100th Post; Wish-to-Do List

Every night, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, a million things speed through my mind. I think about what I’ve completed that day and what I have yet to accomplish the next. It never stops until I am asleep. When I wake up, I already feel behind.

This is a problem. Even though I take pride in being someone who is constantly generating ideas, I inevitably have more ideas than I can execute. Yes, a lot of those ideas are probably not that good and practically trivial, but ideas are ideas, and until they are executed, they all weigh relatively equally as valid solutions.

So, to ease the pressure off my brain just a little bit, and to celebrate the 100^th post of Flush, I would like to share 100 things I have brewing in my head. (I have a lot more, as I’m sure you do as well.) Some are very realistic and executable, while others are more ideal and fantastic.

Site

1. Get all areas of the experiments section opened and working.
2. Have a creative About section.
3. Redesign Flush to fit with transparency theme.
4. Have the entire site be mobile and screen-reader friendly (in other words, accessible).
5. Have the site completely done by sometime next year, before I realize I need a redesign.

   Career

6. Continue with learning ActionScript 3.0.
7. Learn MySQL.
8. Learn Processing, whatever benefit I may get from it.
9. Learn AfterEffects.
10. Learn podcasting.
11. Learn a printing press.
12. Learn to hand-assemble a book.
13. Learn to use a type design program.
14. Learn to write a form that will update an XML file.
15. Finish my print portfolio.
16. Create a multi-functional business card.
17. Design a body font family, including ligatures and special characters.
18. Attend AIGA Design Conference 2009 in Memphis, TN.
19. Be a part of the Olympic branding committee of a Summer Games.
20. Buy a copy of CS4 (unless I wait too long and CS5 comes out).
21. Meet well-known design figures with mutual respect.
22. Design a self-promotional holiday souvenir.
23. Be part of an “awesome” project.
24. Own a copy of Sagmeister’s “Things I Have Learned From My Life So Far”.
25. Volunteer with whatever AIGA SF needs volunteers for.
26. Start a career portfolio archive.

    Experiments

27. Design and screen print shirt graphics with geeky design-related topics.
28. Make a poster/series with writing with light.
29. Make an info-graphic poster of the bodies of the solar system.
30. Print an image on the same sheet multiple times.
31. Print an image on separate transparency sheets and align the images in the light, then photograph it.
32. Create a poster series of the sun’s actual visible electromagnetic spectrum.
33. Design a reusable calendar.
34. Do a time lapse series of one location at the same time each day for a long period of time (e.g. a year).
35. Invert night sky photographs.
36. Overlay a high-resolution photo onto a low resolution version of the same photo.
37. Align panoramic Photomerge photos but don’t blend the edges.
38. Put supposedly-panoramic Photomerge photos in a grid in relation to one another.
39. Create a new typeface by overlapping two typefaces, then take the overlapping areas or dissimilar areas.
40. Use enlarged small type on screen as regular type.
41. Use Flash/ActionScript to write a visualization of two bodies orbiting.
42. Create a motion graphic piece that will show a writing with light, but the light moves with time, so the writing cannot be seen at any one time, but collectively.

    Life

43. Continue with learning either/both French or/and Japanese.
44. Learn Morse code, just because.
45. Learn Braille, just because.
46. Learn American Sign Language, just because.
47. Learn more about astronomy.
48. Learn more about physics.
49. Learn to surf.
50. Learn to ski and/or snowboard.
51. Learn to ballroom dance, for whatever future occasion.
52. Start life blogging again.
53. Get my life completely GTD’d.
54. Pay off my student loans and start being in the black.
55. Get a green job.
56. Live in a studio apartment.
57. Have a road trip of some sort across the country.
58. Go to an amusement park one of these days. It’s been too long.
59. Go mini-golf with friends.
60. Go on a road trip with friends.
61. Go on a cruise with friends.
62. Go to a beach where the water and the weather is not cold.
63. Be part of the excitement in Washington D.C. on January 20, 2009.
64. Attend an American/Western wedding. (I’ve only been to Chinese style weddings).
65. Attend a baseball game.
66. Attend an indoor concert with die-hard fans who sing along to all the songs.
67. Play more Wii.
68. Become a space tourist.
69. Experience Zero G in one of those planes.
70. Fly first class.
71. Ride in a Rock-Star-Style Tour Bus.
72. Spend a week in a cabin with friends.
73. Get into a habit of exercising and eating right (for the most part) for the rest of my life.
74. Return to a routine of swimming.
75. Get shampoo/body wash that takes out the smell of chlorine.
76. Have a crazy adventure night like in the movies, but with no one dying.
77. Buy myself things for the holidays that I’ve been longing for all year but have been really conservative with money. Or when I get a full-time design job.
78. Go on a “vision quest,” whatever that is.
79. Re-watch the Matrix Trilogy.
80. Watch something in IMAX.
81. Re-watch Motorcycle Diaries.
82. Re-watch the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony.
83. Have a movie marathon of Planet Earth.
84. Be an awesome and cool uncle when my niece or nephew is born.
85. Help build houses for families who need and deserve it.
86. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or something similar during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
87. Convince my friends that it’s “should have” and not “should of”, among other things.
88. Build something useful with wood.

    World

89. Visit New York City and live there for a month.
90. Visit Japan and live there for a month.
91. Visit Beijing and the Olympic area.
92. Visit Vancouver during the Olympics in 2010.
93. Visit London during the Olympics in 2012.
94. Volunteer to do something in Africa.
95. Visit Australia.
96. Visit Machu Picchu.
97. Visit France and try to live there for a month.
98. Visit Italy.
99. Visit Dubai and sight-see all the cool architecture.

100. Learn to live, and live to learn.

Let’s see how many of these I can accomplish by the 200^th post. I know I won’t be able to do all of it, but it’s still good to try.

Flush.

Cookies Basics

I can now write cookies. I had been avoiding it for a while because I knew it would be a little more complex than basic JavaScript, and that I don’t like how cookies are used for “evil” sometimes. Cookies have a bad rap of taking personal information and whatnot, and I want to avoid that for my sites as much and as long as possible. And now I’m using it only to enhance visitor experience and it does not collect personal information.

I created an experiment with cookies in my Experiments section. It involves taking a name and storing it into the browser cookies, and then also created a switch button that just makes a setting go on and off. I did it for my portfolio section, where I want the visitor to have the option to show the “panels” of navigation within the portfolio section or to hide them, and not have to keep setting it every time the visitor returns to the site.

It’s a basic function, and it’s non-intrusive, and it still works without the function or JavaScript. In fact, if the browser disables JavaScript, the button disappears! You can test it yourself with your browser. And like I said before, the portfolio page exists; follow my site’s navigation format and you’ll get there.

Flush.

What Am I Doing? (Jun 2008)

You realize time really flies when you see the weather gets nicer by the day and you start writing “6”’s in dates.

This past month, I’ve moved forward with my career planning by continuing my ambitiously comprehensive website, mainly in the type experiments section. I’ve also started looking into getting a wide-format, individual inkjet cartridge printer so I can have large and nice prints for my print portfolio.

Finally, I have a tiny photo shoot gig for my aunt’s business. If all goes well, I will post the completed pieces.

Even as the country continues to go downhill economically, there is still that ray of hope in my personal life emerging in the past few weeks, believing that things will get better; I just need to be patient, continue to work hard, and persevere.

Flush.

Typexperiments Title Block Test 1

Here’s the first test of my Typexperiments page title block. The original concept came from the old school type cases that people use for the printing press. This is the digital version/take for the new way most fonts are created. I’m still looking into whether I should go all the way with that concept and layout my content in those type cases or just do a different layout all together.

The image above is pretty much a demo of how the type floats and stacks as you shrink your window. Yay CSS.

Notes on the current state of the page:

• The background color will change.
• The legibility of the “type pieces” is not of main concern.
• The color of the “type pieces” will change, but the legibility will not be the reason for that change.

Flush.

Typexperiments

So I’ve slowly settled into my job at Peet’s, which leads me to having more time to get back to my website. The above is a process snapshot of the title block for my Type Experiments page. I’ll explain the concept more in a later post when the page is created, but I wanted to point out how the middle three rows turned out. They make really good type experiments and are why I enjoy creating new type so much.

Flush.

Flash Experiments Portal: Auto Rounding Width et al

I’ve been taking care of other aspects of my life for the past week or so, and today I was able to spend some time to continue building my Flash Experiments Portal. Honestly, I did not expect something that looks this simple to take so long. But I think that it’s a design worth pursuing, partly because in the process, I’ve learned some stuff in JavaScript that it made me realize that I have a love-hate relationship with JavaScript, just like with ActionScript and Kinko’s.

The image above may not look that different from the one before, but I’ve added many features, all of which are exclusively in JavaScript and would still function like before if JavaScript is turned off or is not available in the browser.

First, I made all the “frames” fit to the length of the text but also rounded them up to the next frame. If I had just left it at auto, the frames would not end at the grid lines, which defeats the purpose of having the grid.

Then, I added up all the lengths of the frames in each row and determine the minimum page width I need to display all the frames in their own row. If I didn’t specify the page width, the frames would actually start floating/stacking under the layer names. That doesn’t happen in Flash, of course; I just used the float trick to make it look like Flash, but it certain doesn’t behave it like it.

Finally, I made the boxes where the layer names go have a fixed position so that as you scroll to the right for more frames (if the row of frames goes longer than the page width), the left side stays there like in Flash.

I spent a good chunk of the day working on this locally, and it seemed to work fine in Firefox and Opera, with a little bit of glitch in Opera that I fixed relatively quickly. But when I uploaded it to the site, Opera seemed to have completely ignored my JS, so now I have to figure out what’s happening there. And IE has the same situation as last time. Inconsistencies with paddings, margins, and border widths among browsers are a pain.

Nonetheless, I made real progress today, especially in my JavaScript skills. I’ve become more comfortable with arrays and for loops now. Scripting is so powerful; I can’t wait to learn all the other kinds.

Flush.

Flash Experiments Portal

Worked on the Flash experiments portal today. Making something look like something else proved difficult, but I think that when one is done with it, satisfaction takes over.

I’m not done with it yet, though. I still have to:

• Code it so the width of the frames on the timeline are determined by the length of the frame label, but still conform to the 8px widths of individual frames.
• Make it work in IE 7 (grr.)
• Make the arrows clickable to expand/collapse the folder (which I practiced in the web experiments section), and have the arrow and folder icons change accordingly.
• Make it have auto horizontal scrolling instead of a defined body width.

At first, I wanted to make the portal Flash-based, but I figured that might be too crazy and not that accessible if people have slow connections or don’t have Flash Player installed. This is a fun alternative, I believe.

Flush.

A Bit of Beta House Cleaning

I did a bit of site house cleaning today. I know, I don’t have that much on my beta site to clean yet, but I made some messes while creating those pages, like writing messy non-validatable XHTML and illegal characters, as well as inconsistent page titling.

I also began a format for the web experiment pages, which I’m bound to change so they’d go more with the rest of the site, which has yet to be created. I’m starting to see that this entire site is going to some time to build. But I don’t feel defeated at all; I am so excited to see how this site is going to turn out. Anyway, less talk, more walk.

Flush.

Background Change By Time

Been a few days since posting an update on the web site. Before you make snap judgments on the image below, hear me out. That’s not how the site is going to look, exactly. Think of the idea, the concept behind it. Concept, concept, concept.

The point is that I figured out how to control color using time, as well as brightness and saturation control just like the HSB panel in Photoshop and the like. This might be a sarcastic BFD for geeky programmers, but I’m still proud that I figured this out in one night, part of it without power because of some storm.

Background Change By Time

I may or may not continue applying a time-based background color on the home page. This is actually the same saturation and brightness as the original dull blue background color, but I guess it’s just too bright and saturated-looking in other hues.

Shaun Inman

The idea for this came from Shaun Inman’s site, which I heard about from a (relatively) recent BADG podcast interviewing Shaun Inman. His site has a changing background that repeats every year, and on top of that, his older articles fade to white as a metaphor that writings on web programming and such get outdated very quickly over time, even stuff written in 2002.

I will continue to play around with the background color; I’ll probably make it darker and muted if I was to keep the script on the home page, because frankly, I don’t really have a strong concept and reason like Shaun's to have the script on the home page.

The process of writing the script is documented under Experiments > Web > JavaScript.

Flush.

Beta Mode Day 3

Experiments Section. Still working on the design.

Web Experiments Section. No, that’s how it’s supposed to look like.

Thanks Rosa and Alissa for your comments!

Flush.