Following the new design of this blog, I thought “Hey, why don’t I start fresh and delete all the old crap off this blog”. I read through loads of my posts, deleted some videos that were no longer being used and actually, I write a load of bollocks. Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense and stuff, but MAN, I talk a load of crap sometimes, so while I was hovering my cursor over the ‘Move to Trash’ button I decided against it. What’s a blog without posts right? …and they do make sense and are somewhat interesting so I just thought fuck it. I can delete them later if I want, or not.
What I do have to do though, is more image based content on this site. That’s where all the fun is at. No one wants to hear me just jabber away without a picture of a dog with a bear’s head and armadillo arms right?!
After cutting up my girlfriend’s photoshop file of her new website design [charlottesaunders.co.uk], I’ve decided that i’m going to ditchthis stock template I settled with a good few months ago and design from scratch a brand new shiny blog. I’ll use the theme that I come up with and apply it through my portfolio and landing page which should be fun, not sure how long the whole process will take – but i’ve got plenty of time. (unless I go down burning on the flight either to or from new york at the end of January!)
Oh, and btw, I’m going to New York at the end of January. Not looking forward to the flight though.
As a Mac user I was a little excited about Google Chrome and as soon as the beta was out for Mac I downloaded it.
Previously I had been using Firefox as my main browser, it takes up a lot of memory but the features and the inbuilt RSS reader made it number one, a close second, purely for speed and initial start up time was Safari. My third most used browser, purely for compatibility issues with websites I’m developing is Opera. Opera is pretty amazing and with the recent updates I think more and more people will verge onto the browser. I have to put in a mention for Mozilla’s girl next door offspring Camino, it’s great to look at… and that’s about it.
Now onto Google Chrome. Since i’ve downloaded it, it hasn’t let me down once. It’s got the speed of Safari, it’s got amazing tools which allow me to inspect specific elements within a web page so it replaces Opera, it’s extremely lightweight compared to Firefox and a nice feature is that with each individual tab, Chrome treats it as an individual process, so unlike Firefox if one crashes it doesn’t effect all the other tabs running. I would like to see, however, more features in regards to the multi touch on Chrome that Firefox has, don’t get me wrong, it does account for the majority of them, but there are one or two that I still find myself trying to use.
Web pages load fast, you can download different themes for it (like you can with Opera and Firefox), it still is in it’s bea stages so of course it’s only going to improve. Updates are a breeze as they go on in the background so you don’t actually know when it’s updated unless you check the version number or one day you randomly see a new feature. Another feature I’ve got to mention, which is not a big thing but is something that Safari lacked and actually, you don’t realise how much you use it (or at least I do), which is the loading bar at the bottom of the browser which, when you hover over a link, it displays the url that you will be directed to and what Chrome has done is taken the minimalism of Safari by not having a loading bar at the bottom, but has incorporated a little pop up box with the url – a very nice touch in my opinion. Chrome also uses many of the same keyboard shortcuts as Firefox. The last feature I want to mention is the address bar where you type your http://’s and what I find useful is that the address bar IS the Google’s search bar and I know Firefox has a similar thing implemented on it but it lacks the suggested searches that Google’s homepage offers, it can also be changed to search different search engines or Wikipedia and even Creative Commons which saves screen space. there are many, many other features but you can check them out on the Google Chrome website
I have had a couple of issues such as when I’ve tried to load the history it crashed, but that was the first time and since then hasn’t happened and I don’t think it reads code as well as Firefox as yet in regards to outdated html usage.
Usually when I try out a new browser I’m always weary of it, and I was with Chrome, but what I didn’t have is the regular “breaking in” period that I’ve had with other browsers. It imports information from Firefox and Safari and also uses the Keychain for stored passwords (if you wish it to) so you don’t have to remember all your passwords for various websites, again, only if you want it to.
Overall, it’s a very good browser, stable, etc. etc. It’s a definite must have for an Apple Mac computer and I use it as my main browser, however, it may be in my dock but so is Firefox but at the rate this is going it may not be for much longer.
One last note, I can’t help but think that actually, Google IS taking over the world. You use it’s search facility, you’ll soon use it’s browser, you use it’s email, it takes pictures of you, your house, your street, your dog and they even their very own satellite – do we have any privacy anymore?
I’m feeling pretty excited at the moment. My little A-Z Zombie guide got featured on NotZombies.com. Naturally, this makes me love the site and all that it stands for so I’m going to stick em on my Blogroll because actually, the site is awesome.
Apart from that, nothing else really to report about or ramble on, and as I’m writing this whilst leaning half way off my bed at half past tomorrow, I’ll be off.
I’ve been introduced to Geektool, which is basically an application that lets you run Terminal scripts on your desktop as well as images and files.
After a day of learning the commands I’ve finally positioned my desktop how I like it with live news feeds from Yahoo, time, date, IP addresses, and with help from Yahoo Widgets I’ve managed to get my current battery life and the weather. Of course most of this is unnecessary and pointless, but it looks cool and I like it.
A bit of a long winded title for such a tiny book, but it does the job. I was at a workshop with Leah Klein (Wired Magazine), which, in my opinion, was quite good. The workshop brief was to write, illustrate and make an A-Z book on anything. So I did it on Zombies.
As a pre-warning; this thing may be riddled with spelling mistakes as it was put together quite rapidly and I didn’t get a chance to proof read it, so if you spot anything, just leave a comment and I will correct it at a later date.
Here are some photos I took on my (not so good) camera phone so I apologise for the lack of image quality. Also, i’m on Twitter so follow my ass!
Term has started again, just had my first day back and handed in my summer project. We had 1main project and another not so main project. The briefs were simple. Watch 3 films and produce an ‘Emotional Response’ to one of them. The films were Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’ and Jaques Tati’s ‘ Mon Oncle’ – which is the one I did my emotional response piece on. I played around with a few ideas. Originally I was going to make a video that causes the viewers to feel the emotions I felt during the film, but I decided on a photo montage with a goat (which represents me) and the emotions spewing from it’s head.
Here’s that piece:
Then I had to find a quote that sums up my philosophy on life which for it I used “If you don’t open your mouth, you don’t get fed” as it can apply to anything, such as business, life in general, or actually eating. If you don’t make yourself known or speak out and get noticed, who’s going to pay you to do a job over someone else? Then make it into a typographic piece, so here is the piece I produced for that quote: (click image to make it bigger)
My little A-Z Zombie guide got featured on 
