There are no images above, nothing but css (half of it vendor propriety, sadly), and this was entirely created with primary colors: Red Yellow and Blue. Why? Because I wanted to see how well you could create other colors using additive color mixing methods like you would with paint through overlayed rgba semi-transparent colors. A standard color wheel with secondary and tertiary colors was the obvious test. This works in Firefox, webkit browsers and even, yes, Internet Explorer. Well, the curved edge that makes it a circle doesn’t work in IE. But the semi-transparent color overlays to simulate additive color mixing that I was wondering about? Works like a charm! Read the rest of this entry »
Most Recent Blog Entries
Color Wheels with only CSS3 and Primary Colors
July 11th, 2010Milwaukee City Hall
June 30th, 2010Vignetting/Depth of Field with Smart Objects CS4/CS5
June 30th, 2010Now, assume for a moment I wanted to focus attention strictly on the tower, up around the clock, to show off some of the great architectural detail on the Milwaukee City Hall. One way to do this is to blur out the rest of the picture (called a “depth of field” effect). The masking adjustment and edge refining controls that were added in CS4 make this damn simple. Read the rest of this entry »
Guess I’m just getting old
June 22nd, 2010…but man, social networking is more work than it’s worth. Blog comments… if you’re reading a popular blog, there’s no point in answering it because there’s so many comments no one really reads them past the first five or ten and someone else has likely already said what you want to say anyway. Twitter, sure, you can pass along funny or useful info and sometimes have a short conversation but most people seem to fill their “following” list with hundreds of people and I’m sorry but there’s no way you’re _actually_ following hundreds or even a thousand people with any form of meaningful interaction. Just following my friends, family and guildmates on Facebook (about 100 people) takes an hour every day and if you miss a day, well, don’t bother trying to catch up.
There’s so much more to life. Put down your cellphone. Turn off your computer. Go outside in the sun. Go down to the corner pub and buy a beer. Go dig in the garden or walk around the neighborhood and meet your actual neighbors. Post to facebook… tomorrow. You don’t need to tell your three thousand followers on twitter that you’re climbing the steps or going to the bathroom. Wait til you have something worth saying.
There’s lots of things worth saying. Discuss things related to theories about your passion or your job. Post about _meaningful_ happenings in your life. It’s great that you can talk to people you’d be incapable of keeping up with otherwise. But gods, before you write something think to yourself: “Does anyone really care? Am I adding something worth reading to the conversation? Will people who follow me for updates care about this?” Otherwise you’re just adding to the noise.
WordPress 3.0
June 21st, 2010Have to say, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about where WordPress has gone. I was a little worried when I decided to switch over to WordPress a year ago. I was worried that the first upgrade would break my theme (which I’ve redesigned about a million times since then), that the upgrade would make me lose data from the database, that every upgrade would turn out to be a freakish chore that took a whole weekend…
…but I figured it was worth it to let someone else worry about coding for security and maintainability instead of me spending my time on it for the blog software I wrote for myself before. If I’m not spending my time worrying about whether or not I escaped something properly, I can spend that time working on other things, like site design or freelance work or drawing *cough*or playing WoW*cough*.
Instead what I’ve found is that upgrading is painless and so far hasn’t caused a single problem. It takes about three minutes and most of that time is actually me taking a backup “just in case”. I’ve had no problem posting code snippets (which seems to cause some blog software to choke) or with putting special code in just for particular posts. And I have made extensive use of being able to save things as drafts. It’s really come a long way. I would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for blog software.

