1. JL421 Badonkadonk Land Crusier/Tank

From a 2-star review:

I rev’ed up the engine and floored it! As I got closer and closer, I could see ol’ ‘tardy Tubbs’ face paint a life-size portrait of confusion on a tattered canvas of fear and surprise.

2. UFO-01 Detector

From a 1-star review:

Only later did I see the disclaimer: “For best results, hold directly under saucer.”

3. All reviews by Billy Bob McRobert. An excerpt:

… but I digest … I’m sposed to be talkin about the Xtend-o-Truck. Now that we have this Xtend-o-Truck, the person on the back is always lined up straight! So, when we hit the speed bump he (or she if the girls aint too warn down from the mornin sickness) always flies just one direction: straight toward the truck. We learned pretty fast that you need to do a little hop right before the truck stops though. Otherwise you just wrap your bodily middle sections around the crossbar of the Xtend-o-Truck and it takes a day or two to walk upright and propper again. If you time it just right you can use the bar to sprang up in the air and do some amazin flips and poses before hittin the truck! I even got a few new dents in the HOOD of my truck from Lucas sprangin off the crossbar just right!

While the above list is anything but complete, I hope to see some more contributions in the comments.

I started with a list of things I will need this desk to accommodate:

• Desktop PC
• Two 23″ Monitors
• Keyboard & Mouse
• Laptop
• External HDD
• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Speakers
• Tons of cables
• Headset / Headphones
• Lighting
• Filing Drawer for various papers
• Random Stuff Drawer
• Storage Drawer

With those “requirements”, I came up with a model that I was pretty happy with and used those as I went to price out my adventure at the local Home Depot. At this point, I have modified my plans according to changed needs and finished basic construction of the desk. As I complete the staining and finishing of the wood I hope to revisit and detail the process of construction, with pictures, and explain what I’ll be doing differently next time.

Also, the handles are mad sexy:

There are subtle differences between the way different browsers on different operating systems render the exact same font. While it may not seem like a big deal, it can create big headaches as designers need to choose how to keep their design consistent accross platforms. Since the variation between what browser and operating system a user only becomes greater, I can only see this becoming a larger issue as more people use the different browsers.

While I’m not going to document the problem extensively here, as Chris Coyier over at CSS Tricks documented the rendering differences quite well and a quick look at my own website shows some of the symptoms, I would like to suggest a solution or two as I plan to implement them on my own site.

The above shows the subtle differences on my own site when I only change OS. While not an incredible change, those 3 or 4 pixels are terribly annoying every time I see them on my Windows box.

The Fix
Luckily, that specific problem I think I will be able to fix with a relatively small snippet of jQuery JS or PHP magic. While it will rely on the user-agent, which can easily be spoofed, it should be able to fix the issue for the majority of users. I’ll basically just be grabbing the user-agent OS / Browser, and inject some CSS into the page to adjust the padding / margins of whatever elements it affects. However, I don’t see this as a solution.

The Solution
My fix will be very site specific even though the principle idea can be applied to any site. A solution should fix it in one swoop, but I do not see that happening for some time. I think the only effective way to solve this issue would be to introduce a “Web Font Rendering Engine” that would have to be voluntarily introduced into each browser. Although solving the problem, this is less than ideal considering it would require a browser upgrade and eight years later people are still using IE 6.

To update our new site without updating it, we wanted to use the various places on the interwebs we do participate actively in to fill in the blanks. Our blogs, twitter accounts, flickr photostreams, etc. As I began to think about the logistics of creating these tremendous feed of information, Yahoo! Pipes came to mind. It’s an incredibly useful tool that basically allows me to aggregate data from as many places as I want, process it, and spit it back out as RSS / JSON / whatever I need.

While the above is still just a sort of proof of concept, I expect to use this to provide all the data for the site in a way I can interpret it and display it for the masses.

- Jason Chen (Gizmodo.com)

While it isn’t really anything ridiculous, it’s very special because it meets exactly my needs. It fits every electronic I want, and provides my with plenty of storage for trinkets, more electronics, and papers. In addition, it has ample desk space, with a place to push my keyboard and mouse under the monitors when I find myself needing more space still.

While these plans remain far from final, they represent the desk at it’s most basic requirements. I still need to consider technical aspects and design choices for the desk. During its two plus year stay at Penn State, it will undoubtedly take a beating from myself and my housemates.

As far as materials go, I haven’t even decided what kind of wood I will be making this out of. While I would love to make the entire thing out of figured maple, I feel this to be unreasonable. Maybe my personal wood expert will have a suggestion besides oak.

After a bit of search for cute poses for both Hoops and Yoyo, I created these two vectors that I’m making available for download. Please note that as Hoops and Yoyo are not my IP, you definitely should not be using the imagery for commercial stuff. I’m just making it available for anyone out there that wants to make something with a bit of Hoops and Yoyo flair. If you make something you want to share, come back and post it in the comments!

Download Hoops and Yoyo.

The concept for the site revolved around a thought cloud to symbolize the free thinking and intellectual goals of the organization as requested by the coordinators Dr. Tapia and Dr. Ocker. The site’s minimalist design lays on top of a custom CMS system to make maintenance and updates to the site such as adding pictures, students, or forms easy for both myself and the two professors. I’ve had a great time working with both professors in reasarch and in the design process of this website. Below I’ve posted a few screen shots from the website along with a little tidbit about each.

The above page is used by the organization to list upcoming events as well as post pictures and information about events past.

The home page of the site, that also serves as the about page, draws information from the MySQL database that can be updated from the administration panel. There site administrators can manage page revisions and drafts to the site’s about page.

Just like the old engineer joke:

‘There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multi-million dollar machines.

They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who has solved so many of their problems in the past.

The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small “x” in chalk on a particular component of the machine and stated, “This is where your problem is”. The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again. The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for this service. They demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.

The engineer responded briefly:

* One chalk mark $1
* Knowing where to put it $49,999′

Web designers, like engineers, are paid for their intangible expertise on the subject, something hard for non-experts to gauge or comprehend.

I basically started the design for my new site (which should be coming up soon, btw) with the animation and built it from that. The small snippet of a picture of my screen is a bit of a teaser for the new site, and you might notice that I’m rebranding the site to my own name. While I enjoy the Bit by Bit name and the whole duality of it and stuffs, I felt this makes more sense as a personal portfolio website. Hopefully Google agrees, and I will no longer see my friend, Andy Mangold, ranked higher than me for my own name.

Despite digressing into a promotion of my redesign, I would like to point out some of what I consider to be the finer uses of Flash. It is most definitely a powerful tool, and likely something that can impress visitors, but it can also be overwhelming and distracting. By using Flash to introduce movement to your site in a sublte way, you can maintain a clean aesthetic and add just a little bit more to the site. It also allows the Flash to degrade nicely to a static image and continue to look great for all those (few remaining these days) that don’t have Flash installed.

I don’t think anything turns me off more when I visit a website on my iPhone to see half the design missing because I don’t have Flash installed.