An Evil Mad Scientist

Gamelayers: First Day at PMOG

Lorin Tackett — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:24:23 +0000

First day in the office yesterday with GameLayers. Quite Cool - My coworkers are all pretty down to earth. They seem to be more interested in getting things done right and exploring many different approaches towards the solution of a problem. I’m not used to this. I’m more used to people hastily making a business decision and working towards the goal. This freedom to be creative and do what you need to do to solve a problem is really rubbing off on me.

So far, I love my new job.

Tags: PMOG, jobs

Chris Glein

Lorin Tackett — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:03:24 +0000

My buddy Carlos is “looking” for his lost friend Chris Glein. Apparently they’ve been friends since they were kids and Chris is being a punk. Pretty funny approach.

The moral of this story? Don’t punk out on interweb geeks.

Share the wealth… give this story some link love on your blogs. Thanks!

Disenchanted with the Hardy Heron

Lorin Tackett — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:45:06 +0000

Okay, I like Ubuntu… or at least I did… well, I still do… it’s complicated. I like all the new features of Hardy Heron, but it seems to come at the price of performance. I can almost go so far as to say my Dell C400 running OpenSUSE 11 outperforms my desktop running Hardy Heron.

My laptop is a Pentium M @ 1.2 ghz w/512mb RAM. My desktop is an AMD64 @ 2.2 w/1.5gb RAM.

WTF.

… and don’t get me started on when I had HH running on my laptop. It was totally useless for just about anything useful. Not even running XFCE could save the day.

That said, I’m downloading Linux Mint with high hopes — but not expecting miracles, as it’s based on Ubuntu.

42 - The answer to life, the universe, and travel?

Lorin Tackett — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:18:17 +0000

SASS Blueprint Grid on Github

Lorin Tackett — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:55:06 +0000

Table of contents for SASS Gridification

I started a github project for those of you following the SASS Blueprint Grid.

SASS Blueprint Grid

Previous in series

HAML 2.0

Lorin Tackett — Sat, 24 May 2008 16:29:33 +0000

Just reading about HAML 2.0. Man. I wish I wasn’t packing up for a move. I wanna play with it! Suffice it to say, I’m more of a SASS junkie than a HAML fiend, and the new SASS 2.0 features alone are enough to make me salivate.

Mix-ins is by far my favorite new feature in SASS 2.0. Now you can write chunks of reusable code:

=clearfix
  display: inline-block
  &:after
    content: "."
    height: 0
    clear: both
    visibility: hidden
  * html &
    height: 1px

… And place it within whatever rule you like

#sidebar
  +clearfix
  border: 1px solid black

Talk about leaner, meaner and more productive. Holy crap!

I’ll be rejiggering the SASS grid generator in SASS 2.0 in the next few weeks. I also have a new SASS project underway for when I have more time, SASS 2.0 will play an integral part in making it all work… without tipping my hand too much, it involves color schemes.

SASS Gridification - Part 2: Blueprint

Lorin Tackett — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:12:05 +0000

Table of contents for SASS Gridification

SASS Gridification - Part 1
SASS Gridification - Part 2: Blueprint
SASS Blueprint Grid on Github

I have extended my initial SASS grid to work with the Blueprint grid library. Now I can leverage the Blueprint grid in a completely SASSy way.

Please refer to Blueprint CSS for instructions and tutorials on how to use the grid.

Feel free to download, use, distribute and modify my work as you like.

download: SASS Gridification: Blueprint (3.32KB)
added: 05/20/2008
downloaded: 188 times
description: An adaptation of Blueprint 0.7 Grid in SASS. Change any one of three constants to recalculate the grid.

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Mission:Canonical — Western Union

Lorin Tackett — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:08:09 +0000

I just noticed this and thought it was more noteworthy to my blog than to Twitter;

If you go to the non-www westernunion.com, it does not load. It just sits there and eventually times out at the DNS level without sending a 404 message. This is by far one of the worst cases of poor canonicalization I’ve ever seen. Obviously it’s not hurting their ranking, but still — I would be horribly embarrassed if I was the website manager.

So far, so good: Microsoft Live Writer

Lorin Tackett — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:35:53 +0000

Trying out Microsoft Live Writer for blog posting now. So far it hasn’t borked my shiny green W3C validation, so maybe Microsoft has scored two points with me today. First OneNote, now Live Writer, and I’m working on some design and front-end projects for a Microsoft employee group using SharePoint.

I guess I should stop bashing MS, they’re really trying to dig themselves out of the hole. Vista really didn’t help, but if you ignore the glaring mar, they’re pushing out some pretty darn cool applications. So I will begrudgingly give a hat tip to Microsoft, after years of sucktitude, they are finally coming around.

The right tools for the right job, I suppose. *grumble*

Using Microsoft OneNote instead of Evernote

Lorin Tackett — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:50:49 +0000

Since my primary use of Evernote is to jot down music ideas while I wait for something else to process, I’ve decided that it’s too many steps needed to use Evernote effectively. Until a direct audio recording and playback plugin is developed, it’s pretty clunky to record in Adobe Audition, save the file, open the folder then drag+drop to Evernote. I’d rather just press a button to record, then move on… especially since I’m usually doing something else when music ideas come to me.

It was a natural progression to go to Microsoft OneNote as audio recording is one of its main features. I can put as many ideas on one ‘page’ as I like, which is especially useful to me as I might come up with several variations on the same theme in one setting. I do this quite often.

OneNote also has text-within-image recognition and indexing, though I’m wondering how Evernote and OneNote stack up against each other on that front. Evernote was able to recognize handwriting fairly easily, and while I haven’t done any comparison, the demo of text recognition in OneNote only shows computer fonts being recognized, which doesn’t impress me.

I’m not sure whether I will switch over entirely or keep using Evernote for textual notes and to-dos etc. I’d much rather keep all my notes in one place, but seriously… Evernote rocks the kazbah as far as search and tags.