George Lakoff: our hero

One of the best reads of last year was George Lakoff’s Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. (Admittedly, we were prejudiced in likeing Lakoff. He was our hero and guidepost through metaphor thinking in onlinecommunication — our master’s work.) Lakoff picks apart the varying controlling metaphors that Conservatives (as a group) tend to use and what that says about how they think, and he does the same for Liberals. All in all, quite amazing, and quite telling about how government is run and posed.

Recently, we found that there is also a DVD that you can rent / own.

On the cheap: software

We love open-source software. It’s usually small, fast, and does one or two things wickedly well.

As we mentioned yesterday, Firefox 1.5 launched yesterday. Aside from a few extensions not working properly (grrr), it seems to work pretty well. Our current biggest upset is that the Calendar extension no longer works. We use Calendar to keep track of some serious stuff, so that’s a bad thing there. Lifehacker (whom we love) has a workaround for some externsion blargaring.

We were particularly excited about installing the update, as we had installed a Beta version on our machine, which created a huge Status Area at the bottom of the browser. Uninstalling the Beta did nothing to erase it. But thankfully, as we suspected it would, the release version wiped it up.

But more than browsers, we love to actually do stuff. And for that, we look to the Open CD, which has recently launched version 3.1. We have also recently found that Wikipedia has a nice directory of open-source software. The one software that we are most looking forward to is Jahshaka, a video and movie-making software.

On a parallel topic, we love things that make us more productive. This is why we began this who blogging thing. Okay, one of the reasons. The blog groupies are amazing. We recently heard Paul Ford — author of Gary Benchley, Rockstar, and frequent contributor to our favorite morning news site, The Morning News — on NPR talking about disctractions and computing. He had some compelling suggestions, but we don’t think we will be installing WordPerfect for DOS any time soon (sorry).

But he mentioned a keyboard that “stores your text”, but doesn’t do anything else. We were intrigued. Imagine, no (computer) distractions as you type! Lo and behold, here is the AlphaSmart Neo. It seems like it’s all the use of a portable word processing program–check out that fancy but low-fi software!–, but with none of the laptop overhead to go with it. (It dumps into a computer via USB come time to print.)

We are thinking of buying the rechargeable version, which has an AC cord. 269 bucks is a lot, but we are also thinking that future generations of Free Tacos (Free Taquitos?) will get much use out of it. Especially when daddy won’t let them chat or surf after hours.

Getting better all the time: Illustrator

When we first began using Illustrator, we were so frustrated. All the time. We couldn’t understand how everythng worked. We came from a Photoshop world, and the fluidity of Illustrator bugged the hell out of us.

For a set of docs at Le Job, we opted to create TIFFs instead of AIs, only because the set of P’shop tools was so much handier than Illustrator’s.

But we persisted. WE struggled, we read books, we learned. And now, we are proud to say that we have remade a lot of those old images which, frankly, ended up looking blocky and choppy in print and PDF form. Now we have glorious vector graphics that are smooth smooth smooth! It makes us very happy. And we have smart looking graphics that are very controllable and adaptable.

Edit: We caught ourselves this evening, while working with P’shop, marvelling at how it doesn’t treat objects independent objects. And so we come full-circle.

Along the way, we found CreativePro and Adobe Proxy magazines, both of which offer up good tips and advice for burgeoning designers. And in our jack of all trades magic switchblade, we find we are designing more and more every day. (Now if only InDesign Mag was free….)

On another slightly different note, we think the MyFonts’s utlity What the Font is pretty darn neat. Upload a file and they will tell what the font used is.

What it looks like to be you

When designing online, one must get a sense of what things look like for other people. Gone are the days with the little button that said, “This site looks best with BrowserYou’llNeverUse.” The best one of those, btw, said, “This site looks best on my computer.” Because it always does.

CSS was supposed to take care of a lot of those issues. Of course it did not, because not everyone plays by the same rules (see browser compatibility).

But still, we try. Because we care, we love, we try. A recent project has presented issues with Safari on Mac (where it’s perfect with Firefox on Windows, so what gives?) So we have been interested in checking out a good Mac emulator. But, failing that, we will be happy to take our chances with buying time on BrowserCam. We have seen other sites that let you publically check out what a site looks like through a different browser, but for project development, that’s not really a “good option”.

We, however, remain steadfast in our love of Firefox. We hear 1.5 is set to drop today, too. W00t.

Here is an extension for viewing a site “as IE” while never leaving the comfort of your Firefox tab (from lifehacker).

And speaking of Firefox tabs, you might want to move your tab bar. We have yet to try tohis trick, but it sounds like fun.

And there is this promising article on How to Turn FF into a Web Writer. We are writers for the web, so this looks nice. And here’s a fun movie from the amazing folks at Coudal partners about a writer.

We found safaritest to be a good and cheap (free) previewing solution for the Windows-based web designer. The KHTML engine is a bit differen than Firefox’s, so one needs to actually see the screen to test the differences. Although, for its quirkiness, it’s necessary to have a Mac with IE on it to test that browser.

Hacking the body: fight brain-freeze and more

Men’s Health has a sheet of 18 tricks to teach your body. Nice little hacks and work-arounds for everyday problems. Our favorite? How to combat brain-freeze. Yes, we are susceptible to this horror. And, living in the middle of Hell, we are inclined to drinking very cold drinks to cool off. And, because we are children, we drink them too fast. But there is hope.

13. Too much Chipwich too fast will freeze the brains of lesser men. As for you, press your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering [area] as much as you can. “Since the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, your body thinks your brain is freezing, too,” says Abo. “In compensating, it overheats, causing an ice-cream headache.” The more pressure you apply to the roof of your mouth, the faster your headache will subside.

Hot diggity! Now, when combatting the “warmest winter on record (yet again” with Slurpees galore, we shall not be mocked as our eyes tear up, and we rest our heads in our hands until the world comes back into focus.

Adobe freebies – training and files

At our work, we have come to rely upon Adobe’s InDesign. Pagemaker, the program replaced by the new interloper, was a great program. The best thing about it was its “Make Booklet” function, and we absolutely, categorically despise that not only was that functionality removed from ID, but that it could be bought for an extra price in, confusingly, could be either a different form of the program (from Adobe) or a plug-in from a third party–but it was never made clear which it was. Plus, looking over the functions in each, one is not sure even if one gets what one wants from the extra purchase. Rubbish.

Frankly, we were up for scrapping the entire effort. But as we said, we need it for our work.

We found a nice set of free, online video tutorials for InDesign CS (and blast-all that CS 2 business). We have also uncovered another set of tutorials, but they have not been evaluated yet.

Also interesting, is Adobe’s own print and video Tips and Tutorials. We have checked out a few of these, and they are nice. The site is slow, but the tutorials are nice.
But what we are really loving–head-over-heals, to-die-for loving–is Adobe’s Studio Exchange, where lovely designers and good folk users upload things they have created so that others may use them, too. There are Photoshop and InDesign bits, as well as bits for one of the many banes of our existance, Illustrator. Huzzah.

We have also found some other templates for InDesign from WorldWide Printing and Sheriar Press.

FreeTacoHere is dead. Long live Free Taco!

I began a blog on March 22, 2001. It ran for 4 and a half years, through happy beginings, near endings, real endings, 5 jobs, 3 moves, 2 wars, a massive identity change (for me), the “blogging revolution”, a lot of learning, a firing, and the single largest attack on American soil. It was there when I needed it, listened to my secrets, found me lost friends, and told my troubles.

There was a lot about it that I didn’t like, of course. But one thing that kept me going was that it was free and it was available. Always. But now it’s coming to an end.

I found the other day a message, saying that the service I hosted with will be ending as of December 31, 2005. So I’m moving on to greener pastures. Here. Here is where the Barbaloots have plotted down their parcels and Barbaloot suits for a rest. New service, more streamlined name. The Taco shall survive.