Time to buy a Mac for a Designer

I'm finally making the jump from a PC to a Mac. The deciding factor? Money.

I'm a designer with a lot of focus on user experience. You may wonder why I haven't been using a mac all along. Well, Macs are expensive and I've always had a PC. I remember when my dad brought home our first real PC. It was a Dell and the computer box was almost the size of a microwave. Hard drive space? A whopping 4GB. Since then, I've built my own PCs--always getting a nice CPU with extra RAM.

Do I have any affinity for Microsoft? Not a shred. In fact, I've decided that Microsoft's pathetic excuse for a browser, Internet Explorer, is my mortal enemy. I will rejoice on the day that IE officially loses the dominant market share, and I will sing the "Hallelujah" chorus when IE officially dies...

I think a designer can get by on a PC, but a Mac just makes life so much easier--Faster, simpler functionality and interface; no sudden system crashes; no endless system upgrades; and the list goes on. Most importantly, with a Mac, I won't get the awkward looks from people who learned that I was a designer on a PC.

Macs are sleek, beautiful pieces of engineering finesse and artistic design combined into one. It's no wonder that Apple can ask a pretty penny for its products. Because it's Apple.

No Humanity in the Chinese Government, I Could Not Refrain from Posting this

In lieu of the recent Nobel Peace Prize granting to Liu Xiaobo, I did a little more reading about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The cowardly, corrupt Chinese government will pay for it's crimes against innocent people.

I feel for the Chinese people in their oppressed state. I cannot sit idly and watch a corrupt government of more than a billion people oppress and abuse it's citizens. However, I don't know what I can do to help the Chinese gain freedom. Hence this post. Watch the video below:


The key to freedom for the Chinese people will be information penetration. There must be some creative way, with the technology of our day to penetrate the Chinese firewalls and keyword blocks.

Chrome is just fast

That's my reply to people who ask why I use Chrome. It's faster than any browser I've used, despite what folks say about Safari.

In fact, it's light years faster than Firefox on my laptop. When I go to type something in the URL box and realize I'm in Firefox, I will copy and paste what I've already typed and enter it in Chrome. That's how much faster Chrome is to me... Fast enough that I'll switch browsers in the middle of my query.

Now, you may be asking why I still use Firefox. One reason: Firebug. Sadly, I can't fully give up Firefox until a better version of Firebug (should it Chromebug?) is developed for Chrome.

Inception

Powerful piece of music. Minimalistic--simple melody.

Converting Local time to Unix Timestamp in Javascript

After some thought, I finally was able to come up with a javascript solution to convert the local time to a Unix timestamp.

Basically I used a few main Javascript functions: getTime(), getTimezoneOffset()

The first function (getTime) will convert the time we get from the Date() function, into a UNIX stamp. Unfortunately, when we convert this string, we won't get the local time, but the main UTC.

This is where I had to use getTimezoneOffset(). This function finds out the difference in minutes between the main UTC and your local time zone. I'm going to use the number I get from getTimezoneOffset and subtract it from the UNIX timestamp number I created. But getTimezoneOffset() is in minutes, so we'll have to convert it to the data type of the UNIX timestamp, which is milliseconds. Thus, we'll have to multiply it by 60,000 (60 seconds in a minute, and 1000 milliseconds in a second).

Below is the code I finally used (put this in a script tag):


var theDate = new Date();
var theTime = theDate.getTime();
var localMil = theDate.getTimezoneOffset()*60*1000;
document.write((theTime-localMil));

Race, Gender, Class in the media - How to teach your kids to realize the stereotypes

For my class in Gender, Race, Class in the media, we studied some of the psychological theories behind learning and socialization. As part of our group project, we presented a research paper concerning proper techniques for helping children to be aware of negative stereotypes and how to utilize positive ones.

Jacob Rascon, a member of our group, wrote an editorial about the issues behind many children's animated films, such as Lion King, Cinderella, and Aladdin.

I was fortunate enough to design the editorial for an 11x17 layout:

The Lion King, Disney Princesses, and Rising Above Negative Media Messages
By Jacob Rascon

Remember ‘the circle of life’ in The Lion King? What was that all about? Lions are at the top of the food chain and are therefore naturally better than all other animals—especially hyenas, who deserve their poor circumstance?

That doesn’t sound like the Disney I used to know. Remember when Princess Ariel gave up her voice? Why did she sacrifice that plus everything she’d ever known for a prince she’d never met? Not sure, but hey, she kept her looks...

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Advertising for Queen Elizabeth I

After a little bit of work, we came up with this: 

Text:
Why Queen Bess?

Her Highness Will

• Improve England's Industry and Trade
• Victoriously stop the war with France
• Promote the Arts