Why is the cherry all concentrated at the center? You practically have to eat through 2 inches of a croissant before you even touch the center. If I wanted a croissant, I would have gotten a croissant!

Imagine if you bought a pizza and all the tomato sauce, cheese, and pepperoni was layered in the center. Wouldn’t it be pretty disappointing having to eat all that crush first?

On top of that, once you get into the center, the cherry reward is VERY unsatisfying. Why? Because it is way too sweet. It’s like eating jam straight out of a smuckers’ bottle, or spooning ketchup without the fries.

Is it so hard to spread that cherry goodness all around? Evenly distribute the jam for a perfect mixture of bread to jam, resulting in syrupy goodness.

It took me a while to figure this out because the HTC Touch Pro from Sprint does not come with FM Radio. When I tried to stream the KQED - NPR stream from the KQED website, Windows Mobile Media Player failed to load the stream correctly. It got stuck on the sponsor advertisement.

I tried all kinda crap, I even downloaded Real Player, which didn’t work, and wouldn’t uninstall correctly. Finally I got the CorePlayer, also known as TCPMP, and now I am regaled with informative NPR news on the bus to work.

When you put a background-image into an input field in Firefox Mac/Win, the input borders get distorted (it’s darker…)

I don’t have a fix for it, actually, I am not even sure it’s broken. Also, the blue highlight the input field gets when it is in focus, does not appear when you add background-image to an input field.

I think that’s a very strange default behavior.

To be honest though, sitting at home writing code doesn’t feel any different than sitting in an office writing code. Well, maybe the only difference is that I can freely pick my nose and scratch my ass when I am home. Not so in an office setting.

1) Padded block links - It is absolutely sinful to not use a large padding areas for bigger links on your page. In fact, I am a bit embarrassed that my own blog design violates this concept. However, I ‘kind of’ made up for it with neat hover over underline and color change effects. The point here is to make your links more accessible.

2) Typesetting buttons  - I can’t tell you how many hours I have spend moving pixels around to achieve the “balanced” feel.

3) Using contrast to manage focus - Finding a web designer who understands this concept can be hard. It is especially important for blogs and news websites to use this tip, otherwise the page become illegible.

4) Using color to manage attention - I knew there was a reason why I am attracted to colorful websites. I wish this concept of color would work its way into more web applications. One place that uses color really well in their application is Shopify.com. Also, come to think of it, the new Wordpress 2.7 dashboard kind of detract from this principle. Everything is so grey now…

5) White space indicates relationships - Sometime you can stare at a web design for hours and never figure out why it just doesn’t look right. This is most likely the reason.

6) Letter spacing - I am VERY careful when it comes to this stuff. Whenever I am handed a PSD design, I usually examine the text elements for any letter-spacing that the designer specified. I wish more designers would just make an itimized list of these things so that these unique effects don’t get lost in translation.

7) Auto-focus on input - I am no sure how useful this tip is. I am more into giving users control and not hijacking their browsers with scripts. However, I can see this being a great tool if your form is the main of focus of the page.

Custom input focus - You learn something new everyday. This is definitely something I have never thought about. I will try it in my next project.

9) Hover controls - While this is a great tip, it is also very dangerous. One of the most common flaw of websites are hover controls that a) disappear too quickly when you hover-out 2) displaces other content when they become visible 3) important navigational controls that should be visible at all times.

10) Verbs in labels - One of the best advice yet. The other day I changed a button that said “save” to “change” because I knew the whole point of the form was to make a change.

These are all great tips. I hope you take the time to read the Smashing Magazine article.

Basically, I have a bunch of links that are set as ‘display:block’ and they sit on top of an image. The links are ‘display: block’ because I am using the links to make certain areas of the image into clickable links.

Of course this works fine in Firefox, but in IE, both 6 and 7, the stupid links kept disappearing behind the image. Regardless of what z-index I give it, or how I arrange the order of the HTML, the links kept disappearing behind the image ( I knew this because I examined the DOM with the web-developer toolbar and I found the links behind the image. )

After f*ck1ng around with it for like an hour and being absolutely bewildered, I applied a ‘background: red’ ( or an an image ) to the links, and wahla, they appear correctly in IE. Freaking amazing.

The reason I have never encountered this problem in the past is because I usually have a background associated with my links. This is the first time I had a background-less, text-less, link element.

Anyways, this is a very ill-prepared blog post, but I hope it will help someone running around in circles like I was.

I always thought this was a very strange defense, but I just recently noticed that my girlfriend is not the only female who uses this illogical line of reasoning. Women everywhere are using it: Here is one example. Here is another.

My belief is: if things COULD be turned around, it SHOULD turn around. Basically, an eye for an eye.

For example: If you have a roomate that drinks all your milk. You confront them about it and their response is, “well, you eat all my ramen.” If that is true, then their counter argument - turning things around on you - is PERFECTLY valid.  I think anyone, male or female, can agree with me on this.

But for some reason, this kind of logic never works when arguing with your woman. Sigh…

I can’t agree more. I am so annoyed when I get phone calls, and even more annoyed when I get voicemail. Email, or even text messages, is a much better form of communication. Why?

1) Email = instant record

2) Email = allow time for scrutiny, research, and analyst. When people tell you something on the phone, you have to take their word for it, or guess on the subject being discussed.

3) Phone = distraction. You have to drop whatever you are doing just to answer the phone. This is annoying, especially if you are driving, or working on something important.

4) Phone = waste time. People call you and spend 15 minutes trying to figure what they wanted to say. “Ummm… ooooh…..aahhhh…..okkkk….welll”. Shut up already and just send me an email.

5) Email = free. Phone minutes are not free.

6) And lastly… Sometimes, most of the time, I just don’t feel like talking to you. If you need something, email me and I will get it done for you.

Some girls are so naturally pretty, guys like me have to catch our breath literally, and stuff our tongues back in our mouth.

But it’s sad because when those same girls see these airbrushed, photoshop icons, they try to compete by pounding on the makeup. Which, as a result, only detract from their natural beauty.

Twisted world.

The solution is simple. Go into the “preferences” –> “settings” –> choose a theme –> “advanced” –> change “declare terminal as:” to “vt102″. Reboot terminal.

Fun, fun, fun.