I had a lot of fun doing this redesign. I worked on it in the background throughout the year, when I wanted to. It’s not a huge change in design–the biggest change is under the hood. It’s a lot easier for Mac to manage his site on his own, now that it’s run on Wordpress.

Check it out, and let him know what you think of the new Sharks logo.

As you may know, I play WoW and frequent wowhead.com, a popular WoW database. Currently, the ads look quite familiar.

So easy, even a ______ can use it.

I missed the first CSS Off, but I was happy to take part in the second contest over the weekend. CSS Off is a contest where you are provided a Photoshop or Fireworks mockup of a design for a fictional website, and you then have to code it up to look as close as you can to the design. Not only that, but your code will be scrutinized against web standards. Not only that, but all within 24 hours. This time around, the fake-website we were supposed to code looked like this:

Right at 10pm on Friday, I downloaded the psd and got to work. Thanks Phil and Brandon for keeping me company through the night. I got my 3 hours of sleep and worked on it on and off right up until an hour before the deadline. I also should say thanks to Chesney and Caleb for putting up with me and my obsession that day. It was hard for my perfectionist self to let go and finally submit it, but at 9:15 pm, it was as done as it was going to get, and I sent it in.

It was a challenge, but a fun one. I learned a lot in those 24 hours. If any web geeks out there are interested, this is my finished entry.

• It was harder than it looked. When I first looked at the design, I didn’t think it would take me more than a few hours to finish. I was wrong. CSS Off did a good job in creating a design that made you really think about how to best lay out the structures and which tags to use.
• I don’t know javascript very well. A lot of the time was taken up learning some simple javascript.
• The death of IE 6 can’t come fast enough for me. I really, really hope that people upgrade to Windows Vista just for the reason that it that means they would get off IE 6 and start using IE 7.

We’ll see the results of the contest in a couple weeks. Maybe, just maybe, it will go as well as the last contest I entered in…

The new Sharks logo has been leaked before it’s official announcement (thanks for the link, Andrew). I like it. They didn’t do a radical redesign, and it definitely pays homage to the original. I don’t know if people were looking for something totally different though. …Figures. I finally get a Sharks jersey and they change the logo the very next year.

I got up at 5 this morning to be ready for the FileMaker 9 product launch. Several months of hard work by the entire organization led to the best-selling launch to date (and it’s only 2:30!). For my part, even though it wasn’t a site redesign (I wish), I probably made a thousand or two changes to the website. It was a nice chance to clean up some of the existing pages, both visually and code-wise. Legacy code is not pretty.

Now for some sleep.

What I would look like as a citizen of Springfield. Create your own.

More than meets the eye, indeed. I was so oooh’d and awe’d by the special effects that I came out of the movie wondering how good the actual movie was. (Aaron assured me it was pretty good) It was some of the most impressive CG in a movie that I have seen yet. I have a very (very, very) tiny slice of experience in animating something, so even the transformations, which were probably the easier sequences in the movie, just had me in awe of technical feat these guys have pulled off in this film. The battle sequences were spectacular. Everyone walked out with a big grin on their faces. Maybe it was because they finally saw this battle on the big screen like this.

The movie’s plot was far-fetched…but it had to be in order to bring the Transformers to earth in at least a semi-believable story. The good thing is that you don’t need to be a fan of the Transformers cartoon of the 80’s in order enjoy the movie. But for the fans, there were some nice touches: Optimus’ voice is done by the same Peter Cullen of the cartoon (they couldn’t have done this movie without him) and there were a few familiar lines.

In short, a good summer movie filled with crazy robots beating up on each other. What more could you want from Transformers?

As I got in my 4Runner to drive home from the movie theater, I really wanted it to Transform…

Nobody’s going to spend $600 on a phone! Nobody.