Freaky People Productions

Reading the ten typographic mistakes everyone makes at Christopher Phin’s Receding Hairline blog, brought back vivid — and occasionally painful — memories of editing copy at my University paper. In particular the vicious division in the comments to the article, between those urging Christopher to both keep up the fight, and to “get a life”.

See, the thing is that people who gravitate to jobs like editing copy or designing layouts at a weekly paper, working for peanuts — Joey’s pizza, actually — is that we’re obviously anal-retentive and naturally procedural. Read the rest of this entry »

An insightful overview of teleprompter tips, sightings during the US presidential primaries can be seen here, at Garr Reynold’s site, Presentation Zen.

Teleprompters allow for speakers to present without the apparent use of notes. Keep in mind however, that there is a learning curve, and without preparation can appear to be more stilted or wooden than reading from visible notes. The teleprompter operator listens to the presenter and adjusts the speed of the words so they flow naturally. Additionally, this allows the presenter to ad-lib, or go off-script, without worrying about the script running away from them.

With no announcement at all, it seems that Netfirms has decided to support WordPress permalinks without having to resort to this plugin hack. Unfortunately, it also broke the existing plugin, which Joelika managed to figure out before me.

I haven’t followed up to see if this means that other .htaccess commands are now available to be used, but at least the site is up again.

Discovered yesterday that an update in the Google Maps API causes older Safari systems (1.3.2, the most current for OS X 10.3) to crash. Hard.

Luckily, after wading through plenty of ranting about why old browsers should be kicked to the curb (not a particularly useful solution if you’re trying to make your page interactive AND compatible for your audience), I found an easy tweak that in the short term will stop a hard crash. Without resorting to a browser detect, or rendering a static version of the map. Read the rest of this entry »

Frankly I’m tired of scouring the net for tips on fixing a Powerpoint bug, projector alignment or maintenance code, only to lose the link or scribble the info on a sheet of paper to be lost in the wash. <again!>

So, the plan is thus: over the next while, I’m going to pick through my bookmarks, del.icio.us and facebook feeds and develop a comprehensive database of useful places on the web for the work that I do. Seems only fair (after going to all that effort) to share it someplace to be useful to others in my predicament. The additional benefit is that I can’t lose it. I think the Internet is too big for even the jumbo laundromat washer to swallow.