I swear students will say anything to get out of a lecture:

I’m sorry I’m not going to be able to make it to class today. My wife and I just had a baby boy yesterday at 10:08pm at Ingham Regional Medical Center. He’s perfectly healthy and 6lbs 3ozs and 19.5″ long. I hope that I don’t miss a whole lot and that I can get copies of the handouts and any information that I missed. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Congratulations to the Marlatt family! Exclusive video here.

Out buds over at Creativebits have a post on how to dress to impress.

You’ve worked hard on this presentation. You gave up your workout and a date to put in the extra hours. You stayed late night to perfect the keynote slide show. All the boards are mounted and the rationale has been proof read. This presentation is a stepping stone for a bigger deal. The only question on your mind is: what to wear for it?

You may think only your work is important, not your appearance, but you would be wrong. Your work and the way of presenting it are of equal importance.

Read Designers, what to wear for client presentation.

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its’ primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

Try it out: The Typetester

I got an email last week from Patrick who asked where he could find some cheap and preferably free stock photos. I didn’t have an answer for Patrick but I did some searching and found some. I haven’t dealt with any of these places so I don’t know how good they are. Leave a comment if you have any experiences or know of other places:

FreeDigitalPhotos.net: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Photogen: http://www.photogen.com
Public-Domain-Photos.com: http://public-domain-photos.com
StockVault: http://www.stockvault.net
Stock.XCHNG: http://www.sxc.hu
Yotophoto: http://yotophoto.com

Update:
I just stumbled onto this list of 100 places to find images. I’m sure the ones I listed above are in this list as well but I’m not gonna complain if you don’t.
Virtual Hosting.com – http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/100-legal-sources-for-free-stock-images/

Brendon Sinclair has a post on sitepoint.com about what it takes do be a freelancer. His post server partly to selll his book but it’s still a good one.

Trial naturally involves the risk of failure. A lot of people believe it’s safer never to try; that way, they’ll never fail.

No kidding. You don’t have to like failure but you sure as hell can’t be afraid of it either. Read more here.

I’m hang’n at CreativeBits this morning and saw this post about Branding Resources. I thought I’d pass it along to all my peeps.

Here is a list of a few branding resources that I found on the DHL small business website of all places.

http://www.dhlsmallbusiness.com/knowledge_sales.html

Articles
—————————
Put Your Business Name to the Test — This test can help you determine how effective your name is in terms of marketing your company.

Branding Basics: Understanding the Brand Trilogy — A total approach to branding requires creating the brand, selling it and fulfilling its promise.

What Does Your Logo Say about You? — The right logo can be the anchor to your brand. Your logo should mean something to your customers; it should convey a message about your company and your offerings.

Small Business Branding: An Online Education Company — Branding education and resources for what site founder Michael Pollack calls “solopreneurs.”

Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide To Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position — This is brief review of the book Brand Aid, by Brad VanAuken, President and founder of BrandForward, Inc., which provides solutions for 22 common branding challenges.

(Via creativebits – mac design community.)

This has nothing to do with art or the net but it is a) a topic that’s near to my heart and b) just neat. So here ya go:

Right now, there are more than 70,000 people on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in the US alone. Sometimes, a family member will offer to donate a kidney to a relative. That’s a really amazing thing to do. The problem is that one-third of the time, the match isn’t right. But what if the donor, say, from one family, is a good match for the recipient in another family, and vice versa? According to Science News, researchers at the United States Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University hope to address this with a mathematical method to “match up the maximum number of donors with recipients while simultaneously guaranteeing high compatibility in each case.” The technique is based on graph theory, a way to model the relationship between pairs of objects. From Science News:

(US Naval Academy mathematician Sommer) Gentry expects that if there were a national registry in place for kidney matching, and if it used her team’s method, then each month, about half the pairs in the registry would find a compatible match. Each year, 1,000–2,000 patients would get kidneys who currently would not.

By contrast, as of 2005, only 51 patients had ever received kidneys through a swap in which two incompatible pairs exchange donors to create compatible pairs. Gentry calculates that developing a national registry could save $750 million per year, because dialysis, the only alternative to transplantation, is very expensive.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

Here’s a list of seven deadly things to avoid with your digital camera. Mostly common sense really but somethings need repeating…

The Digital Camera has a number of natural predators – things that in just a few seconds could snuff out it’s life and render you camera-less. Learn to identify your camera’s predators and take a few simple precautions and exercise a little care and you can keep your camera operating at it’s potential for years [...]

(Via Digital Photography School.)