Several of us here at the office have decided to have our own business cards printed. Psalm has some digital printer contacts, so I suppose he’ll be handling them. In the meantime, I have yet to decide how I want the paper (glossy, matte, or maybe a mix of both).

You can preview it on deviantArt.

Curious about what I actually do at work? You might wanna check out my account at tumblr. You’d be surprised how much in common employment has with unemployment.

I started my new job last Monday. It’s a night shift job but the pay is generous. I’m not working for peanuts anymore. So far, the workload’s pretty light and the client didn’t specify a deadline so it’s all smooth sailing for now. I get to take it easy, which is all good since I still work 2 shifts (I spend about 4 hours or so at my old office while waiting out the 30 days on my contract).

Earlier today while I was over at my former job, I overheard that a few more people are rumored to have resigned/will resign. I’m glad I’m only expected to stay there for a few more weeks. Morale over there seems to be dropping and the folks in my department have realized that they better start looking for greener pastures. I even tried to get at least one officemate to apply here out of pity. I’m lucky to have quickly found another ship to jump onto before the other one sinks.

The people here are great, at least the ones in my group. I’m still experiencing a bit of culture shock. I’ve gotten used to the bullpen setup as opposed to seemingly endless rows of identical cubicles. It’s not so bad, but I prefer the former. I guess you can blame Dilbert and Office Space for the bad rep.

My shift’s just about over, now I can drop the hardworking rookie act and go home. I have a few seasons of Lost, Family Guy and The Office waiting at home.

Gone were the days when I had to make 2 sets of CSS to make a site look consistent. I will miss them.

Today, I discovered that the CSS hover menus I use break in IE7. Now, I have to make 3 sets of CSS to make a site look consistent, at least without resorting to messy hacks. Conditional comments help but still, having to use 2 extra sets of styles for the same family of browsers is ridiculous.

I hate.. no, hate is too weak a word.. I loathe IE7.

Update: Development on Swift has resumed! You can download the new 0.2 version from the Swift site.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when a client kept sending revisions for their website. We were confused as his revisions concerned portions of the site that didn’t seem broken, at least to us.

Later, it was discovered that the client exclusively uses a Mac and Safari was rendering our work differently. Borrowing a Mac from the company’s execs wasn’t really an option, so I went around looking for a way to view sites the way Safari would render them. I came a cross browsercam sites BrowsrCamp and iCapture but both were slow and overall an inefficient way to tackle the problem.

Eventually, I came across a few sites making mention of a Windows browser called Swift that utilized WebKit just like Safari. I discovered that the project, while still in it’s alpha stages, seems to have been abandoned. Scouring the web for mirrors, I found that there were none. I wasn’t able to find any mention of it on WebKit’s site, as if the project was erased from history. Disappointed, I made it a point to try looking for it again sometime in the future, perhaps something will come up.

A few days ago, I came across Dave’s post. He had a copy of the files for Swift! I downloaded it immediately and attempted to run it. It gave me an error, citing something about the configuration. I contacted Dave and he provided the proper installer for Swift. I tried again but this time I got errors saying something about being unable to register WebKit.dll. After a quick search of the phrase in the error on Google, I discovered that I needed some Visual Studio runtime libraries to get it to run. So I installed the libraries, reinstalled Swift and it worked!

I tried the client’s site again and it was showing the same bugs as the ones I saw on the browser cam site. I never in my life thought that I’d be so glad to see such glaring and consistent errors.

Thanks Dave.

- Swift Browser mirror (21MB, zipped)

If you get an error that says it’s unable to register WebKit.dll, you need to install this:
- Visual Studio 2005 runtime libraries (2.5MB)

Take note that Swift never left the alpha stages, you may experience frequest crashes and be aware that forms do not work.

We need some. Seriously, going from 7 people down to 3 is so not funny. I’ve managed to find the contact info of someone who has ties to MMA students at Benilde, perhaps he can find some for us. Mental note: must send him email later.

If you can help or are interested, leave a comment or use that meebo widget on the sidebar if I’m online.

Just when I thought this week was going to be as bland as the last, the cosmos conspire to give me something good for a change.

First, this:

Dear Mr. Carlo [baleeted!],

Good day!

We like to invite you again to be one of our semi-finals judges for The 9th Philippine Web Awards.

Your kind cooperation and participation made in previous years’ competition/s credible in the eyes of the participants and therefore, made The Awards very successful. We are thankful for your commitment to the development of Filipino web design and it would truly honor us if you can be part of The Philippine Web Awards once more.

As you know, The Philippine Web Awards is an award-giving body that honors the best Filipino-created Web sites. Now on its 9th year, the Awards has gained industry-wide acceptance and is one of the most highly anticipated events in the Philippine Internet community.

Like in the previous years, the event will be organized by Media G8way Corp., the Philippine representative of the global technology publisher International Data Group, which publishes Computerworld, PC World, MacWorld, Infoworld, CIO, and numerous other titles.

The Pre-Finals Judging and Semi-Finals Judging are critical stages in the competition and we need competent, credible, and experienced Web professionals who can help us choose the semi-finalists and finalists. As a judge, you will score the screened official entries for three categories that will be assigned to you. Screened official entries have already been checked for eligibility and proper category. All you have to do is give a score for the four criteria for your assigned categories.

The Pre-Finals Stage (where the top 10 semi-finalists per category are drafted), and The Semi-Finals Stage (where the top 10 are further narrowed down to the top 5), will begin a few weeks prior to The Awards Night which is tentatively scheduled on November 2006.

As a show of our appreciation, we will feature your profile (brief background and portfolio) on the Philippine Web Awards Web site, e-mail newsletters and on the souvenir program during the event. This will help enhance your exposure to thousands of PWA participants, the media and potential clients. You will also be acknowledged as one of the judges during the Awards night.

Should you accept our invitation, we will be discouraging the submission of your personal sites to the competition so as to minimize conflict of interests. Your clients, however, are free to nominate sites that you developed, although you will not be judging in the categories that they will compete in.

Also, please provide us the following:
Full name
Nickname
Company (if applicable)
Tel. No. (landline and mobile phone)
Postal address
Web development training (seminars, courses, etc.)
Areas of expertise (Flash, HTML, ASP, PHP, XML, etc.)
Years in the industry
List of clients (including URL)
Personal/Portfolio site
Digital photo (300 dpi)

Additionally, our Technical Committee is in the process of looking for other judges for the competition. We acknowledge your immersion and expertise in the field and would greatly appreciate your referrals should you be familiar with any similarly credible groups and/or individuals who might be interested in participating in the judging of The 9th Philippine Web Awards.

Thanks very much and we hope to hear from you again soon!

Sincerely,

Amalia V. Curva
Technical Committee Chairperson
The 9th Philippine Web Awards

A little history lesson is in order. I was a pre-finals judge for the Webbys 4 years ago, in 2002. After that, I had no involvement with it as a judge or as a competitor. Now, it seems like I’ve been upped a little because now I’m being invited to be a semi-finals judge.

I have never been too excited about events in the local scene. I’m no scenester, and I tend to have a cynical or skeptical approach to things. I have a somewhat keen eye for work that’s really good and for those that are just pretentious. I think my nature of being not easily impressed will give a nice counter-balance to at least some of the judging.

The second good thing is, I’ve been contacted by the guitarist of Eternal Now, a local progressive metal band, for the purpose of making them cover artwork for their upcoming concept album. Apparently they held a contest for the artwork and still want more choices.

Several weeks ago, cross-posted on a couple of forums of my intention to make album cover artwork for free. I simply wanted to add some more credentials under my belt, and this one is a good opportunity. I emailed back asking for details, hopefully he will reply soon and nab me at least 2 seconds worth of popularity.

What these 2 things mean is that I’ll actually have to set aside time to update my portfolio. Not the most favorite thing for me to do, but it’s gotta be done.

Is it so bad to let a client screw up his own site? The beginning of a project is usually so much better. Everything has been agreed upon, everything has been organized and laid out neatly just waiting to be created. More »

<nerd>

The past week, I’ve been tasked with implementing a tricky design in XHTML/CSS. What a bitch it’s been. I’ve wrangled lightly with the CSS beast before and I usually end up getting a huge headache when I finally finish. This time around though, I think I’ve gotten used to the usual nuances and I’d say I’m getting pretty good at it. I crawled to the beast’s underbelly and gave it a firm kick in the nutsack.

I don’t think I’m at liberty to reveal what I’m working on right now, but it’s for a big local company looking to penetrate into the broadband entertainment niche. The only clue I can give is <3.

I’m rather satisfied with the template I’ve made so far. I’d like to think other people would’ve preferred to do it with tables because it would have been so much easier. There are still a few quirks with the CSS that refuse to go away, but I’ll figure it out eventually.

In my opinion they could’ve picked a better design, but hey, I’m proud to say it will look good on either IE or Firefox. I’m hoping to wrap up my part in the project this week and start work on the next big one.

</nerd>

Well crap. I just spent P300 trying to get a copy of my birth certificate only to receive, a few days later, a sheet of really fancy paper asserting that I, in fact, do not exist. The HR department won’t be happy about this delay. Sigh.

I’m skipping work tomorrow to get at least some of my other requirements straightened out. For now, they will have to settle for my tangible, physical presence.