My son is inclined to throw money around like he has not responsibilities in life. Perhaps that is because for the most part that is true. He has income, but very few expenses that are mandatory. He is in the perfect part of his life.

He regularly says that one should not skimp in several areas of one’s life. Specifically:

1. food — always buy quality
2. tools — you will have them for years if you buy the good ones and weeks if you don’t
3. tape — duct tape isn’t generic, there is good duct tape and well stuff that pretends to be duct tape
4. adhesives — one of my favorite products of all time is Loctite 401 (specifications). It isn’t cheap, but it is good. Miracle glue appears cheaper at a buck or two a tube, but you use a new tube basically every time you need to glue something because it dried out. Loctite 401 stored in a fridge has a several year shelf life. It doesn’t run like the other quick glues. It has body so that it will bind and works on many porous materials … try that with your miracle glue! Get some and be happy.

This site looks to have some very nice tutorials on css (Cascading Style Sheets), including lists and floats. From a quick look it appears easy to follow as well and written in plain English. I’m putting it on my todo list.

Society is working towards making ADHD obsolete. Soon that will seem but a distanct memory to our newly dysfunctional society. Why twitter vision? Cause you cannot follow a thread even for a minute. And we thought chat rooms were bad?

It seems that the French upper house is about to swap from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu Linux for their PC requirements. They join a growing list of governments who have realised that you don’t need to upgrade hardware to anywhere near the same extent that you do with Windows. (VISTA might run on midrange XP class hardware, but it certainly isn’t a responsive experience.) Not to mention the fact that Firefox/Thunderbird and Openoffice.org are becoming more than competitive to their Windows competitors and the only real costs of the conversion are setup and training.

Read more about it at zdnet.

This is a really great site from a quick review of it. It offers a number of design tips and techniques and actually provides open source web designs that you can obtain and use, as well as encouraging you to share yours with others. I will have to return when I have some more time.

It has been an interesting night as I surf around tonight while in discussions with Reese of Reese Designs. She and I often collaborate on work.

Microsoft want us to use a new image format created by them. According to TGdaily it is a very capable format, if it lives up to Microsofts claims. The real worry here, is that Microsoft will probably have all softs of intellectual property claims tied up in this format, and will probably not allow all of their opposition to use it. The problem with that, is that if images in this format end up in web pages, you’ll probably need Internet Explorer to see them. Not that Microsoft would mind that of course.

We don’t need a new image format, there are comparable formats available now that can do most of this stuff anyway, (PNG for example) and the great thing about PNG is that it’s free for everyone. If this new format becomes the default image format on the net, we could have a situation where any free image viewing programs (including web browsers) would be unable to display them.
I’ll withhold judgement until I see the details of the licence for the new format.