I was close with my prediction. Adam Carriker went one spot before the Jets pick. I have mixed feelings about the draft. They got decent players, who will most likely start. But they also gave up alot of picks to get them. Statistics show that that you as much of a chance to find a great player in round 6 and in round 2. More picks is better (contrary7 to the Less is More theory).

However, the Jets consolidated their picks to get higher. The only drafted 4 guys. The Browns got 7 guys. Falcons got 11 guys. The Patriots got 9. It goes on and on. The Jets got the fewest picks in the draft. This is troublesome.

Well, we shall see. Hopefully the picks we got will stop the run. If we still can’t stop the the run, then we are totally screwed.

I accidentally crashed IE7. I narrowed down the code to be a CSS issue. It’s surprisingly simple and very annoying.

Code:

Link1
Link2

Is span not allow to self close? Lame.

Ok, I know I posted 10 minutes ago.  But I have been looking at YouTube.  WOW.  There is some amazing stuff here.

Look at these kickass athletes!  The guy at the top in UNREAL!  Less cool, but very clever.  Did you know this was possible with a guitar?

Cute, but Ethan is cuter.  And Jared is cuter. Or Ethan? Man, I need to get some video of Matty Matt.

Trying to upload my first YouTube and embed it here. Of course, the editor is not helping. Let’s see if this works. It’s an old video of Ethan Dancing to Happy Days.

Nice article on MSNBC about Joe Biden.  Joe is the man!  Too bad he hasn’t had any Joe-menutum.  I fully support his viewpoint on Iraq.  Here is a quote from the sentate floor.

“History suggests only there’s only a couple … ways to keep together a country driven by sectarian strife. And it’s not to put American troops into a city of 6.2 million people to try to quell a civil war. Throughout history four things have worked. You occupy the country for a generation or more. That’s not in our DNA—we’re not the Persian Empire or the British Empire. You install a dictator. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony for the United States—to go back after taking one down and install another one? You let them fight it out until one side massacres the other—that’s not an option in that tinderbox part of the world. Or lastly, you make federalism work for the Iraqis. You give them control over the fabric of their daily lives. You separate the parties. You give them breathing room. Let them control their local police, their education, their religion and marriage.”

Joe is the best. I think he should be nominated. If not, I think he would make a great VP or Secratary of State.

I wonder how User Experience Design could help Joe? Why isn’t he more popular? Is it because Obama is black and Clinton is a woman? is it because Edwards is prettier? Joe is just plain vanilla? He should have ran last time. He would have won. I think Joe is in a tough spot. He shouldn’t become “flashy” to get attention, but he needs to get attention.  He needs to steal away women and black voters.  Go right to the heart of it.

Joe, if you can hear me, You have to make a massive appeal to black women.  Propose legislation or come up with a plan that will stop sending young black boys to prison away from their mamas.  Daycare for women on welfare.  A GI Bill with Daycare for women to get computer science degrees.  You have to appeal directly to Black Women.  Obama and Clinton are taking these demographics for granted.  You can steal the stage and become the guy who is really looking out for minorities and women.  You can be the second black president, after Bill C.

I think this would work.  I have no political experience, but my UX skills tell me it will work.

Book Note:  I started reading Huey Long.  Interesting guy.

I put the urchin.js file on commadot a month ago.  It is a little file that tells Google everything that is happening on this page.  It’s quite amazing actually.  Really solid user interface. (Much better than AdWords)  Great information.  Nice use of Flash, where appropriate.

Look at this image showing where commadot.com users reside.

And you can mouse over the little dots and see how many and what the name of the city is.  The one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is either Hawaii or a guy with a waterproof laptop interesting in the Jets and User Experience Design.

Sometimes Google is so great about UX and sometimes they are so bad.  I guess that is not bad for a gazillion dollar company with a trillion employees.

I am trying to switch to the technique of 1 giant icons file.  I didn’t like the opacity filter for the disabled elements.  I really wanted grayscale.  So I had to use duplicate images.  I made a grid on my image so that the math was easy.  See image here.  So in my CSS, all I have to do is adjust the horizontal axis for the background-position.  Internet Explorer does this with background-position-x.  Firefox doesn’t support that!  They just have regular background-position.

This blows.  Now my css for this section is 3x longer than it needs to be.  Bad Firefox. I usually don’t need to say that, but, well, there it is.

Unless there is a CSS opacity filter that shields out all the color?  It would be a cool feature for IE8 and FF3!

From the legendary Bill Mirbach:
…. so here’s today’s high-value trivia question. this “website” http://www.sigsmarketingsecrets.com/, if you can call it that, sells product. navigation …. not. is there anything other than the straight down approach that would sell more stuff? in other words, could you redesign this copy approach (including, i suppose, [a better picture of Bob Bly] and get more orders? what do you think? possible or not?

My Quick UX Assessment/Reply:
I clicked on the link at the bottom to http://www.filipinowebmasters.com/. I think it’s interesting to compare the two. The first one keeps every sentence short, and separates the sentences with good padding, yet maintains a decent grid so you can skip a few, scan etc. The second one has crazy colors and no grid, plus the sentences are twice as long or longer. I will bet that the Bly site does much better (pound for pound) than the Filipino site. Even his picture matches what I think a great writer would look like. The key that I get from the comparison is: Ugly isn’t better, it takes skill to write the Bly page. Better writing is better.

Additionally, I think that the Bly site does one thing very well. It manages expectations and fits neatly in with the users mental model. His users are not buying computer hardware. They are not trying to see the slickest stuff. They want something that feels like “writing”, not something that feels like “website”. So for this application, I think its great. One might suggest a better palette or shadows or visual niceties, but I don’t think it would affect sales. Too much visual beauty here might detract from the copy.

I might try different font faces or colors, but I also think it wouldn’t change much. I bet this does well as is. Caveat, As a designer, you always have to be looking to improve, so trying new things and testing is still a good idea.

If I wanted to go a whole new direction, I would try a page flipping design. Nice and big. Cover the whole screen.
Examples (although they are small):
http://www.oreillynet.com/javascript/2004/09/03/graphics/pageTurn04.swf
http://files.swish-tutorials.com/ex/preview_file.php?id=1416
http://www.iparigrafika.hu:16080/pageflip/

But I wouldn’t be confident in it winning. I just think it would be a good test to try. Thinking out of the box.

Great article about using concatenation of images.  I have been doing this for a while.  For me, a major trick is to make sure that the images still look good even though they might be of varying colors.  I have been considering one giant “icons” image that has all of them.  I worry about the maintenance and management and the image optimization.

I wonder, why isn’t there animated PNG’s?  I have been waiting for PNG to become the standard image of the web for a long time.  IE7 has support, and IE6 has some hacks that give limited support.  But do these work if the background image is a PNG?  I wonder if the concatentation technique will work with PNG’s.  Will the PNG files look better at lower file size?    I should do some experiments with this.

Random other news:  Adobe announced that they are going to OpenSource Flex.  I think this is a good move.  Even though I hate Adobe right now.  Maybe if there was a free way to make rich apps, it would help them. 

This problem is driving me nuts.
http://www.commadot.com/jquery/simple.htm

I want to make a yellow box with a red border. (Must be two divs).  I want to be able to move the yellow box and change its size and still have the red border hug it tight.

I asked Experts-Exchange and got no love.  I joined the CSS-d mailing list, but my post never made it.  I can’t believe this might not be possible in either browser.

Yuck.