em:two; the musings of a casual geek

A bit of an update to this I've just been having a browse round the new CSS3 specs and stumbled across one of the most recent approvals by the W3C which is an interesting addition of rounded corners (or border radius). Alot of you will have seen this before I'm sure but that, and in fact the whole site, is well worth a visit.

To be honest, I love the ease of the CSS method but the on page rendering doesn't really look as elegant as the jQuery solution. It's a shame too that Microsoft and Opera / Netscape have yet to update their browsers to recognise this new CSS property.

Ah well, we'll get there eventually. 

Well I've been waiting (geek) for IE8 to reach the second beta so I could have a play around with it. I'm interested purely from a designer's perspective as I'm in the same boat as the gazillion other designers out there who have to hack up their code to make IE (normally 6 but 7 doesn't make the grade either) do what you ask it to.

We all love Firefox and the latest addition of FF3 is frankly superb. The "Awesome Bar" does exactly what it says on the tin and for everything else you want FF to do there's likely a suitable add on that will do the job.

At time of writing I've just read this article and have yet to download the beta for a play but if the article is to be believed, Microsoft have finally addressed IE's markup inconsitencies and have made it stand up as a real FF rival in the eyes of a designer. Course, they've blatantly downloaded FF3 and seen what it can do, then made their browser do the same but at least we can hope that in a few years we only have to write one lot of code for all the browsers out there.

I'll save judgement until I've had a play and for the moment it's just another browser to add to the constantly growing testing list. 

That's right, just a quickie.

The comments have now been styled up so you should be able to post away. I've also made the Tag cloud a little more workable so any feedback is much appreciated.

Laters 

As I do alot of training work and material development when I'm a contract I usually find myself shipped around from machine to machine depending on the client's requirements. A massive problem I used to have was that I'd need to write some training guides and struggle to find any decent screen grab software.

A few months ago a good friend of mine Al Bundy pointed me in the direction of Zapgrab.net, an awesome piece of free software that requires no installation and can be carried around dead easily on a USB stick and called upon when required.

Don't know if it is already, but I reckon it should deffo be included in the PortableApps suite along with Lightscreen Portable (which in my opinion is also awesome but just a bit too involved when all you want to do is Ctrl + V into a training guide).  I thought i'd share it with you in case you're in the same boat I was in!

Well it struck me last night while I was sat on the coffee table (the sofa's too soft) playing the acoustic (that Matt severely detuned, freak!) and working on stuff that singers apparently work on like intonation, breathing and phrasing or summat, that I was actually singing and working on songs that are being performed in front of total strangers but have come out of the depths of my head.

Now I've only been writing songs since about May 2007 (ish) so it's not actually that long in the grand scheme of things. But I think I've written about 25 or so and so far about 12 of those have been worked on by the band and / or me and Matt acoustically (that a word then?) and have been met with surprisingly good reviews. Hmmm, how bizarre.  More so is the fact that we've now started to properly record these songs and the first batch that went on MySpace (Blank written by Nic) are still receiving good feedback.

This really baffles me as in my head I always thought they were resonable songs but people actually like them and sing them. This is a really odd thing to get to grips with; you spend a few hours over the course of a few days writing a song that's about something that's happened to you or a scenario that inspired you etc and you automatically think (or I do at least) that it's on the lower side of mediocre. But then when you work on it with a band and it becomes an actual song it starts to take on a life of it's own and you find yourself in the shower singing it.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get across is that it's a good / odd / proud feeling when you've put something together in your living room that ends up being sang by people at a gig or gets banged on someones iPod. Weird but awesome.