Look at these cute signs I see every time I go outside of my house here. I just had to take a photo of them, only seen 3 different ones, but I am sure there are plenty more of them out there somewhere.
I specially like the one claiming “I never trashed your house”. Funny thing is that the sign is placed just outside of where we place the garbage in the street. (Yep, that’s how they do it here in Amsterdam, you have to place your garbage in the street on specific places and they come to pick it up twice a week)
Anyway, nice to see some fresh street art just outside of my casa.
I use the Google search engine numerous times a day. In my opinion it is the best search engine out there, always finding what you are looking for in no time. But the web is truly like a jungle and sometimes it can be hard to find the information you are looking for immediately. Here are some basic tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your search:
Explicit Phrase: Lets say you are looking for content about internet marketing. Instead of just typing internet marketing into the Google search box, you will likely be better off searching explicitly for the phrase. To do this, simply enclose the search phrase within double quotes.
Example: “internet marketing”
Exclude Words: Lets say you want to search for content about internet marketing, but you want to exclude any results that contain the term advertising. To do this, simply use the “-“ sign in front of the word you want to exclude.
Example Search: internet marketing -advertising
Site Specific Search: Often, you want to search a specific website for content that matches a certain phrase. Even if the site doesn’t support a built-in search feature, you can use Google to search the site for your term. Simply use the “site:somesite.com” modifier.
Similar Words and Synonyms: Let’s say you are want to include a word in your search, but want to include results that contain similar words or synonyms. To do this, use the “~” in front of the word.
Example: “internet marketing” ~professional
Specific Document Types: If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier “filetype:”. For example, you might want to find only PowerPoint presentations related to internet marketing.
Example: “internet marketing” filetype:ppt
This OR That: By default, when you do a search, Google will include all the terms specified in the search. If you are looking for any one of one or more terms to match, then you can use the OR operator. (Note: The OR has to be capitalized).
Example: internet marketing OR advertising
Domain Search: You can use Google to search only within one specific website by entering the search terms you’re looking for, followed by the word “site” and a colon followed by the domain name. For example, here’s how you’d find admission information on the Stanford University site:
Example: admission site:stanford.edu
Fill in the blanks “*” search: Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to ‘fill in the blank’ for you. You can do this by adding an asterisk “*” in the part of the sentence or question that you want filled in. For example, here’s how you’d search for who invented the parachute:
Example: the parachute was invented by *
Numeric Ranges: This is a rarely used, but highly useful tip. Let’s say you want to find results that contain any of a range of numbers. You can do this by using the X..Y modifier (in case this is hard to read, what’s between the X and Y are two periods. This type of search is useful for years (as shown below), prices or anywhere where you want to provide a series of numbers.
Example: president 1940..1950
Stock (Ticker Symbol): Just enter a valid ticker symbol as your search term and Google will give you the current financials and a quick thumb-nail chart for the stock.
Example: GOOG
Calculator: The next time you need to do a quick calculation, instead of bringing up the Calculator applet, you can just type your expression in to Google.
Example: 48512 * 1.02
Word Definitions: If you need to quickly look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply use the “define:” command.
Example: define:plethora
Hope you found some of these tips useful, and that it will help you on your search. It sure helped me. Now, all I am waiting for is for Google to come into my house and my real life helping me find all lost items, like where is the blue pants of my husband, where did my son leave his bottle and where the hell did I leave my Parker pen?!
Everybody is talking about Web 2 these days, but many people do not know what on earth this really is. Below is a very informative video created by professor Michael Wesch. He managed to tell the whole story in just under 5 minutes and it is definitely worth the watch. Only thing he maybe forgot to mention when he says that XML was created to separate form from content, is that CSS enables the same effect with HTML.
But here is your chance to upgrade your web knowledge!
I started with collecting the portfolio pieces in PhotoShop, making one long horizontal layer which I later imported into Flash where I wrote an ActionScript to follow the mouse scrolling the masked layer to the left and right instead of using the typical horizontal scrollbar. When all the portfolio movies were done, I made one main movie which loads/unloads all the respective movies.
To hang it all together, I was searching a bit before stumbling over the oh so fabulous Mootools. It’s basically a whole bunch of different JavaScripts you can choose from a library. The advantage with that is that since it’s JavaScript the file almost weights nothing and it’s read by all browsers and all systems. No plug-ins needed, no hassle involved.
Wanted the site to be as user friendly as possible and at the same time playful, and the Mootools were just a perfect choice for that. Everything is condensed into one page, with the Flash portfolio on top, then some info about us, a table with all of our clients completely stylized in CSS, followed by an Ajax contact form where I had to add a JavaScript validation in Dreamweaver.
What more? Oh ja, a script that randomly changes one of my 3 background images onLoad, very OldSchool. Still have a few minor changes to do but at least it’s now up there and live!
I’ve had a very productive week and I am happy to see that my work went live today! Nothing like the exciting feeling of a launch!
First banner is for Shell Pernis which is one of the biggest oil refineries in the world. The materials made at Pernis are used by customers to manufacture many everyday products including car parts, foam seating and bedding, paints, cooling fluids, pharmaceuticals and petrol.
Second banner is for Shell Moerdijk, which is a specialized division for chemicals. The products made at Moerdijk are used by customers to manufacture many everyday products, such as car components, synthetic fibres, insulation materials, latex paints and anti-freeze.
It was a true pleasure making these banners, specially because I had the luxury problem of choosing from hundreds of really superb photos. And also they just liked everything I did and you just have to love clients like that. Everything went smooth and I am happy with the result!
Have a look and click on the banners to see them live on Shell’s website!
Took me a whole day to write the last post because of an unexpected problem, when I pasted in the code in my blog post and saved it, the code was embedded inside of the actual HTML code instead of showing up as code. No need to say that it also utterly messed up my WordPress template design.
A lot of people write a lot about it and after installing a few useless plug-ins to only display the code as actual code, I came across a list of the most common HTML character entities and just what I needed. So now you know, just use following characters and your code will appear as normal code.
I am a FireFox (FF) lover, let that be said once and for all here. I do have very little love for Internet Explorer (IE) which always creates problems for me. I build my web pages and testing them in FF which almost always renders the pages correctly and just as I intended them to be. Then I do the testing in IE and low and behold, some fuggly white space between my images I build in CSS. GRRRRRR…
But have no fear, the remedy is very simple. If for instance you have used Image Ready to cut up your page and export the images for you, you just need to clean up your code a bit and IE will render your page just as FF do.
All you have to do now to make it look as good as our dear beloved FF is showing us, is to make sure there is no space in the containing divs in your code, like this:
On this very day - 04.04.07 I registered ReBirth Media here in Amsterdam at Kamer van Koophandel (picture). Now that felt good! Finally everything is official and I can start doing business the way business is supposed to be made. Feel very upbeat and ready to take on the world! So cheers for me and my brand new company!
The cold weather made my daughters lips all dry so she made some drawings of how she felt. Even the sun is crying… Luckily she is all fine now and draws only smiling faces.
The printer is working just fine so here is a drawing my 4 year old daughter made.
She is starting to draw more than just simple line drawings and is paying attention to small details like teeth. Oh, and the dots in the hair are of course diamonds…
Have a look at my Gym Class Heroes - Cupid’s Chokehold, they made an innovative and funny remix of Supertramp’s “Take A Look At My Girlfriend”. It’s PHAT!!
Yes! nothing is like getting a new gadget, this time I bought myself a HP OfficeJet 7210 All-In-One InkJet Printer. And it works for me and my small business! I am so happy with it, soon I’ll print my first business cards, and scan in all of my daughters drawings. I will post some of her funny drawings here since I think she draws really good. Didn’t even test the scanner yet, just made some prints and tested the fax. Nice with so many gadgets in one!
Inspired by my very good friend Nina in Norway which is showing us Street Art from Oslo on her blog, I now am on the look out for Amsterdam Street Art. Here is a nice piece from a walk we had with the family around the Museum Plein, where all the museums are located. Looked like the devil and I thought he was real cool so here he is living on my blog.
Was sitting here in my living room/office late at night when I suddenly saw fireworks from my window in March! Fireworks is pure eye candy so off I ran with my camera to capture the moment. It went on for at least 15 minutes and it came from the Tivoli or Kermis they set up on an old fabric terrain here in my hood. Just stood on the bridge to capture this big Paris Wheel. Nice, eh?
Don’t worry - I am not going to go into any politics here, but this image was just too amazing to let pass without any comment.
This is a photo of Hillary Clinton during a speech before the National League of Cities meeting in Washington 4 days ago, but it does not really matter what she says with this subversive logo in the background. It is working against her and it in fact looks like a big Fuck You in your face! Clearly not the message she wants to send out to the public.
This logo belongs to The National League of Cities and is supposed to be simplified image of a sky scraper and not a hand.
Hm… I would fire the creative director that came up with this idea!
