Spotted on The Mary Sue, these SuperPotatoes are just about the cutest things ever. Sure Marvel has The Avengers making $200 million in a weekend and confirmed a sequel, but do they have adorable potato people? I mean, aside from Spiderman.
Our next webinars will cover Canvas, HTML5 and WebGL as mediums for Rich Internet Applications. As we dig through this toolbox of RIA technologies, we’ll help you understand their respective pros and cons to provide a Nerd’s eye view on:
We’ll address the immediate and the long-term benefits of using HTML5, including what creative directors and designers need to know about progressive enhancement. We’ll also get into how Canvas is like Flash (the other F-word, to some), only not.
RSVP for one of two free primers, Tuesday, May 15 at 10:15 a.m. and repeated with polish Thursday, May 17 at 3:15 p.m.
This color game reminds me a lot of the the Kerning Game, because it causes just as much anxiety and refreshing to get the best score possible. For the color game you have to match hue, saturation, complementary, etc. colors.
My best was a 7.0. Ternary colors are a mystery to me.
Buzzfeed, which continues to become more than just the “28 things/people/cats that blah blah pbbbt” site, does an investigation into who has the worst commenters on the Internet.
The post pits mainstream media sites against YouTube, Tech Blogs, Political Blogs, Celebrity Blogs, and Facebook. While it doesn’t get to why commenters are saying such horrible things, they do offer up a some of the reasons on why the comments are so out of control. This bit about tech commenters was especially nice:
“The problem with tech commenters isn’t that they’re especially mean or ill-informed, it’s that they think they own the place. Tech news used to dominate the internet to an extent that made tech-minded people feel very important. This is not true anymore! But tech commenters still have this unearned confidence and, to use the least appropriate word possible, “swagger”. Everyone’s an idiot to a tech commenter. Everyone is also: a fanboy, biased, on the payroll for a major company, etc.”
Who has the worst commenters? You’ll have to read the whole post to find out. If you have delicate sensibilities beware. The post features a lot of the horrendously racist/homophobic/sexist crap often found in comments.
In a post at Harvard Business Review writer Anne Kreamer implores, “Workers, Take Off Your Headphones. It’s a thought-provoking read even if your gut reaction to the headline is a very strident, “no!”
“most younger people in our increasingly post-telephonic office world wear headphones about half of the time they’re working. And all but one of those I interviewed said that they had at least one G-chat or Skype window open throughout the day, every day — some of them checking in with as many as five non-work friends or family members every hour.”
Kreamer’s argument is that headphone-wearers are missing out on being vital, engaged members of their company. Also, she says headphones isolate people, can make them anxious, and erodes employee loyalty. Most of her conclusions are drawn from informal interviews with a dozen people she knows, so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still an interesting perspective.
Besides, have you ever been in an office where your co-workers complained that it’s just too darn quiet? Yeah, me neither.
Last week, Mike and Tim from the Nerdery’s UX department lead a discussion about how to communicate their ideas effectively with clients.
“Static wireframes are excellent for showing architecture, but as applications and websites become more complex, it becomes equally important to document and demonstrate interactions. In this roundtable, Mike S. and Tim W. lead the group as they consider the potential use of code-based wireframes to enhance our bond with development and stakeholder expectations.”
John P took some “rough” notes during the presentation, which as expected from the UX Department look better than anything I’d ever be able to make. He’s shared them publicly on Google Plus.
In the second ever Nerdery Kitchen Table talk, our rotating group of nerds discussed their experiences with becoming a developer. What kind of tools they rely on, like Codecademy, how to get started and what a person can do to improve the way they write code.
So give the recording a listen and let us know if you have any questions about the project.
Participants
Tom J. – Marketing Event Coordinator (host)
Tom O. – Chief Strategy Officer
David L. – .Net Software Engineer
Matt T. – Marketing Community Manager
Ellen S. - Interactive Developer
Jeff K. - Principal Software Engineer
Ryan W. – QA Engineer
Adam R. - Software Engineer
An overview of the new deferred object added to jQuery in version 1.5, presented by Nerdery software engineer Kevin.
“Often underutilized and misunderstood, a variety of areas of application such as pain-free asyncronous loading and chaining together a series of animations will be discussed. This will illustrate how you can potentially beautify your code by preventing the need to pass around callback functions and using chaining to avoiding indentation nightmares.”
Also check out Kevin’s nifty online slidedeck.
Today on “CBS This Morning” they did a story on a study by the Virginia Commonwealth University about how bringing your dog to work lowers stress and makes a lot of people more productive. Of course, The Nerdery could have told you that.
But the best part about this story is that the man they interview from the university is named Dr. Randolph Barker. You can’t make that up people.
