Mike on TAP

Here’s an interview I look forward to reading when I get a chance. Our friends at Wake Up Later had a sit down with Christine O’Kelly. I’ve never heard of her but she sounds like an interesting person.

When Christine O’Kelly was 17, she spent a summer traveling around in a VW bus with the Grateful Dead. Having nowhere to go “home” to and only owning some handmade apparel to sell, the experience taught her that (a) something always “works out,” and (b) you can never be too far “down and out.” Years later, after having a steady job and family, she found herself in the corporate world, working long hours for a small startup. Then one day, with no real planning, Christine decided to take another risk: quit her job and start her own online business, thus becoming the Self Made Chick

(Via Wake Up Later: Freelance + Passive Income.)

ARTS173 Student and all around interesting person, Linda Cowles sent me this:

I’m involved in an international research project with profs. from the U.S., Japan and Italy. The purpose of our study is to find out whether culture affects the internet viewing preference of students in different countries. For the project, three prototype websites were designed: 1) entertainment oriented– a site you might visit purely for fun, 2) interaction oriented– a site you might visit if you wanted to interact with other people, and 3) information oriented– a site where you might find information about something. Unfortunately, during a pretest of the sites, students didn’t find the entertainment site entertaining and didn’t identify the interaction site as such. Our conclusion so far: Profs don’t necessarily know what students find entertaining or define as interaction oriented.

So, here’s my request for help… If you would please find a couple sites that you think are entertaining and a couple that are interaction oriented and be so kind as to copy the URLs and email them to me at lindacowles@gmail.com I’d appreciate it a lot. This is totally voluntary (I can’t even offer extra credit), but your input could really help.<br/> Thanks much. –Linda

School’s narrowly associate themselves with helping their students find their first job. Article’s focus on that all-important “getting in”. But in the month’s of research I did before I left my last position, I found nothing on obtaining your second. Your second position is, in many ways, more important than your first. Hopefully it helps.

(Via creativebits – mac design community.)

OMG! OMG! OMG! I just learned something! Here’s a keyboard shortcut that I did no know.

While in the Finder, hit Shift+Command+Delete to empty the Trash. If there are locked files in the trash, you can get rid of those by holding Shift+Option+Command+Delete.

(Via MacTips.)

Listen up! This semester there was a line of people trying to get into ARTS 229 – Advanced Web Design. I’ve been informed that we have the very real possibility of opening ANOTHER section starting in Fall ’09. Please, please, please – if you’re considering taking ARTS 229 in the fall, let me know! Use this handy form and tell me your name, phone number, student number, and whether you’d prefer a day or night class.

Thanks! Now get back to work!

Mike – Happy New Year and hope you had a great break. Wondering if you can spread the word that we have a student employee position currently vacant in the web design area. Interested students should apply under JobLink at the college’s CES web site – http://www.lcc.edu/ces/.

Here are 4 free video clips from the new series from Total Training — Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Advanced Training with Janine Warner. Each link will open a new window with the video.

• Explaining Dynamic Web Pages
• Differences between Static & Dynamic Sites
• The Advantages of Dynamic Web Sites
• Styling a Navigation Bar with CSS

Via PhotoshopSupport.com.

Donnie Hoyle does a series of tutorials called You Suck at Photoshop with a twist. Or two. Probably not work safe – he uses the ‘s’ word. Twice.

He has other episodes available as well. They are not work safe either:

• Episode 2: Covering Your Mistakes
• Episode 3: Clone Stamp and Manual Cloning

Here’s a collection of the better stuff I’ve found so far today:

Mozilla Developer Center – The current goal is for this document is to provide comprehensive, detailed, and accurate reference information for CSS. I learned stuff from just skimming this!

Adobe Flash Tutorials – Best of – Smashing magazine is famous for it’s “best of” and “top 100″ lists. This time they’re looking at Flash tutorials.

Stuck. – Because quality tutorials shouldn’t be hard to find. Or so the slogan goes. They have links to tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and a couple of others that we don’t use.

Universal Usability is a free web design ‘book’ by Sarah Horton. Sarah has authored three book,Web Style Guide (with Pat Lynch), Web Teaching Guide, and this online companion to Access by Design. This site went online in late 2006 and, frankly, I’m not sure how something free eluded me this long.

In this book, we primarily address universal usability at the functional layer, focusing on the challenges of designing pages that are accessible and usable on different devices by diverse users. We concentrate on the functional layer because, without it, the other layers are irrelevant. An intuitive interface and informative content are useless if the basic functions of a site don’t work. Like a car that doesn’t start, a Web site that does not function is of no value to the user.

Read the book.