Joel Friesen Web Designer, Victoria BC

I accidentally hit back on the mouse in Google’s text input, and it put in the back button symbol. A pile of suggested search results came up. I’m guessing these were captures of people intending to leave google by typing in a site. Kind of neat.

What’s weird is that the back button symbol is a list all the typically popular sites (google, youtube, gmail ), however the forward button’s symbol results feels sleazier (redtube, myspace, and hotmail). I don’t know what this says about the habits of people that use the forward button over the back button, but google is collecting that data.

Henchman’s helper got a lot of attention this last week when it was posted up on boingboing.net. It was just a simple idea to bring world domination to the internet, so evil henchmen could have their lair anywhere they are. People liked it, and it sort of took off!

In other news my new best friend Alex over at neatorama launched a new amazing wordpress endeavor called the upcoming Queue.

I’ve been a follower of the neatorama since I picked up my first issue of Mental_floss a few years back. They were doing some kind of cross promotion at the time and I was interested enough to check out neatorama. The website is sort of a giant collection of things that make you say “Oh, that’s, uh… odd!“. The site and magazine suit each other.

Since I love wordpress so much and I am always amazed at what it can do, I want to point out that the Queue is totally WP based runs independently from wordpress on something called varo cms (Thanks Jim). My friends at Automattic, one of the bigger developers for WordPress were impressed with the ingenuity as well.

Well from one friend to another, way to go Alex! From one blogger to his readers, I’d suggest you give the Queue a go, see if you like it.

That was one crazy vacation! Check out the website. Since I’ve come back, I was asked to teach at Camosun College. That’s right! You are looking at the screen output of Camosun’s newest Photoshop, Illustrator, Interface Design and Graphic Design for the web instructor! A big thanks to Camosun for trusting me enough to take on this large course load.

The SMPTE test pattern was reworked last night. It’s lost a couple lines of code and works in every browser known to man!

Previously, I had each row sliced into bars equally, I had to shave off a tiny bit so IE could render the page, if i had them all equal 100% IE would try to make the last one wrap. This left a tiny white line at the right side of the screen. That always annoyed me.

Last night I realized that I didn’t need the last slice, and I could just colour the row behind the bars, and float the bars left. So simple! It even removes a couple lines of code.

The white bar is gone, and the page renders perfectly in the 44 browsers I tested it in. Take a look! If only i could find a way to reproduce the 1000khx tone…

Feel free to steal the test pattern and use it on your own site, Just credit me in the code.