When I posted the entry about designing a logo, I didn’t expect to get the kind of emails I did about designing on specs. I didn’t think about the issue with such “contests” where a business posts its requirements and offers a set price. People would respond with their creations and then the business picks … Read more
Making Online and Offline Connections looks at how the virtual world changed how we connect to others. In it, I state that the online world made it possible for me to become a full-time freelancer. It got me thinking how I met people in this virtual world. I met a few through blogs, especially in … Read more
Once I got out of automated mode, I woke up and realized that I often use Paste Special with unformatted text when working in MS Word. It became a habit like CTRL+V, CTRL+X, and CTRL+C. To do Paste Special without formatting, I clicked CTRL+V to paste, selected the Paste Special icon (smart tag) and selected … Read more
Ack! I started off the day with 2500 email messages! 2450 of it spam. Someone used meryl.net to send spam. The sender name had all kinds of first and last names, so my inbox (the catch-all for meryl.net. A catch-all email address gets all emails that have been misspelled or don’t exist.) got all the … Read more
Many types of cuisine are award winners and require a variety of special ingredients to be flavorful. It would be easy if one award-winning recipe existed for all newsletters, but newsletters, too, are as different as Creole gumbo is from Korean dumplings. One recipe won’t do the trick. Fortunately, two newsletters can be opposite in … Read more
Over the last few years, comments have popped up on how PowerPoint ruins many presentations. That’s backward. Presenters ruin presentations by using PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn’t the criminal here. The crime comes from people not using creativity in designing their presentations. Weird Is Good took an ingenious approach in a lecture on the Civil War. Here’s … Read more
3rd edition update: The third edition took a bigger leap from the second than the second took from the first. Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd ed., comes with a greater focus on Web standards and cascading style sheets (CSS). In fact, the book opens with a chapter on Web standards, whereas it was merely … Read more
Bridge Is Cool teaches you how to play mini bridge and regular bridge. Paul and I learned to play bridge with our parents when we were first married and had more time on our hands. Since then, we’ve gotten busy with out children and other things plus our friends don’t know anything about playing bridge. … Read more
A friend of mine bought another PDA when her Zire 22 wouldn’t charge. I asked her why didn’t she tell me as the solution could be an easy one. Nonetheless, I told her to try a soft reset and then a hard reset. She said she was charging the new one and then was going … Read more
The campaigns to promote Firefox and demote Internet Explorer keep coming and Google tops them all by promoting Firefox on its home page–prime ad estate–along with the its Toolbar. For a limited time on Wednesday, April 26, users in the U.S. surfing with Internet Explorer saw a one-liner that read, “Firefox with Google Toolbar: tabbed … Read more