KaiSchaller.com

I was doodling on the whiteboard this evening and came up with Marvin (the turtle). He is now the companion of Sammy (the giraffe), who I first drew in 4th grade. Enjoy.

I sometimes find it hard to focus on one certain area of technology because I constantly find myself wanting to do everything. Even though my true passion has again and again proved to be web development, I can’t help but want to try my hand at various other facets of modern creation. For example, I dabbled quite a bit in 3D modeling and animation throughout my high school and early college years. These days I want to write software for OS X (it’s just so pretty!).

On the one hand I like that I’m exploring several different skillsets, but at the same time I worry that by not focusing entirely on one thing I’m falling into the trap that the saying “Jack-of-all-trades, master of none” warns us about. The trick here might be finding a way to combine these interests under the same roof of “web development”. I’ve used the 3D know-how in web projects before, and being able to write desktop applications would surely come in handy for certain web-related uses. Guess we’ll see how things turn out — everything should become much clearer once I find a career that has me working in a certain area.

I was browsing Panasonic’s website last night and thought their choice of favicon was a bit odd:

Perhaps a default that didn’t get changed?

I’ve been watching the BBC sitcom My Family lately and came across a lovely little web-related easter egg. Take a look at the following screenshot:

In the episode, Ben (the character looking at the computer screen) claims he is on the website OldPals.com. However, we can clearly see the address bar says “C:\Documents and Settings\Work?\Local Settings\Temp\WebC.tmp\index.html”. (The ‘?’ after “Work” is a character I can’t decipher.) You’ll also notice the scroll bar is at the very bottom of the page; we never see what’s at the top. I thought it was funny how the address bar immediately caught my eye. :-P

While browsing the web tonight looking for things to keep me entertained I stumbled across a video of Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) speaking at WordCamp about Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. It’s a great presentation (funny, too!) and if you’re even remotely interested in the subject I recommend you give it a look. I’m sure you can find it in many different formats on various video sites, but I downloaded the Quicktime versions from Revver. Part 2 can be found here. After watching the presentation I see I have a few changes to make to KaiSchaller.com. ;-)

For the longest time I’ve been baffled as to why the scrolling text in Winamp would sometimes mysteriously change font on me. Today I finally opened my eyes and saw that it was because of the special characters that sometimes appear in songs. In my case the phenomenon is predominantly caused by umlauts. Example follows.