Peter Chester
What Are You Afraid Of?
Who would have thought that the best way to overcome my fear of big waves was to go surfing at night?
After a year of surfing three-foot waves on a ten-foot surf board, Shane started to push me to try bigger waves and increasingly challenging situations. However, the idea of a wall of water threatening to hit me with my 10 foot surf board was hard to swallow.
I liken the feeling to balancing on a curb… 40 feet off the ground. You know that 6 inches off the ground you can balance just fine. Though for some reason the extra 40 feet stirs a distinct uncertainty.
Bag of Tricks
Professor Peter Elsea completely changed my view of what a person can do when he taught me that skill is nothing but a bag of tricks.
The thing is, just about anyone can express music to some degree. Anyone can make a picture, or cook a meal. It might not taste very good, but perhaps that’s simply due to a dearth of tricks in the cuisine bag.
Informal Contract
So it just dawned on me, after having spent yet another weekend on this project, that maybe there should be a cap on the time or the number of revisions allowed within the scope of the bid.
Oh wait, we do have a cap in our contract. So (scratching my head), why am I now working on revision #4,536,136? Oh, that’s right, because this is for the one client that we have for whom we did not prepare a formal contract for.
This brings to light a fundamental concept… Contracts are for people who think they don’t need contracts.
Word of The Day: Vague Deadline
vague dead.line [vāg dêd’lîn]
noun
- An unclear time limit. Often implemented with the intent of relaxing time boundaries only to produce an impending sense of doom.
- A clearly stated deadline that has been utterly ignored and therefor requires de-emphasis. Usage: “Yeah, we figured 3pm sharp was a vague deadline and that it would be OK to get it to you at 6pm tomorrow.”
Photoshop Broke My Color
I’m on a Mac Powerbook. For months, I’ve been having trouble saving images for the web in Adobe Photoshop. What would happen is I would File > Save For Web and Devices… and find that many of the colors are de-saturated in the preview window.
What happened to my colors???
Word of The Day: Permabeta
per.ma.beta [pûr’mə-bā’tə]
adjective
- An indefinite state of incompleteness. Often symptomatic of highly humble or insecure engineers or agile development and web 2.0.
- A state of endless anticipation for advance to a higher level. Usage: “Johny wanted to get to third base with Suzy for years. Realizing his relationship was permabeta, he dumped her for Sally 3.0″
The Price of Simplicity
It can be hard to explain why a really simple UI design should cost more than a complex one. Here’s how I like to look at it:
Good UI does the work for you.
Our Type of Client
Last night at the Webbies Video Awards, Jennifer Daumler, Director of PR at Level3, asked me “what kind of clients do you look for?”
Continue Reading »
Setting Keyboard Focus on Flex onLoad
When you refresh the browser with a flex app running fullscreen, obviously the flex app should be focused…. but it’s not 
Here’s a really easy way to set keyboard focus on your flex or flash embeded code. Basically, just paste the code below into the bottom of your html. After the page loads, this code gets called and sets the focus on your embeded swf. Continue Reading »
Scrolling List using Tween
We had a situation requiring up and down buttons, and we wanted them to scroll a list. The catch is how to animate the scrolling. Here’s how we did it. Continue Reading »
