The other day, Chris was asking whether anyone had heard the new Beastie Boys album and whether it was any good. As it turns out, none of us had heard the full album, with the exception of the singles that have been getting radio play. So, I mentioned to Chris that Metacritic might be able to provide some insight.

Metacrtic, in case you hadn’t heard of it, is a review site for movies, music and video games. But, they don’t have their own review staff; rather, they gather reviews from other critics (both online and offline) and create an aggregate score out of 100 (which they call a “Metascore”). Because it’s based on dozens of reviews, you can really get a feel for how critics as a whole thought of a movie, album or game. (more…)

I have recently started using the Firefox browser from Mozilla. I love it! It seems to be very compatible with everything that I do. What I especially like is the “type-find” feature. Well, I am not sure what they call it, but it works very well. For years I would find my self using the “find” feature to search for keywords on web pages. Now, with Firefox, I simply type and the key words or phrases are highlighted on the pages as I type. Very, very nice.

Now, there was one problem that I resolved today… (more…)

Once again we have experienced a font issue today. Most specifically, we had a PowerBook that needed “Helvetica Neue Extended Bold.” For some reason, when we tried to load the font into Font Book, it did not seem to load that particular font within the Helvetica Neue family. This is very frustrating since we have been through this same scenario over and over again with the same font. Now, I will not even pretend to be a font expert of any kind, but what I do know is this: (more…)

When coding CSS layouts, min-height is often useful to have around. Unfortunately, it’s not widely supported among browsers (other than Mozilla, natch). (For those not familiar with it, min-height defines a minimum height on an element.) And, generally speaking you can simply make use of min-height (for real browsers) along with height for IE — which essentially treats height like min-height, as it happily busts out of its container if there’s more content than the allotted height.

The tricky part? Safari. If you need to support it, you’ll find that it supports neither min-height nor IE’s pretend min-height. (more…)

We were fine-tooth combing our portfolio book, searching for any typos or misspellings, and as luck (or smart business decisions) would have it, we’ve got a couple of grammar nerds in the office. Correcting someone’s grammar in a friendly setting can be seen as confrontational, but where business is concerned, we feel it’s vital.

We came across the word “that” in a restrictive clause, (more…)

I was reading the other day about smart web design techniques, and one of them impressed the importance of using only as many aesthetic elements as you need to convey the message of the site. That is to say that if you feel like adding a little doily in the background, you’d better be sure that it helps express the reason for the page and takes nothing away from the same.

It’s no surprise that the same is true with words; over and over again we are told that “less is more.” Best friends can convey many sentences’ worth of information with a single glance, filled with nuance and poetry, but a lot of business communication can require a paragraph to explain a single point. (more…)

A few weeks ago, we hired a couple of weblog junkies. I was intrigued by the fact that I was able learn so much about these guys just by reading their weblogs. Pretty interesting stuff. Full of interesting random topics as well as a wealth of interesting technical information. So, after bringing these guys in, I began to really become more aware of various weblogs on the internet. As an internet junkie myself, I have been a little surprised that I have been living in the dark as to the opportunities that weblogs present to companies of all shapes and sizes. (more…)

There’s a Starbucks right near our office — off Oaklawn & Rawlins — and, being the caffeine junkies we are, we go there all the time. And whoever is going generally asks around the office to see if he or she can pick up a drink for anyone (I hesitate to say “pick up a coffee” since some of us are tea drinkers).

And just this morning, Bryan mentioned that he’d be making a Starbucks run. Normally I’d ask him to pick up an Earl Grey for me, but I still had my mug of tea that I had made earlier in the morning. However, I recalled that Bryan really liked Starbucks’ Pumpkin Scones. As I’m quite a scone aficionado myself, I figured I should give them a try. (more…)