Valhalla Island

Choosing punishment over probation is something I’ll never understand. I was caught speeding a few years ago and was given the option of a year probation with double the fine and suspension if I break the law or a 3 month license suspension. For me the decision was an obvious one - don’t break the law again and receive no punishment. Continue reading →

Group assignments are something I really dislike. They’re made worse when most of the people at university don’t seem to want to be there. They’re made worse when your group members expertise extends to basic Flash development and nothing else. They’re made worse when the majority of your group is foreign and barely speak English let alone understand it. Continue reading →

Doing a little design today I noticed something about two common fonts. Georgia and Verdana never look good at the same size, Verdana looks good small while Georgia doesn’t, the bigger they get the better Georgia looks and the worse Verdana gets. Here’s a little demo Continue reading →

When I first laid eyes on CSSEdit it looked somewhat like a Dreamweaver specifically for CSS. There’s a UI element for every CSS property. If you wanted to you could create an entire stylesheet simply by filling out forms and it’d only take you about 10 times as long as it would if you knew most of the CSS properties like you should. That properties panel can be turned off, so I continued. Continue reading →

Heroes sucks. It’s slow, poorly acted, poorly scripted, stereotyped, there’s holes in the story line and there’s just too many story lines. I watched about 15 episodes back to back, ad-less and still had trouble with how slow the show progressed. I’m sure this partly due to there being 100 separate stories so they can only spend 3 minutes per episode on any one story. Continue reading →

It’s getting very close to the time when Panic release their new application - Coda. I predict it will be found here. Since reading something about a new app from Panic on Friday, I was excited! Panic’s applications have beautiful user interfaces, Transmit is the best FTP client ever made and I use Candy Bar all the time for changing crap icons. Even more enticing was the hint that it’s for people that make websites. Continue reading →

This is the kind of thing that bothers me daily. Continue reading →

I spent all day trying to make a realistic sentence with the words - they’re, their and there in sequence. I failed. What a waste of a day.

I really don’t mean to pick on Andy Budd, his article 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer just happens to be the latest of this type I’ve come across. This type are those that offer “<n> habits of the successful <professional>” that are usually widely linked and dugg but are all filled with the same generic, obvious advice like “manage your time”.

So here’s my 7 Habits of a Highly Successful Freelance Web Designer. Continue reading →

I try to spend about 40 to 50% of my time improving and the rest actually working. Depending on what’s going on at the time, that number can fluctuate wildly. Improving includes streamlining workflow, looking for applications that may suit my needs more closely or save me time, learning new things, getting organised, creating template files, there’s a lot to it. Continue reading →

This morning I got a shock, spam that wasn’t a huge, distorted, unreadable pile of shit. Not that I want to read spam, endorse it in any way or think it should be sent at all, this certain piece actually made me think twice before marking it as spam.

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Everyone said such great things and maybe I turned it off before it got good, if that’s the case they were taking their time, I watched for an hour and a half. There was one benefit to watching it as long as I did - I now know just how many times I can watch a Spartan’s spear pierce a Persian’s chest before becoming bored. That number is around 650 times. Continue reading →

I had something really good to post about, something I really wanted to post about. But I’m not, because of my relationship with things outside of this blog. It’s really been quite a battle to decided whether or not to.

Welcome to the new JimWhimpey.com, now with added, self-imposed censorship!

Before I jump into things I just want to mention how horribly crippled the trial of NewsFire is. Crippled trials are useless. I trial software and if by the time it expires I can’t live without it, I will buy it. I will never buy NewsFire.

That unpleasantness out of the way, on to the good stuff. Continue reading →

It’s officially called BarCamp Queensland but I think it should be BarCamp Brisbane or BarCamp Gold Coast, where ever the majority of attendees are, I’d go to either. Anyway, more on that later, I’d love a BarCamp . I’ve said before that we never get conferences here and I have an opportunity to help get this one off the ground. So I’ve made some logos, some as in two… and the only difference is colour. Continue reading →

My family subscribes to the Weekend Australian newspaper. In this paper comes a magazine called… The Weekend Australian Magazine. Compared to the rest of the WA it’s a light-hearted and modern read and I quite enjoy it. In it is a section called Modern Dilemma where they take a reader’s scenario, then three ‘experts’ help them come to a conclusion. Continue reading →

The thought of having to use a track pad was the scariest thing about buying a laptop. Every track pad I’d ever used was extremely difficult and felt completely unnatural. I ended up buying a Mighty Mouse with my computer but have since found I’d much prefer to use the track pad over a Mighty Mouse. But that’s partly because they suck. Continue reading →

Great music, food, weather and even better company, after staying an extra unplanned day, I’m back home. Continue reading →

Over the Easter weekend I’m going on a holiday with some friends to the beautiful Byron Bay. I’ve thought about taking my computer but have decided against it. I’ve been on a huge wave of motivation recently so it feels strange to be I’m dropping it all right now. Is it possible to need a holiday when you don’t feel like you need one? Continue reading →

The Deck is an advertising network of 16 specific websites run by Coudal Partners. It includes some of my favourite sites - Daring Fireball, The Daily Report, Airbag and Computer Love. It’s a high profile, high quality network based around the creative profession. That means the cost of advertising with The Deck is high.

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There’s so many web and design conferences on over the year. SxSW, Web Directions, Rails Conf., An Event Apart, etc but none are ever geographically close to me. So I basically go into a state of denial, telling myself that they’re rubbish, overpriced, time wasters that I’ll never learn anything from. Continue reading →

My web programming class requires the use of the Smarty templating engine for the first assignment. Actually, I don’t know if it requires it for the first assignment but it definitely does for the second so I want to get my head around it on a smaller problem first. Anyway, Smarty is stupid. Continue reading →

In an act of strangeness the widely followed blog of Bryan Veloso, Avalonstar, has been taken down with a letter from his fiance in it’s place. Byran Veloso is what you might call an A List blogger which means fanboys. I wasn’t a regular Avalonstar reader but in #wordpress this morning people were calling him, emailing him, messaging him, just freaking out in general. Continue reading →

As an April Fool’s Day present to my website, I gave it a lick of colour. Just like I would when considering a present for anyone or anything, I started to think about it yesterday. A new look in just one day? Is that even possible? When you cut corners it is. Continue reading →