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Showing posts from July, 2007

On The Last Day Of Steady Employment

It's been raining for the last two days, and the glorious city of New Your smells like sewage and dog pee. And it's hot. The Internet connection in the office is very flickery, which really screws up my writing flow, but it feels like the events of these few days somehow should be documented or at least reflected upon. So... My desk is sterile with the exception of a few things I still plan on using today: headphones, Palm, half-pack of chewing gum and an antique* Maxwell House coffee mug. My ailing Windows box is cleaned up of all the stuff I kept in it during almost two years I had it. My coworkers are conspiring to take me out to lunch (I, of course, already bought one in the morning, because initially the gathering was supposed to be a short run for a beer after work). Darn. Will have to take it home along with the antique mug. The office of congressman just called. Apparently, my case is not showing up anymore anywhere in both organizations, so I have to re-file. I don

Writing A Job Description For Myself

It is kind of a fun assignment: to write your own job description. Nevertheless, worth trying... OK, soooo... after I leave this job, you, guys, are going to be looking for a Visual Web Designer/Front-End Web Developer with a minimum (well, and maximum, too) of B(F)A, schooled in both conventional (hard copy) as well as fluid layout (web) composition, with experience in image editing, web image optimization, typography, with strong hand-coding (no WYSIWYG!) skill set (XHTML/DHTML, CSS, client-side JavaScript) and basic understanding of .NET developing environment. The above professional should be aware of the latest Web design trends and principles, and be able to create standard-compliant cross-browser and cross-platform HTML structures and be able to (err... to see them being butchered by the developer team without spiraling down into a fit? no, not that...) oversee and ensure proper implementation of the aforementioned designs, as well as being able to maintain and troubleshoot (i.e

On IE7 Upgrade

Since I really have nothing to loose at work, where I am spending my last two weeks (I gave a notice on Monday), I have upgraded to IE7. After that I have spent two hours, trying to figure out, why my website makes IE7 crash. I finally did, but damn, that was entertaining. It looks like document.open('text/html','replace') needed to loose the replace argument, document.writeln() can not be used for writing links to external scripts, the address bar is not removable anymore, and window.resizeTo() doesn't want to work (that pretty much disables all my portfolio galleries). Lovely. What was even more annoying, is that IE would work with .html files, if they were opened locally, but crash, when opening the exact same files from the server. So much for the upgrade. All other imaginable browsers do display my site correctly, with little or no problems. Even Opera. P.S. During the fixing fit, I removed the reflection.js script---which wasn't mine anyway, I was jus

"Dude, you need a helmet..."

I think, I've found a place, where I can hang out for a while. Roth's Steakhouse on the corner of West 93rd and Columbus has jam sessions on every Friday night from 10 pm to 1 am (allegedly, that is, the real time was from 10:30 to 2, and the jam part started around midnight), starting with a set, played by hosts, as usual. First set was actually very good, nicely and tastefully played by a minimalistic piano trio (the drummer had only a snare, a kick drum, a hi-hat and a ride cymbal), the only inconvenience was the location of the stage, which can't be really observed from the bar, so I had to stand for an hour in order to see the musicians: the drummer, the bass player, whose instrument looked like it survived a small hurricane, but was a time or two used as a floating device, and the pianist, working on the weathered upright, seemingly held together by the wall, it was leaning against, and some duct tape. The repertoire was diverse enough to get my hopes up, just a righ

An iMovie bug AGAIN

After several month of not making any movies, I am trying a new project. Right of the start something is wrong, freshly imported unedited line of clips is not being played correctly in iMovie preview window - video stops in about 30sec or so, while audio goes on. If I switch to full screen, it gives me another 10sec of video, then it stops there, too, and nothing brings frozen video back to life. After restarting the app, everything repeats. Needless to say it's impossible to edit. It also does it with the older projects, which used to work just fine. Here is what I've done so far: 1. Repaired permissions on startup disk and checked it for errors. 2. Repaired external disk, where the project resides (even tried to move the project to internal disk with no avail - same results), and where I have 80GB of free space. 3. Replaced external disk's directory, using DiskWarrior. 4. Deleted iMovie preferences file. 5. Removed all third-party plug-ins I had. Nothing works. QuickTime