Whiteboard of the Week – 9

So…it’s been a bit more than a week. And I don’t have any make-up boards. Ok, I’m sorry, but Grease does that to a person. But I do have some plans for a french project involving the whiteboard, so don’t get too disappointed.

 

While half asleep Kevin’s rantings about thermostaticity started rolling through my brain, and I came up with that question. I dunno. Top right is “Typing into the Sunset” and bottom right is “SIDEBANDED”, illustrated. In effect, what happens when you… are interfering RF with different RF bands? 

Have a good week, and remember, tomorrow’s hump day!

Sticky Run

So for some reason I was taking photos of my Sticky Run. (When you need pens and stickies you just have to go!) With the lighting and b&w effect I had going on, things looked pretty cool.

Full Size | Download

M:nikon corporation
m:nikon d40
f:f/6.3
iso:400
s:1/160

Whiteboard of the Week – 8

So I’m thinking the WotW is quite inversely proportional to my actual thoughts or something, because this was probably the biggest week for me ever, just…learning so much about myself and the world around me, and yet the reflections on the board are far from inspirational. Maybe that’s a good thing, because we can’t have amazing weeks all the time, so most of the time the whiteboards will be good? I’m not sure, but here’s this weeks in all it’s grayscale glory. (I’ve been keeping my camera in B&W mode, and noticing that a lot of other people do too. It’s a good idea: you can focus on the color balance without being distracted. Plus when you shoot in RAW it is still kept color once you download it.

 

 

So the main scene here is my closet. I reorganized it recently and thought about the giant multi-function printer thing I have in there that I use exclusively for scanning. (I got it from Kevin, and the printer fails and our house doesn’t need more faxes so…) Anyway essentially everything has sort of grown around it, because I keep all my rolls of tape in it’s paper feeders, and it makes me think of a jungle growing around something abandoned in it. (Notably, the abandoned truck in this book from my childhood.)

To the side in that square is Kevin “steaming” the inkjet heads of our old printer. Inkjet spa.

Some interesting thoughts from this week: WordPress has won my heart. My dream is to have all the websites I manage on my Safari toolbar, so that anytime something needs to be changed I can hit Command-# and be in their admin area. I’m starting with elderadvocates.ca, where I’ll be merging all the documents into a giant RSS feed with a bit of PHP and then importing them into WordPress as posts, then converting them to pages using the lovely p2pConverter. I did notice a glitch with it though: it doesn’t seem to handle converting pages with quotation marks in the title. I suspect there’s an escaping issue in the JavaScript somewhere, because it asks you to confirm changing from page to post. (Which, quite honestly isn’t that necessary considering you can switch it back just as easily…)

I’m pretty sure it’s just as easy to do it right in the SQL database too, which might be more efficient for bulk conversion. 

Have a good week everyone!

Thoughts on CMS

One thing that drives me mad is how every content management system (CMS) out there is now based around the concept of blogging, and yet most companies and simple website designs are still reliant on fairly basic static pages. As web developers, we go out and find the most advanced *blogging* tool there is because it’s stable, consistent, and easy to setup (read: WordPress…almost), and then watch as the client sits back and doesn’t actually post content in a blog-centric fashion.

This doesn’t surprise me. After all, if they hired me to implement their website, they probably don’t have too much information that needs to be critically shared on a regular basis, and unlike bloggers who are seeking to provide fresh content, get readers, and thus ad revenue; they don’t have much incentive to publish. (Look at me!)

As I worked away on fbcedmonton.ca which I setup with textpattern a while back, I started to drive myself insane realizing that in order to create a static page, you need to:

  1. Create an article (blog post)
  2. Create a “page,” or essentially a layout method that is statically selecting that post ID.
  3. Create a “section” or area for which the page will be served using a specific themeset.
  4. Create the link to the section within the navigation if an automatic nav generation tag is not in place.
Of course, if I just wanted to post an item to the blog it would have been one simple step. But really, our church doesn’t use its blogging features and the website would have been much better implemented in something more static-page oriented. Maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough, but it seems like a simple static-page CMS is no longer existent in favour of blog blog blog.
Which is fine. I guess I’ll stick to my php includes and raw code. 
But hey if you know of something simple out there, let me know. 

Whiteboard of the Week – 7

Another busy week I’m afraid, but I sketched out this while discussing boots for ethernet cables. You know how some cables have those little hoods on them that protect the jack (or make it a total pain in the butt to unplug, especially on ethernet cards that are not flush with the PCI slot %$#@!) Yes those. They’re called boots. I say they should be hoods. Here are my illustrations:

I have been studying Roland Harvey’s Drawing Book (Scholastic). I probably got it when I was in like…Grade 4, but it has some good stuff in it. Maybe if I actually have TIME to sit down and draw its influence will be passed on in drawing quality, who knows.

Have a good week everyone!

Whiteboard of the Week – 5 & 6

Last week I was a bit busy, so the results were a bit lame, but I came up with this shortly afterwards. We’ll call this “5.” 

Basically Kevin was complaining about how HP wizards would not extract files until it saw a printer around. I imagined the files in a kennel looking for printers for it to spend time with. Kevin is hitting it with a stick demanding they come out.

 

Onto this week: my parents were off living the Italian lifestyle for a bit, and my sister and I were left to our own devices. Here’s a summary of what happened (Guest author: Laura):

 

There is quite a bit going on here. Clockwise from top left: 

  • jFish dies
  • Laura hands out juice boxes to trick-or-treaters after running out of pencils. They are in fact, happier.
  • We stock the house with organic eggs.
  • Purolator guy shows up with a bunch of boxes (“Mom boxes”) and asks to use the washroom. My sister cautiously permits.
  • We go for breakfast for with my Grandpa, and I get my last pancake “to go” (Hey! It would be a waste not to eat it! I had it for lunch today.)
  • Opa tells of chasing Oma and her boyfriend’s Volkswagen. (Random!)
  • Food choices included pizza pops and soy loaf. My sister couldn’t find any real bread at superstore apparently.
  • Laura brings home jack-o-latterns, they are composted after Halloween. That should work.
  • Derrick shows up before Laura comes home the day that Joel decides he’s going to play piano for the first time in more than a year. He reads the newspaper until Laura gets home.
  • Joel learns how to do laundry. Later he observes the instructions on the machine. 
Of course other things happened but this was the overall summary. Until next week!

Rest in Peace: jFish

October 19, 2007 ~ October 27, 2008

I feel kinda weird doing this, but I guess I just feel a bit sad about little jFish. He passed away quietly at the bottom of his tank today after refusing to eat for several days and suffering from some form of paranoia. Our thoughts and prayers are with him as we know he is in a better place.

jFish in his early days enjoying his IKEA tank.
jFish in his early days enjoying his IKEA tank.

Whiteboard of the Week – 4

 

Sorry guys. Unless terrible drawings of hedgehogs interest you, this week’s whiteboard is a bit lame. For the jolewriting impaired, the first line says, “I’m happy (or I have understood, am satisfied) with something when I can sum it up in a sentence.”, something from Tuesday @ 1AM. I would probably be more specific in my more lucid state as “one sentence” rather than “a” sentence, but yeah. This is a bit obvious.

Hedgehog (attempt 1 & 2) was me verifying if I could draw one or not. A long time ago I had found an adorable image of a hand drawn one but I couldn’t remember if I had drawn it or not. I’ll see if I can draw it for next week because it’s coming back to me now, but those were my attempts at the time. From far away attempt 2 looks worse than attempt 1, but attempt 2 definitely is cuter… you know the whole *having eyes* part helps.

The last part was just some notes for a TELUS essay contest. More on that some other time.

Whiteboard of the Week – 3

This week I released my first whiteboard animation, as a social project. It is in French though, because I’m in French immersion so my projects are in French. 

In any event it still has some cool stuff and I hope you like it!

…

 

Ok, fine. There’s also a static Whiteboard of the Week. I’m not explaining this week though, because it’s not very meaningful and most of it was fairly context driven, but there was another guest drawer in this one. Make your guesses on what part it is!

 

Oh and the video of course:

 

P.S. I guess that sorta makes this the public of jolevideo. It’s been in private beta for a while, but that’s news for a day when my PSU isn’t fried. (Sigh…)

P.P.S. Thanks to Ashley for her contribution to the project! (No she isn’t the guest drawer.)

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