Yearly Archives: 2008

Who’s Afraid of HTML Email?

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Anyone who tells you creating HTML email is easy has either never done it, or is lying. Inexperienced designers tend to think, “Oh, no problem, it’s all tables and font tags!” Grizzled veterans, however, know all too well the difficulties of getting anything but the most simple design to render well in a variety of clients.

Email design today is like web design in the early 90′s, complete with nested tables, spacer gifs, and FONT tags galore. Standards support is virtually non-existent, and even simple things like background images and table spacing are handled poorly by some clients.

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Anathem: One Paragraph Review

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Anathem

I started reading Anathem with some hesitation, because I really didn’t get into The Baroque Cycle. It’s not that they were bad books, I just wasn’t into the time period they were set in. Thankfully, this is a return to his earlier style of spec-fic, and I found the world he invented absolutely compelling. The book is presented as a journal kept by the main character, and is basically divided into two parts. The first half introduces us to the world he lives in — a sort of inversion of our world, where scientists isolate themselves in monastic communities called Maths. These communities are built around Millenium Clocks, which only open the gates to the outside world at predefined intervals (1 year, 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years, depending on the Math). Our story starts as a ten-year Math prepares for their gate to open. The second half of the book is the action story, describing a series of world-changing events. I can’t describe any further without ruining some surprises, but suffice to say that it’s a great story.

Zoe is 21 Months Old

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Lips

Dear Zoe,
You are 21 months old, and it’s been awhile since I wrote one of these. It’s getting more difficult, because you have changed so much, and at the same time, you’re the same little girl you’ve always been. Your personality hasn’t changed at all, it’s just gotten larger as you learn how to do more and express yourself more clearly.

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Gears of War 2: One Paragraph Review

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Gears of War 2

If you liked Gears 1, you’ll like this one. It’s more of the same, with slightly better graphics. One thing I liked is that there’s a little more color. The world is still mostly brown and gray, but as they walk through cities and forests, you get to see that the Gears world is not, in fact, monochromatic. Absurd environmental features are still present (replace “krill” with “razorhail”), and the storyline is still non-existant, but the key bits that made the first game great are all there. Excellent cover mechanic and guns that are fun to fire. That crazy power chord that plays when you clear a room of enemies. And nutty over-sized boss fights. In fact, they pretty much open the game by throwing all the biggest monsters from the last game at you to establish that they have bigger ones to play with this time around. It’s not a huge improvement over the first game, but it didn’t need to be.