Don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t hate Microsoft, but some times on occasion they do something like this that just seems a little odd or dishonest. Now i’m a firm believer in browser choice, so far be it for me to tell you not to use Internet Explorer, but Internet Explorer has for the longest time been the worst rendering engine for all things HTML.

Now Microsoft claims, that’s all been turned around, and everyone except IE isn’t capable of rendering Today’s web. I did my own testing however and as you’ll see from the results, ie9 is far from caught up with today’s market.

Kudos to them for making a vast improvement on the Trident engine, (before ie 9 the acid3 score peaked at a measley 12 with internet explorer 8 and I believe before that it was 11, and 9 for ie 7 and 6 respectively, so this is great). I really am glad they are making some effort to catch up with the market, but i’d prefer if they didn’t do it while defaming webkit and gecko, both of which are leaps ahead of trident still. At the very least, they could have shown the Acid 3 results from the web standards project.

I’ve been working pretty relentlessly for the last week and though I’m excited about the long weekend, I don’t think I’ll actually have time for an extended break. I have a couple of projects that I really need to catch up on and I’ve a WoW Raid scheduled for Sunday morning that I’m excited about. This is the 2nd or 3rd time I think that I’ve actually been slotted for something and not just standby.

I want my wife to start playing with me again, not right away of course, especially not this close to her starting up school again, but maybe after she starts her job search she’ll humor me for a bit.

I watched about 3 episodes of Better off Ted last night on NetFlix which were super funny. Portia de Rossi playing Veronica is absolute genius and I’m looking forward to catching up to where the series is now because I heard it gets even better. My wife had actually told me to start watching it probably two years ago now, but at the time I was wrapped up in re-watching Sailor Moon I think, which I still haven’t actually finished. Maybe I’ll wrap up Sailor Stars after I catch up on better off Ted.

That is, if you don’t like version cue, Adobe Creative Suite 5 is amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade it for an older version even without Version Cue, but let me tell you, version control using Version Cue for PSDs was an amazing experience, and I hope that I’ll be able to find a replacement or substitute soon, because I don’t know what I’m going to do without it. I like Mercurial, SVN, and the like, but none of those will provide me with thumbnails for previous version of PSDs (that I know of).

There is something out there called AlienBrain that’s supposed to be optimized for artistic media, but it doesn’t look particularly friendly or easy, though I could be wrong. If anyone has any suggestions, or experience with some kind of version control server that’s great for PSDs, either locally or remotely, please let me know, I’m pretty desperate.

I just can’t seem to create anything that I feel really meets the standards of what I want for Tedera. I’ve got plenty of good ideas, just none that really flesh out perfectly when I try. I think my issue may be that I’m trying too hard to make it perfect. I’m going to work on this current concept I have tonight and hopefully it’ll actually lead somewhere.

I started FFXIII last night, and the game was actually better than I had anticipated. In the first hour of game-play, at least 80% of that was actually game-play and not prerendered cinematics. The combat system also has more to it than I had been lead to believe it would. I love the ability to queue up moves for battle, and I really can’t wait to see what spells look like.

I’m having a hard time coming up with a design that I’m even just content with. For use at work, or at home, or for my business. I think my main problem is a lack of resources, mainly a lack of *good* content to use when creating a site or page.

I think sometime (late) tonight I want to look around and see what design elements I do like so I can finally put something good together for Tedera. With any luck, I’ll finally make something I’m happy with.

I’m definitely looking forward to Spring coming back. This area gets so gloomy and dreary during the winter. I’ve been dreaming about an apartment in San Francisco, though I don’t imagine anything will actually come of it, at least not soon.

I’ve been digging for info on the WoW Armory API but I can’t seem to find anything directly from blizzard, it seems to be mostly linking to their xml schemes and downloading all related data, then parsing it yourself. This isn’t a terrible solution, especially not when using jQuery to parse xml data, but I’d like to just retrieve the Stats I’m looking for via a Get or Post http request.

So I only just discovered that Mr. Crichton passed away, It’s a little upsetting, seeing as how he played a large part in putting dinosaurs into the lime-lights of pop culture. I guess he did play a large part in my earlier years with obsessive compulsive disorder, as well. Still the man was a really good writer, and I’m a little sad I won’t be able to meet him now.

Apparently he managed to complete at least one more manuscript, before he moved on. It looks like a really good title too, I’d like to pick it up next weekend if I have the chance.

Dragon Age just seems to keep getting better. It really has a fantastic story line, pretty engaging side-quests, fun character / relationship development. The only improvement I could possibly ask for is graphics, and honestly it doesn’t deter from the game, it’s still really enjoyable. I managed to get pretty far into Dragon Age before I got distracted.

The New Super Mario Bros. Wii game is pretty fricken amazing. Between Aaron, Kari, Brittnee, and Myself we managed to make it all the way to world 7 of what looks like 8 in one sitting.The only breaks were took were one for Thai food as dinner time approached, and one other time so I could make an ATM withdrawal for my wife, who purchase a bike with said withdrawal money.

So, long story short. I wanted to use Django, and despite MediaTemple’s neat “Container” idea, I wanted a more traditional installation. Which I found I couldn’t do on thier grid service. So now I’m back with SliceHost. It’s not like they ever let me down in the past, I was just enthralled by MediaTemple’s shiny interface, which I’m over now I think.

I’ve been listening to Sainthood, over and over and over. It’s pretty much all the inspiration I need to make it though the day. Work has been pretty steady, if nothing else.

Every chance I’ve gotten I’ve tried to play DragonAge: Origins, with less success than I’d hoped. I think I’ve gotten about 2 hours in since I’ve got the game, and starting this Sunday I’ll have a new obsession! So I need to get as much time in as I can. I also received a new mouse today. Pretty much the greatest investment ever. It’s much more responsive than my previous mouse, and makes working in Photoshop feel much more fluid.

If there’s any one turn off for any game I’ve played, it’s control scheme. It’s the reason I didn’t like any of the Tomb Raider games, it’s the reason I wasn’t a huge fan of Superman 64, and now it’s the reason I can’t get into Resident Evil 5. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if there was a nice introductory period explaining what was going on, but honestly it seems like it takes some creative combination of at least 3 buttons to make anything happen successfully and it’s just too frustrating to try to guess what that is for the game to be enjoyable.

I’m going to give Fallout 3 another shot here in just a bit. The controls in that game are easy enough to figure out, but for some reason I get to the first town and lose all interest in continuing the character. I think this may be a personal distaste for the scene in general and not so much anything having to do with game play or usability.

I just completed playing the first for chapters of Tales of Monkey Island, and those were actually enjoyable. The art style was a great 3d rendition of the the original games, and it felt like a better translation than Escape from Monkey Island did. The music score was just a slightly updated version of the original – still wonderful.

My wife is feeling ill, second week in a row. My guess it’s the stress that’s getting to her from her work, or more precisely the possible lack-there-of. News has been getting to her that this Friday is likely her last day. I feel bad that I can’t do much except say comforting things and bring her Bigmacs.