BrainFuel

It’s Chris Tingom’s birthday today. Thanks for all the great content, Chris! Remember to look both ways before you cross the street, and keep an eye out for alpacas. They’re dangerous.

Okay people, here’s the deal: I’ve got an urge to learn PHP, and it’s not going to go away any time soon.

The solution? I’m gonna read up on the language and make an attempt to learn it. That’s where you come in. I’m looking for some books that might help me on my grand quest for programming knowledge, and if you know of any such books that you think would help, please feel free to mention them in the comments.
Most beginner-level book would really help me get off the ground (although I’m not a total novice. I have, at times, managed to hack together some if/else code of dubious quality). I’m thinking about buying this book from Amazon. Any suggestions?

It’s 2005. We’re living in the ‘information age’. We have all these technological communication solutions (email, instant messaging, telephone, and video conferencing to name a few) but it’s still outrageously hard to communicate. Especially through email.

What I’m trying to say is this: it’s hard to explain stuff. Actually, scratch that. It’s hard to explain stuff to clients, especially when you’re doing it through email. It’s really difficult, because you can’t point at things on the screen, or wave your hands around in the air in elite gesticulation. You can’t modulate your tone of voice, or enunciate things just the way you want to.

Nope. You can’t. Instead, you have to type. And through typing, a lot is lost. Instead of pointing, you have to make up your own nouns for things. Overcomplicated nouns, adjectives, and cluttered sentence structures will then take over. They storm the gate, bringing the battering ram with them. They burn, pillage, and enslave your email, and you realize that no one, not even yourself, will understand what you’re writing. You find yourself saying things like:

“I can’t do the navigation the way you’re suggesting, because of the thing in the middle (the red band) interrupts the header division, and the navigation block button band thing will overlap the main body text, which in turn will cause people running Internet Explorer to spontaneously combust. Unfortunately, the usual work-around isn’t going to be effective, because of conflicting javascript and css syntax. That’s what causes the footer and footercontent margin classes to appear bloated and disjointed, which in turn makes the css :hover psuedo class code that controls the pull-down unordered list of none effect.”

And your clients won’t understand this. No one will understand it—unless they’ve got a Bachelor’s degree in telepathy. To effectively communicate with clients, you almost have to put them through a crash course in web design. You need to explain all the intricacies of all these different aspects of html and css.

So this is why I’m asking you, the reader, to search the web for a college where I (or any client I might acquire) can get a Bachelor’s in telepathy.

Start googling, everyone!

Recently, I came across a mini site for one of Porsche’s newer cars, the Cayman S. It’s definitely worth a look, so check it out if you’ve got the time. Good use of flash, very interactive and very immersive. It doesn’t hurt that the car they’re advertising is incredibly stunning, either.

The nice thing about car companies, is that they seem to have an unlimited website budget.

Brainfuel is now decked out in stylish bright green, with a design created and coded by yours truly. There is still an error or two in Windows Internet Explorer, but (hopefully) those will be fixed (eventually). Please feel free to post a comment about the new design!

Check it out, yo! Brainfuel has been newly upgraded to WordPress One Point Five Point One Point Three (1.5.1.3). Time for celebration!
Yes, yes, we know. We’re using the default template. But that should change. We have a new design in the works. In the meanwhile, enjoy the new digs!

Recently, I’ve been dabbling in the arts of form-based mail (i.e., on your website, someone fills out a form with their email address, subject, and message content, and an email is sent to you). I’ve managed to blunder my way through, and come up with something that works, but there’s a problem: the w3 validator doesn’t like it. It comes up with errors like:
Document type does not allow element “form” here; missing one of “object”, “applet”, “map”, “iframe”, “ins”, “del” start-tag and Value of attribute “method” cannot be “POST”; must be one of “get”, “post”.
Anyone know what’s going on here? I’m trying to get my page validating as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Google reports that an astounding 86% of the internet has gone down the tubes, for almost no apparent reason at all. Rumors have been floating around about alien invasions and/or terrorist attacks, although the CIA has confirmed neither one of them. Luckily, Tornado’s servers survived, or else this blog would be history, too! Google also reports that approximately 80 TB (terabytes) of data has been eradicated, and they’re in the process of following clues that might lead them to the culprit; speculators report that it might be an unwitting mistake made by Helga D. Browning, who owns the oldest, most outdated computer connected to the internet. Helga says she turned her PC on, it made a whirring noise, and the hard drive exploded (the incident apparently happened the same time most of the internet disappeared). This suggestion, as with all others, has yet to be verified by the CIA.