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- The Phoenix Light Rail is Here!
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Hurray! It’s finally here. The mammoth 1.4 billion dollar light rail project has finally been completed and opened today. To get you started I created my own map of the light rail route. Why? Well – the Valley Metro’s online maps are broken into separate pages making it a little difficult to simply glance at the entire twenty mile route easily. I also included the approximate travel times, fares, hours, and stop frequency in this easy to use one page printable map.
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- Tips for the Aspiring Web Consultant
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Last week I left my post at Integrum in favor of solely focusing on my own business, Sumo Creations. I’ve been running Sumo outside of school and fulltime work for the past three years and this is a very exciting time for me. Since starting my company, I’ve learned a lot of lessons on working productively for my clients and consistently developing positive relationships with them. Here are some of the lessons I learned.
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- Is History Really Siding With Obama or is it McCain? Read this Before You Vote!
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This article is in response to “Comparison of Democratic and Republican Economies” which was written in response to “Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?” from the New York Times. My friend Brandon did some excellent research and made excellent points explaining the changes in our GDP. But my source didn’t confirm some of the numbers he chose to provide (the source of their data was not listed). Also, only growth from specific years during presidential terms was mentioned as opposed to showing all of the data.
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- Easy Flash Debugging on OSX.
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I recently took on some contract development for another AS3 project and because I wasn’t particularly happy with the way I debugged my flash work in the past I decided to come up with a better solution. Not many traditional flash coders realize that they can view the output from their trace statements on a live compiled SWF. The way you do that is fairly straightforward.
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- I’m Working on a Product.
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Earlier this month I started working on a product. It’s nothing new. It’s pretty basic. It’s going to be really cheap. But I think it will be pretty cool. I’ll post screencasts once I finish more of the javascript. Until then, announcing this is just a tease and motivating factor. I’ve said it; now I need to go forward and finish the first version.
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- What’s On Your Mind These Days?
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Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about peak oil, our place in the world economy, and the harmful industrialization of our everyday food. Simply put, I haven’t been writing as a result of the information overload that I’m enjoying at the moment.
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- Using Presenters in Rails
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Sitting thrugh my first tutorials session at RailsConf we’ve come across an interesting discussion about the philosophy of using the ‘Presenter Pattern’ to refactor code in your applications controller.
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- Blogging is not Technology.
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Last week I was invited to speak at a local NetSquared meeting out in Tempe. Presenting on the topic of blogging forced me to take a step back to look at what I’ve been doing over the past seven years. I realized all of the technological connotations associated to blogging are irrelevant. Blogging is not about the web, rss feeds, or technology. That is just a means to an end. Blogging is about people, it’s about voices, blogging is all about you. Blogging is a medium for distributing both fact and opinion. It’s about discussion and connecting people in a relevant context. The technology just helps run the show.
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- Less Markup Is Better Markup.
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There is a lot of ambiguity when it comes to writing semantic markup in HTML: to what extent should we markup data? How semantically detailed do we need to be? While there is no specific rule of thumb, I will say that the less the better. When writing markup, be as clean as possible without losing meaning. Much like how The Elements of Style emphasizes brevity in writing – a sentence should use as few words as possible without losing it’s meaning – an html document should use as little markup as possible without breaking the context of it’s content.
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- Letting The Page ‘Breath’.
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I’m continuing my way through Robert Bringhurst’s book and at a slow pace. The Elements of Typographic Style is so rich with information that I can only read it in spurts of a few pages and often have to re-read to let the full lesson sink in. Lately, I’ve become very intrigued by how he describes rhythm in the text layout and the concept of how a page must ‘breath’.