Random Quote

The least of learning is done in the classrooms
---- Thomas Merton

Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
---- J. Robert Oppenheimer

To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.
---- Robert Copeland

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
---- Malcom Forbes

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
---- Edward R. Murrow

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.
---- Edward Abbey

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
---- Thomas A. Edison

The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
---- Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, 1995

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
---- Albert Einstein

As soon as I buy the moose head, I have to go pick up some KY jelly.
---- Mary Roninette Kowal

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
---- Gail Godwin

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
---- H. G. Wells

Drink coffee! Do stupid things faster!
---- unknown

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
---- Arnold Toynbee

it's probably not a good idea to underestimate my ability to make an ass out of myself—just when I seem to have it under control, I'll turn around and surprise you.
---- Tenser said the Tensor

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
---- Thomas A. Edison

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
---- Evan Esar

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
---- Albert Einstein

This may be the most interesting blog theme I've ever seen. http://eflgeek.com/index.php Definitely in my top 5 at least.
---- Steve Dembo

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
---- Mitch Hedberg

Technology will not replace teachers...teachers who use technology will
probably replace teachers who do not.
---- Ray Clifford

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
---- Galileo Galilei

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
---- Abigail Adams (1744 - 1818)

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.”
---- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 -1832)

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
---- Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519)

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 Saturday October 04 2008

Web Design First Client Finished

I’ve finished work on my first client’s web site, a language school based in Daegu, ILE 외국어 학원. ILE is foreign owned and operated and the owner is a strait up guy - I enjoyed working with him and am sure that his teachers are also happy there. I wrote up a more detailed report about completing the ILE site over at my web design blog.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Oct 4, 2008 at 09:03 AM
Random_Ramblings | Web Design | Permalink |
 Tuesday June 24 2008

No More Web Design

I’ve set up a new blog where I’ll be writing all of my entries related to web design, free lancing, and setting up a small business. The point here is that I won’t be cluttering up this space with unrelated material. For the record I have a paying client and am just waiting for the deposit before starting work - I’ll post a link to the finished product once I finish it.

This blog will continue to recieve my attention and regular posts as my full-time job is still teaching and I will continue to write articles for the Korea Herald. I have two scheduled articles for July. Though like every other vacation period, posting will be light.

Just a reminder that guest authoring is still available to anyone and I am actively looking for semi-regular contributors though one off posts are also very welcome. If you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jun 24, 2008 at 03:08 PM
Random_Ramblings | Web Design | Guest Author | web_site | Permalink |
 Saturday June 21 2008

Beyond Captcha

Interesting post on Captcha technology.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Jun 21, 2008 at 07:26 AM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Sunday June 15 2008

It’s not about the web site

Advice for designers re: client meetings - found via EE forums

Every Web designer probably has his or her own approach to conducting creative discovery meetings with clients. Surely there is more than one way to skin a cat, but I believe that among the many there are more effective ways and less effective ways.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jun 15, 2008 at 05:45 AM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Wednesday June 04 2008

Re-Design Complete - EFLGeek 3.0

EFL Geek 3.0!

I’ve completed the redesign of this web site and it is now live. It’s been three years since I had a new look and the last one was a template available that I just modified. This new look I created from the ground up. I hand coded everything, XHTML, CSS and Expression Engine dynamic tags. It’s really been a great learning experience for me and I’ve definitely improved my understanding of CSS.

EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that!EFLGeek 3.0 - skipping 2.0 cause geeks do that! yeah! Personally I’ve gotten a little tired of all the hype surrounding 2.0 web sites and software upgrades to 2.0.51.3.6 so I decided to have a little fun with my blog name.

Before I get into anymore details I’m going to post up a screen shot of the blog as it’s looked for the past three years so I don’t forget. The image is quite long because my monitor is 22” in vertical profile - almost no vertical scrolling for me.

old format screen shot

new format screen shot And a screen shot of the current version as i’m sure it will change in the future as well. One thing I’ve done is remove the forums and wiki since no one was using them. If enough interest were expressed, I would bring them back.

I’ve added a few little effects to the site - one that I particularly like is that now any link to a file (.pdf .pub .xls .pdf .zip) will now automatically have an icon appended to the link making it clearer what is a download and what is a web page. You can see it in action on my entry about powerpoint jeopardy.

I’ve also set up comments to use avatars. If you are a member of this site, then you can upload an avatar (100x100) or you can use a gravatar (80x80 - maximum size allowed by gravatar plugin). If you don’t do either than your comment will end up with a generic silhouette avatar. I like avatars because it can really help regular readers to identify each other visually and adds a little style and class to the comment page.

Technical Stuff

I learned a lot by reading CSS Mastery which is co-authored by Simon Collision who just happened to have created my previous look. I also ready Principles of Beautiful Web Design and various web sites. The Expression Engine forums has a very helpful community that I could not live without.

Probably my greatest assistance came from Andy Harris, an active member on the Expression Engine forums - he seemed to be paying special attention to my twitters and posts on the forums and even went so far as to offer me extensive advice via email. Through Andy I came to discovered Firebug (firefox extension) and the IE Developer Toolbar which are indispensable for web development. Andy also ensured that I learned how to add a seperate style sheet to deal with the troubles that come from internet explorer.

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with photoshop, but that has mostly been with photo touch up. Making backgrounds for the web was a learning experience. I’m sure I have a lot to learn still - I think my site might be a little slow to load as I didn’t do a particularly great job with optimizing images. The problem I had was that compression resulted in a horrible look. I need to learn how to design so that my images can be compressed without getting destroyed in the process.

There are still a couple of minor changes to be done to the look. I need to add the dynamic comment preview, as well as buttons for HTML code in comments. I haven’t yet decided if I want to go with the show/hide option with extended text that I had in the previous look. For now, I’ll just have a link to the rest of the entry.  I also want to add the ability to edit comments for a limited time after submission.

Please do come and take a look at the site and tell me what you think in the comments as well as vote in the poll.


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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jun 4, 2008 at 02:46 PM
Random_Ramblings | Polling_Station | Web Design | web_site | Permalink |
 Thursday May 29 2008

Interview with Simon Collision

An interview with Simon Collision of Erskine Design.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday May 29, 2008 at 07:04 AM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Friday May 16 2008

Bamboo Invoice

http://www.bambooinvoice.org/ is potentially useful for once I get my web design biz running.

advice on getting into web design from Derek Allard.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday May 16, 2008 at 06:03 PM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Monday May 12 2008

changes coming in PHP 6

Coming changes in php 6


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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday May 12, 2008 at 09:21 AM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Thursday May 08 2008

Client Red Flags

Potential client red flags - a good post for me to keep bookmarked for future references - i.e. when I start making money in web design.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday May 8, 2008 at 06:43 AM
Web Design | Permalink |
 Friday May 02 2008

Web design is Math

if web design were math, XHTML = addition, CSS = basic algebra and Javascript = quantam mechanics with a dash of super string theory. Essentially, XHTML seems basic, CSS is a little tricky but with practice should get easy and javascript is like talking to an alien from another universe.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday May 2, 2008 at 06:18 AM
Web Design | CSS | javascript/JQUERY | XHTML | Permalink |
 Tuesday April 29 2008

XHTML templates

good XHTML & CSS skeleton templates to use for new projects at particle tree.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Apr 29, 2008 at 09:46 PM
Web Design | CSS | XHTML | Permalink |
 Thursday April 24 2008

CSS text wrapper

interesting generator for wrapping text into odd and unusual shapes


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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Apr 24, 2008 at 09:51 PM
Web Design | CSS | Permalink |

Web Design My column

I’ve added 1 new category and 3 subcategories related to web design to this blog: Web Design - CSS - javascript/JQuery - XHTML. I’ll be using these categories to write about what I’m doing in my drive to improve my web design/development skills. To keep the footprint a minimum on the blog I’ll include 95% of the entries in the extended entry and create a separate RSS feed just for those three categories as well as removing them from the regular RSS feed - but that will have to wait until I catch up on grading.

So far I have read Principles of Beautiful Web Design, CSS Mastery (twice), and ordered Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional.

I found Principles of Beautiful Web Design to be an excellent book. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on color theory and typography. CSS Mastery is really well written, reading it a second time has really helped to clear up some of the principles that I hadn’t really gotten the first time around and I’m looking forward to putting them into practice. I know nothing about Javascript and am looking forward into learning this language and what it can do - hopefully this book is as good as it sounds and an engaging read as well.

In other news I’ve just been informed that my next two columns for the Korea Herald are slated to be 1000 words each. I’ll probably write on motivation for one and on professional development for the other.



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Apr 24, 2008 at 08:06 PM
Web Design | KH Column | Permalink |
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