog from Photoshop - all jpegs, all designed to seamlessly fade into the blogs blue background - took me 3 tries - why? - because Adobe in it’s infinite wisdom has ‘include icc profile’ on by default, and I absolutely missed that fact TWICE – if you’re unaware of this setting, it’s a color profile that attempts to assure you get consistent color representation across devices - and it works swimmingly as long as all the software honors ICC profiles - not surprisingly IE and Firefox on a PC don’t, which is why I never use embedded ICC profiles KNOWINGLY. So aggravating..

I recently just finished a project that included a day-by-day itinerary, and an hour-by-hour speakers schedule, I really wanted to highlight the current days events, and emphasis the current speakers bio - not a daunting task by any means - but always looking to skin the cat differently, I used a single line of php, and a two generated css selectors.

here’s an item from the event list

<ol id="3070812">
<li>Effective Sales via email</li>
<li>Time: 12pm</li>
<li>Date: March 7th, 2008</li>
<li>Location: Green Room Loungue</li>
</ol>
Read More »

I like Math, I like Broccoli and I like Cauliflower - I think the odds are high that I’d like Romanesco broccoli aka fractal broccoli, although I do realize that the mathematical appearance has little to do with it’s taste.

To the somewhat rude lady @ the WAWA on Bristol road who feels her ability to spawn gives her some kind of built in preferential parking permit- I’m not CHILD -LESS, I’m CHILD -FREE, which like sugarFREE, fatFREE, and ‘FREE like in Beer’ - is a choice, not an affliction, so enjoy your screaming, fussing, ugly child for the next 18 years or so, oh and NICE parenting, locking your infant in the car while you go buy cigarettes and chocolate milk is inspired.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE:

if you enjoy the acerbic nature of THIS post, you really must read some of my vintage content

I read about Definr yesterday on DownloadSquad.com, Definr is a web 2.0 online dictionary - it’s fast, it’s minimal, it has autocomplete — and it works - took me about 30 seconds to determine that I can get a definition equally as fast from definr, as I can from the mac dictionary (since I almost always have a browser open anyway) - but to cut my search time down even further I showed it some launchbar love - just add the search template
'http://www.definr.com/*'
and your done.

I’d love to see an API for definr - it seems to have excellent speed, and I do love API’s.

— EDIT —

In order to give other online dictionaries equal time, don’t miss the Urban Dictionary, a handy (and hilarious) community driven dictionary - that features slang to english - perfect for translating that top 40 rap track (note: The Urban Dictionary is generally not safe for work).

It’s launchbar search template would be:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=*

Maybe it’s part of our genetic code, or more likely it’s biological,  but did you ever wonder why certain combinations of hair color, body type and complexion appeals to us, while other, don’t - I find the whole topic fascinating. IMHO men are generally honest to their ‘types’, slaves to our desires anyway - being drawn to a specific type, is just another example of our Darwinian past, women seem to take a bit longer to give in to their ‘types’, but I believe eventually science wins out.

I Know My Type

• Darker Hair
• Shorter rather than taller
• Fair skinned
• 4 Notable folks of my type: Rose McGowan, Lucy Lui, Pauley Perrette (who I believe is naturally a blonde), Lauren Ambrose

I don’t want to suggest that anyone pick a partner based purely on appearance, but appearance is certainly part of what sparks the initial contact. As for what keeps couples together past the initial contact, that’s a different post entirely.

I’m always amazed when I get Photoshop files from colleagues or clients that don’t use layer effects or styles, combined with vector shapes - resolution independence is somewhat achievable, and they make automation simple, simple, simple.

IMHO Everyone should have a solid (and flexible) button-style in their toolbox, here’s one of mine - changing the color is as simple as changing the vector shapes color, enjoy.

• [download#6#nohits]

Years ago, I worked with cool guys (Brad, Camille & Dave) in an equally cool office (aka - THE CAVE black ceilings, dark forest green walls, glass and chrome furniture) - not that you’d ever see any of it because the lights where generally off, and like quality mushrooms we lived in the dark. The web was a new place, websites where nothing more than pretty clickable things you looked at in IE or Netscape - and client expectation was generally low.

It just started getting cold here, for some reason I always get nostalgic when it gets cold.

Camille this one is for you.