070308 Elsewhere: On Iraq Wars, and then some

08Mar07

4 years after invasion, many Iraqis look back with longing. Frightening quote:

“We envy the people who die in one piece now,”

Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 – 6/21/03).

Iraq: ‘The Greatest Strategic Disaster in American History’.

Who Will Stop The Next War?

Unrelated links below:
42 Reasons Normal People Can Switch to Macs.

Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown. Spoiler: Vista loses (!).

Emotions Dominate Decision-Making.

A Guide to OS X Web Browsers.

Web 2.0 name generator.

A Guide to OS X Web Browsers.

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070307 Elsewhere: Procrastination Battle Edition

07Mar07

I’m guilty for procrastinating. And I hate that! The time I waste procrastinating is the time I don’t spend with people I care/books I want to read/deeds I’d rather be doing. But it’s very hard to fight!

First, for those in the dark, here’s the Wikipedia entry on procrastination.

The Causes of Procrastination And How To Conquer Them

Ultimate Procrastination Guide.

Procrastination hack: “(10+2)*5”.

Conscious Procrastination.

Kick procrastination’s ass: Run a dash.

Design your own Anti-Procrastination Plan.

My Procrastination Hacks

Pro-Active Steps to Prevent Procrastination.

Procrascipline.

5 ways of breaking the procrastination habit.

Timeboxing.

The 50-30-20 rule.

Productivity Tip #2: ButterFly Stroke Productivity.

GTD: 2006.48: rediscovering focus.

Unrelated links below:

Google Desktop 5 beta.

Supertask, a task occurring within a finite interval of time involving infinitely many steps (subtasks).

Thinking about the way your muscles work could physically boost your strength, research suggests.

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9 Funny Things that Contribute in Increasing My Productivity

06Mar07

Okay, some of these might not be thatfunny, but that’s fine with me.

1. Tidying up my bed. Gives me a positive sense of accomplishment, quick and easy.
2. Exercising before work. Simple sit-up, push-up, light exercises like that. Gets my engines ready.
3. Combing my hair. I have a rather long, chaotic hair. Getting them combed literally keeps my head light.
4. Ensuring myself I smell okay (may or may not involve bath).
5. Not being too full and/or hungry.
6. Resting often (I’m doing the 30-10 method, i.e.: 30 mins of work and 10 mins of reward times for resting/gaming etc.).
7. Logging off Gaim. Instant-messaging is the mother of all distraction!
8. Listening to songs that I listened during succesful/happy times. I played Alter Bridge’s Broken Wing a lot while finishing a rather complicated application a few months ago, and listening to it now echoes that sense of victory back into my mind.
9. Talking to my mom about whatever. Having someone who is just plain nice and who won’t bother you about deadlines/revisions/work definitely helps a lot!

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070306 Elsewhere

06Mar07

Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage. I do realize the irony that my linking to their page doesn’t help them saving bandwidth usage.

America — the end of an empire.

Top 10 most beautiful blog designs.

List of 100 oldest, currently registered, domain names. The oldest one is registered the day I was born! Coolness.

List of all the crazy ideas people have for their 404 page.

Archspace. Online game I’m into these days.

Five Essential Plugins You Shouldn’t WordPress Without. The URL says six, but it’s actually five.

Big GTD Index. It’s like a world map, but for GTD.

Top 10 SEO mistakes and what to do to correct it.

I’m learning GTD from Zen Habits. My first attempt is by doing the anti-procrastination, 30-10 method. Been working quite well right now.

Is Israel falling apart? Quite possibly, I should say.

Why IT sucks. Enlightenment.

Changing the web at (age) 21. Kinda makes me think.

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My big list of web design resources

04Mar07

These are some of the websites that I’ve used to aid me in designing websites. This list will be updated frequently.

Magazines, Knowledge Bases, General Tools

1. A List Apart. Obviously.
2. Digital Web.
3. Particletree.
4. Web Accessibility Tools Consortium.
5. Think Vitamin.
6. Secrets of Self Taught Web Developers: 115 Resources to Help You Develop on the Web. (Just don’t leave yet, okay.)
7. W3Schools Online Web Tutorial.
8. CSS resources from Max Design.
9. Useful Cheatsheets on many different topics (including xHTML, CSS, JavaScript).

Layout and Design Samples

1. Open Web Design.
2. CSS Tinderbox: Open Source Design Templates.
3. Layout-o-Matic.

Typography

1. Typetester. Online screen type tester.
2. The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. A must read.
3. Charles Hedric’s Typography resource.
4. Accessible Web Typography – an introduction for web designers.
5. All about fonts for captions and subtitles.
6. em calculator.

Color

1. Color Schemer, free color scheme sharing website.
2. Adobe’s Kuler.
3. Colour Contrast Analyser.
4. Colour Lovers.
5. Color Jack: Sphere.
6. A crash course in color theory.

Inspiration & Galleries

1. CSS Zen Garden.
2. CSS Gallery.
3. Stylegala.
4. Fuzzy Future’s50 sources for web design inspiration

Icon

1. Frequently updated list of free icons.
2. @icon sushi, icon converter.

Validation & Testing

1. HTML validator.
2. CSS Validator.
3. Total Validator’s service. HTML validation, accessibility, various browsers screenshot generation, spell-checking, broken-link check, and then some. Highly recommended!
4. Safari test at Browsrcamp.

Forms

1. Smashing Magazine’s list of CSS based forms resources.

Flash

1. sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. Replace any text with a swf replacement in any font-face you want.
2. swfIR: swf Image Replacement.

The Sages

1. Jeffrey Zeldman.
2. Eric Meyer.
3. Jason Santa Maria.
4. Eric Meyer.
5. Dave Shea.
6. Dan Cederholm.

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