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Warren Shea

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The (2) real reasons why I couldn’t be a designer

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 at 11:58 pm

1. I’m sensitive. I don’t take criticism too well…bad criticism can get be down, depressed, etc. I don’t handle constructive criticism too well either, or even compliments. Basically: I don’t want to be told what you think of me or my work, good or bad. I’m paranoid that I think that if I get compliments, it could be genuine or it could be an act towards letting my guard down so that someone could take advantage. Paranoid much? (that’s me talking to myself).

The real reason that I could never be a designer is:
2. I’m arrogant and I have too much pride. I take a lot of pride in my work, I’m pixel perfect with design, I try to keep my code clean, I do a lot of the little things most people ignore/don’t care about…because I care about everything I do (that I care about). If that makes sense…

But the thing with design, that’s so different from development, is that design is subjective. I could do my best work, something I’ve worked hard in and take pride in, show it to someone and they can say they don’t like it. And it’s their right. But I can’t take it. I can’t handle when the awesome stuff I’ve done…isn’t awesome in someone else’s eyes. Now, that’s life, I should get used to it. The problem is that I had done design for years now. I’d been an artist most of my life, been naturally talented (not enough to be professional). And then I’d have joe schmo <insert lame banking desk job&th; saying my stuff was no good. Pissed me off. Who the F*** are you to tell me you don’t like my stuff?!

.
. (time passes)
.

I’m looking up “design is subjective” in Google…and it’s telling me Good design is not subjective. And you know what, I believe that. Meaning a lot of things:

      1. Maybe my designs in the past weren’t that good. Despite my pride and hard work, maybe I wasn’t looking objectively. Maybe there was too much of my pride in my work and not enough skill/talent.
      2. Maybe joe schmo was right all along. Maybe my designs weren’t good enough that they weren’t “good design”. Which means a lot of things:
        1. Despite some natural talent/skill, without hard work and formal training/education, I could never be great
        2. I made the right choice giving up design a couple years ago and focusing on development, which I have to say, the ol’ brain enjoys. And I take more pride in dev because less people do/understand dev than they can/do design. Well, I imagine….that last statement is not backed up by any facts >_>

I’ll leave design to the professionals. The ones that read about design, the ones that blog and tweet about it, the ones that do research outside of work, the ones with textbooks on design, the ones that are formally trained/educated in that area (and I can only think of one person like that, he sits near me at work).

I’ll leave development to the professionals too. The ones that read about development, the ones that blog and tweet about it, the ones that do research outside of work, the ones with textbooks on development, the ones that are formally trained/educated in that area. Wait, that’s me :D (and yeah, I re-wrote and set that whole paragraph up…to prove/show that I’m a professional developer….boo-yeah). Like settin’ up my own jokes. Your mom.

/realizing this post has a lot of attitude and fun in it….I honestly have to thank the Scott Pilgrim books, they gave me a bit of “attitude in writing” inspiration.


that is SO me. especially eating the birthday cake.

Original image from Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe Vol. 5

warrenshea.com, warrenshea, and Google Chrome

Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 5:19 pm

I’ve decided to start trying to use Google Chrome a bit more, give it a chance as my default browser over FireFox.

There are quite a few interesting things (PROs)
1. typing words into the address bar performs a Google Search is one of them…that’s friggin awesome.
2. the UI is smaller, about 1/2 in size.
3. it’s faster
4. it’s seems to Crash less. Firefox has been crashing, for no reason, lately. It’s annoying!

CONs
1. No FireFTP, FireFox Developer Toolbar…need to find equivalents or something

Also, my site currently doesn’t render so well in Chrome. I have to do some debugging….which I’m doing right now!

I just learned about CSS Hacks for IE8 and Chrome. I knew them for IE and IE6…

#footer-container {
_margin-top:-214px; /* for IE6 */
*+margin-top:-214px; /* for IE7 */
margin-top:-212px\0/; /* for IE8 */
}
body:nth-of-type(1) #footer-container { /* for Chrome */
margin-top: 0px;
}

Damn….on my list of things to learn:
CSS3
HTML5
jQuery
ASP.NET 4.0

It’s difficult staying current, especially staying current on so many languages/techniques. Like I told my co-worker, being a jack of all trades does not work as a professional. You have to pick 1 or 2 things and devote yourself to that…now…what do I devote myself to? I don’t know….

I like being a jack of all trades :'(

Instinctive auto-clicking – 1, Warren – 0

Friday, August 13th, 2010 at 1:50 pm

I wanted to update one of my WordPress plugins (Site Stats) and when I went to updates, saw the words “update automatically” and impulsively clicked it.

It actually updated my WordPress 3.0.1 code….so the site you see how is with regular WordPress 3.0.1, not my WordPress 3.0.1.warren modified code.

The RSS/blog section on the right is messed up, the source is messed up, there are <p> tags and <br />s don’t stack…LOOK at what happens to 4 dots! …. ! that’s fugly.

Need to go home and fix…in 3 hours…grrrr!

PHP > ASP.NET? + SWFObject + Google Javascript Libraries API

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 9:15 pm

Actually…I’m not entirely convinced of the above statement (PHP > ASP.NET). I just know that within the last week, I was building something in ASP.NET. Today I was building something in PHP. Both were simple CRUDs…actually, more like C(reate) R(etrieve) U(pdate)s…(btw, the D(elete) is the last one). And PHP was so much easier to develop in, a bit harder to debug (my errors consisted of: Parse error on line: #) but….everything is just so much faster and simpler!

Even with drag and drop controls, Visual Studio design view, etc…I found it more fun and easier to develop in PHP.

Anyways, it was good to develop in both and stay away from ASP Classic.

I developed some good PHP today, finished what I needed to do. Back to my .NET project!

Man…I walked home today and thought of 2 other things to blog about but I can’t remember them now that I’m at home >:( I’ve got some defective RAM and the only ROM I came across was the Royal Ontario Museum.

OMG i just spent like, 20 minutes putting that button in…the reason was that this google page:
http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/devguide.html#swfobject has some code,
load request: google.load(“swfobject, 2.2″);
but they forgot 2 quotes, it should be
load request: google.load(“swfobject”, “2.2”); !

DAMN YOU GOOGLE! HELP ME OUT AND FRUSTRATE ME AT THE SAME TIME ! If you weren’t the best (minus Wave and Talk), I’d hate you! But no…I (would) still love (to work for) you.

/malnourished. will develop for food.

More to come…I promise! + Prince of Tennis

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 12:02 am

I’ve been busy with life lately and more recently, sickness and a .NET project. It’s taking up most/all my time. I promise to get out of my rut and post about Taste of Danforth, Jersey Boys, and <insert things that I’ve been busy with but don’t remember>. Most of my effort is going towards this .NET project which I now realize, I’m wayyyyyyyyyy ahead of schedule. All it took was one good day/night of coding. Any extra effort is just chilling…

I’ve been rewatching a lot of Prince of Tennis lately while I eat…I used to rewatch my favorite matches, Fuji Syusuke VS Kirihara Akaya, Echizen Ryoma VS Atobe Keigo, Kevin Smith, Seiichi Yukimura, Genichiro Sanada…and other random matches. This time around though, I’m rewatching the lesser remembered matches….Inui Sadahara VS Renji Yanagi…um…what’s his face and…that other guy….yeah.

I also got the PS2JAP The Prince of Tennis: Smash Hit! 2 which is certainly no Virtua Tennis 3….but it’s crazy fun being able to do special moves. Yuuta Syusuke’s Twist Spin Shot is like, impossible to return. And Fuji Syusuke keeps Higmua Ootoshi’ng my smashes! Jerkface!

/more to come :D