I really enjoy reading Mike Davidson's blog. He tends to make time for things that most people wouldn't think worthy to tinker with and comes out with a post that will knock your socks off. Moreover, he tends to do this in such a way that avoids the criticism that he's omnipotent of all things web development or has too much time on his hands. In short, he comes across as a real human being who enjoys taking time to make the world (wide web) a better place - something everyone should aspire to be.

For his latest project, Mike has taken a technology I've been considering implementing for a while now, and of course, made it better. Shaun Inman's Inman Flash Replacement (IFR) has been widely acclaimed since it's first appearance in April of this year. Before IFR, font use was limited to only the fonts that the visitor had installed on their computer. Mike describes the attempts and failures of others to invent a cross-browser method of displaying fonts in an entry that reads like a good history book.

IFR has been revisited and rewritten several times since then, but Mike's revisions have made it completely scalable, hence the spiffy new acronym: sIFR and my new founded enthusiasm for it.

Personal Note: I shouldn't keep my wife awake at night describing the possible implications of this new technology. Especially not during the 2nd week of her last semester at UF in Chemical Engineering.
Sorry Ames. :)

Cameron Moll over at Authentic Boredom came up with a great idea yesterday when in his post, he invited his readers to post a 320x320 screen grab of whatever they were working on. With over 130 posted screenshots, I'd say everyone else thought it was a great idea too. I guess it's a little bit like group therapy for those confined to a monitor all day.

My post was a screenshot of an ecommerce website we're developing at Acceleration which will be selling sunglesses online.

From Slashdot:

“America Online has just released Netscape 7.2. Based on Mozilla 1.7, this latest version features better popup blocking, vCard support, an improved junk mail algorithm, better standards support, performance enhancements and several hundred other bug fixes.”

So, I ask: “Why would anyone download a browser with a bad reputation that has been re-built by AOL using source-code from Mozilla?” My head hurts.

Although I have the Adobe Fontfolio and other professional font libraries at my disposal, I still sometimes go looking through 1001freefonts or the other free fonts sites for a particular typeface with that good ole "free-font feel".

This usually results in my downloading dozens of strange fonts that I will probably never use. Today however, I found the perfect "Hello my name is:" font! It's called AlphaMack (Download: PC/Mac)and unlike the hundreds of other free fonts I've downloaded, I expect this one to go into my regular rotation.

My highly impressionable and impulsive co-worker Russ just preordered one of these things. After watching the typing demo video, I'm fighting off the urge to make an impulse buy myself. I've armed myself with the virtue that what's mine is also my wife's, and that I need get approval before spending money - especially when it involves electronic devices, and probably more so since it could alse be contrived as a gaming device.

A few of the people I like to read have been swapping names and changing hosts lately. This kind of activity is making me antsy to get started on my reinvention of Jasongraphix. I really can't wait to get my hands dirty with this one, literally. I've got an old (like over 100 years old-old) scrapbook that I found a long time back that is my main inspiration. I've got some old typography examples, some old newspaper scans, and I plan to get out my charcoal and ink again. No photoshop fabrications here. I plan to design the layout by hand, scan stuff in, and then put it all together in good-ole (er..new) tableless xhtml fashion.

To add fuel to the fire, I just got the first notice today that my domain/hosting plan is set to expire in 90 days. I am definitely going to keep jasongraphix.com forwarded to whatever my main site is, but I'm still toying with the idea of registering a new domain name that's less Narcissistic-obvious. Any ideas?