Why? なぜ？

It all started with two GameBoys. At a young age, I received Pokémon Red, Pokémon Gold, a GameBoy Pocket, and a GameBoy Color from a cousin. I soon branched out to all the classics – Mario, Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Metroid…and I loved it all. They gave me a sense of adventure. They instilled in me a passion for music and technology. Video games were my favorite things in the whole entire world.

Years later, I’m still a huge Nintendo nerd. I would love to visit their headquarters in Kyoto, Japan, and maybe even work there. But that’s not all! I also love how Japan has mixed the old with the new. Despite being very technologically advanced, the Japanese have a culture rich with art and architecture, geishas and gardens, ninjas and samurai.

Process 過程

Because I am learning on my own, I don’t have any teacher to help me. For the most part, this limits me to things I can find online or in books. Luckily, there is a myriad of resources on the internet.

My favorite tool by far is TextFugu, a revolutionary online textbook. If you want to learn Japanese, this is the resource. Unlike most methods, TextFugu focuses on building strong, long-term foundations. It’s also unique in that it has personality, is constantly being updated, and has stellar support. TextFugu isn’t free, but it’s well worth the money, and Koichi definitely deserves it.

TextFugu is incredible, but it’s not the only tool I use. Anki is an open source flashcard program. Denshi Jisho is a great dictionary. Lang-8 is a collaborative site where members help each other write journal entries in different languages. (For instance, I write entries in Japanese and correct other entries in English.) Also, I recently bought Remembering the Kanji, a book that teaches mnemonics for the thousands of characters.

My studying revolves around TextFugu and Anki. I use TextFugu as my main teaching source – I just finished the fourth season. Every night, I study my flashcards on Anki. I’m starting to write journal entries on Lang-8, and I plan on starting the Remembering The Kanji book soon. I’m moving slowly but surely.

The Future 前途

Now, I have a decent foundation in Japanese. I understand the writing systems. I know how nouns, verbs, and adjectives work. I know some basic grammar constructs. In the near future, as I move further in TextFugu, I will focus on expanding my vocabulary, learning more kanji, and writing. I hope to study Japanese in college, too – there, I can get comfortable with spoken Japanese.

My overall goal is to achieve proficiency and visit Japan someday. It may be a difficult task, but with hard work, anything is possible.

Woah! A portfolio!

I revamped my portfolio! Before, I hadn’t put much effort into it; it was just a screenshot and link to each website. I kept the portfolio online, but it was practically hidden. Over the past couple of days, however, I’ve added a small biography of my experience and a call-to-action email. I categorized the projects, and made them a bit more visually appealing. Each project has some screenshots and at least a small description paragraph. For future and/or personal projects, I hope to have more of a description. Brian Should Play Ocarina of Time is my favorite in my portfolio so far – the project itself was fun, and the posting has a lot of explanation.

What about blog comments?

Okay, I removed the ability to post comments. That’s not any discouragement, though; I still enjoy email conversations. Here’s my gripe with blog comments: they’re too easy to abuse. It’s too easy to say “cool” or “go die in a fire”; comments like these are next to worthless. It’s too easy to supply fake info and comment without taking responsibility. If you are motivated enough to send me an email, then I know that you have something valuable to say, and I’ll do my best to send a thoughtful reply. If you don’t like this decision, I invite you to email me and give me your thoughts.

Looking forward

I have some ideas stored away for the future. I have some drafts for blog posts resting in WordPress and my sheet music to-do list is as large as ever. I am working on a few projects that I hope will make it to my portfolio soon. Even though I have been inactive for a while, I am happy to say that I have much in store for the future.

The Good

The most notable aspect is that my Mac is a lot faster. On my Vista, it often takes around five minutes to turn it on, and even once it’s on, it goes agonizingly slow for a while. With the Mac, however, it takes 30 seconds between turning it on and opening up Chrome – including the time it takes to type my password!

I love the fonts, too. Because this is my first Mac, this is the first time I have had Helvetica, Baskerville, and so on at my disposal. The font rendering is much nicer, too – not too sharp, but not too fuzzy, either.

Also, I’m quite pleased with the trackpad and Magic Mouse. On almost every laptop I’ve used previously, the trackpads are terrible – they have a lot less functionality. But, on this trackpad, you can swipe with two fingers to scroll or click with two fingers for a right-click. With the Magic Mouse, you can also scroll, even though it doesn’t have a scroll wheel. The lack of a scroll wheel felt weird at first, but it means you can even scroll horizontally! Despite the Magic Mouse feeling small in my large hand, I’m impressed with both it and the trackpad.

Although it isn’t new for me, I still have to mention Dropbox for being amazing. It made this computer switch a lot easier, and I love knowing that my files are backed up.

The Not-So-Good

I’m the type of guy who flies across the keyboard entering shortcuts. Thankfully, a lot of keyboard shortcuts transfer from Windows to Mac, but I don’t like the added complexity. In the bottom left of my keyboard are fn, control, option, and command. I have yet to find out what fn does, but the keyboard shortcuts I know are scattered between the three other keys. On the keyboard attached to my Vista, there are three buttons (control, alt, and the Windows symbol), and 99% of the shortcuts I know simply use control.

Another sad part of the Mac’s keyboard shortcuts is print screen. On a PC, you hit the button that says “print screen” and then the screenshot is on the clipboard. With the Mac, on the other hand, there are at least three different ways to print screen – one is command-shift-3, and another is command-shift-4. This added complexity to keyboard shortcuts irks me.

The document explorer / Finder could use some work, too. You can’t make a new file from it. If you’re viewing files from a save or open dialog, you can’t edit or delete other files; you need to open up another Finder to do that editing. You can’t access the location bar as if it’s a URL. Surprisingly, Windows’ document explorer lets you do all this.

The Future

Surprisingly, I don’t have Adobe Creative Suite installed yet. I look forward to having it on here, but I just hope it won’t slow down the computer a lot. That 30-second power on is incredible. I have installed TextMate, but I haven’t used it very much. Hopefully, I’ll get to learn its magic on my next project.

So far, I really like my new 15″ MacBook Pro. It’s insanely speedy and the hardware is surprisingly nice – especially for a laptop. Although there are a few aspects that I miss from Windows, the MacBook is superior overall.

To London

I’ve been on vacation plenty of times, but never out of the US. Virtually all of our vacations are camping trips, so it had been about three years since last flying. Plus, I wasn’t traveling with my family – instead, I was with my marching band buddies, the dance team, and chaperones (about 150 people in total). I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

I got through security easily enough, but some people weren’t so lucky. One friend has a broken ankle in a boot (which has enough metal to trip the metal detector), so he had to be patted down quite a few times.

The plane ride was surprisingly nice. Over the course of the trip, we boarded four planes, totaling about 11 hours each way. On none of those was I near a baby, next to an obese person, or behind a seat-recliner. For three of those four flights, I had the window seat. On the two trans-Atlantic flights, there were small touch screens embedded in the seat in front of you. On them, you could watch TV, movies, or even play Tetris! (Okay, those of you who fly a lot are probably used to this, but I’ve only flown twice in my life prior to this trip.)

The Parade

January 1^st was a great day for band. It was one of our warmer days there (the whole week was roughly between 32° and 50° F). I packed four sets of handwarmers, but I didn’t need any of them. It started raining a couple of hours into it, but that didn’t extinguish our spirits; we still carried on and had the time of our lives. We performed in the grand finale, where I was near the front and had a great view of some famous people in the stands. I’ll conclude this section by saying that I can’t summarize the New Year’s Day Parade into text. Not even a video does it justice; to really experience it, you need to be there.

Tourist Places & Plot Twists

We were in London for a week, but only one of those days was the parade. We experienced the London Eye, countless memorials, museums, and tours, and got to visit Canterbury and Dover Castle. I could dump all my trip pictures here, but I’ve tried to show only some interesting highlights.

View from the London Eye

Dover Castle

View from Dover Castle

The Dover gift shop – lots of medieval goodies.

Monty Python’s production studios. Click for a full image.

What do I mean by plot twists? I’ve never been to London, so I wasn’t sure what it would be like. But, a couple of things even I didn’t expect…

An amazingly decorated bike we just happened to walk by.

When we were eating in a restaurant, I saw this group walking by. I took out my phone to take a picture, and they jumped back and posed.

Returning to USA & Returning to Normal

The biggest highlight of the flight back was passing the very tip of Greenland. I got quite a few pictures from my window seat.

Getting home was a nice change. London is a fascinating place, and I want to explore it more, but after an action-packed week, I was ready to relax. Now that I’ve had time to sleep and readjust, I’m looking forward to this new year and whatever it entails.

Stars are incredibly shy creatures, usually emerging at night and staying a far way away. Our light pollution has scared them off for years, making them an even scarcer sight. Yet, they still do their best to help us every day (or, more accurately, every night). You won’t need a flashlight when the stars are shining down upon you. You can always find your location with the help of the north star and his friends. You won’t be bored when you’re spotting constellations and learning their stories.

So what are you waiting for? Turn out those lights. Leave the house and find somewhere dark enough to truly see. Turn your eyes to the skies and see all those stars.

The difference between its and it’s is a serious trap – even primary English speakers mix it up. You’re in luck, though, because Admiral Ackbar is here to teach you when to use the apostrophe.

Showing possession with it’s/its is a trap. Normally, you add ‘s to show posssession; for instance, “Ackbar’s observation.” But, it is a pronoun, just like he, so it won’t follow the normal rule. If you substitute ‘he’ for Ackbar, it becomes “his observation.” See? No apostrophe. Similarly, “its trap-like qualities” is correct.

Have you been paying attention? I have a bad feeling about this, so here’s a summary.

• Use it’s to replace “it is” or “it has”.
• Use its for possession – when you mean “of it”.

And here are two correct sentences:

• It’s a trap!
• Its trap-like qualities are noticed by Admiral Ackbar.

May the spelling and grammatical force be with you.

Hey, guys! Share this post with every humanoid on the face of the planet! With your help, this post can take over the world! Nay, the universe! Just click all those share icons until your dominant hand deteriorates! Then switch to your other hand! It’s that easy!

Actually, don’t. See how annoying that was? Don’t you hate seeing websites that force icon upon icon of sharing links on you? So do I.

In an effort to get traffic, some sites will just toss a bunch of sharing links in and call it a day. But, do all those icons really help? Most of them will end up being ignored. This is the paradox of choice – even if you already have lots traffic ready to share, they will have to choice between all those icons. Only the most fanatical (read: insane) people will share on as many as possible. This means your post/article will have little impact, and it will just be scattered throughout the web.

So what am I saying? Write great content; don’t rely on thousands of sharing links to get traffic. If you write something great, the sharers will share and the traffic will flow. If you do need some sharing links, perhaps to keep the impact on certain sharing sites, limit it to one or two. Front page status on Digg is temporary; great content is forever.

For the parallax to work vertically, two conditions must be set:

• The background-attachment must be fixed.
• The background-position-y must be a percentage.

Here’s some of the demo code:

CSS:

body{background:#9CF url(mountain.gif) repeat-x 90% bottom fixed;} /* The mountain isn't moving vertically. */
#clouds{background:url(clouds.gif) 19% 20% fixed;}
#birds{background:url(birds.gif) 220% 50% fixed;}

HTML:

<body>
<div id="birds">
<div id="clouds">

<!-- Content. -->

</div></div>
</body>

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? You know what to do.

What do I mean? Don’t make smart phone-centric or iPad-centric designs. Instead of specifically designing for a certain device, make sure that all dimensions are covered. If you target devices, it will look good on those devices. But, it won’t look as nice at a slightly different size. For instance, if you target iPhones, you still leave smaller browsers (like netbooks) uncovered. You should address a media query for each dimension that doesn’t look right; not just the dimensions of popular devices.

My favorite example of responsive design done right is Hicksdesign. No matter how you resize your browser, the content moves and fits perfectly. The media queries are custom-made for his site – all the layout changes happen just before it might become awkward. Even if you renamed the IDs and classes to fit your CSS, copy/pasting it to your design wouldn’t work as well.

Why am I talking about this? Over at Stuff and Nonsense, Andy Clarke recently posted hardboiled media queries – media queries to copy/paste into your CSS which target smartphones and iPads, portrait and landscape, as well as the iPod 4 and wide screens. This is exactly what I want to avoid. Remember target sizes, not devices.

Redesign / Simplification

With this design, I aimed above all to simplify the site. Now, the only colors screaming at you are the links; no more bright blue background. No more sidebar, either; instead, blog navigation is on the blog page. Now, the focus is on the content.

And what does the design say about myself? I don’t feel overly cheery enough to have a sky-themed site represent me. As much as I like them, sky-themed sites just don’t fit me.

Art Direction & The Future

This design has another purpose, too. Now that the design is much more simple, it will be easier to art direct posts. Plus, a lot of the borders and background colors use rgba with low opacity, so they will match the background. This post will stay default, just to show off the new design, but future posts will hopefully get some art direction. I’ll even look back through previous posts and add some eye candy.

So, here’s to a nice, long-lasting theme. Chances are I’ll still be tweaking bits of the site, plus I’ll be art directing posts, but I think I’ve found a nice core.