Go get free Starbucks coffee!

Lets face it, Internet Explorer has been the child only a mother could love for so many years, with it’s varying degrees of standards compliance (or lack there of) across versions that make development a nightmare. That said, Microsoft looks to finally be changing it’s tune… or so I hope.

IE is awful. Version 7 is better than 6, but it’s still aggravating to work with. IE6, which is still in wide spread use, brings tears of utter sadness to my eyes. To a developer, getting a site standards compliant takes a little work, but that’s nothing in comparison to the acrobatics I have to go thru to get a perfect site to render correctly in IE6. I loath it with so much animosity that I go out of my way to steer random strangers towards another browser. Any browser.

With IE8 around the corner, that’s looking to change. For the first time, MS is FINALLY serious about adopting standards set out by the W3C. The only problem now is that with so many Windows machines out there running IE6 and 7, it will be awhile before we can finally spend our time on more important tasks like making beautiful and functional sites!

Donate your computers free cpu cycles to help the human race. Join Folding@home.

For those of you who don’t know, Folding@home is a distributed computing (DC) project that utilizes many peoples home computers (or gaming consoles like the Sony PS) distributed across the internet to run a single large program (it runs in the background when you’re not using your computer).

What does it do? It looks at how proteins fold. Learning how proteins fold helps scientists understand diseases like Alzheimer’s and Hunntington’s, and eventually find cures for them. The ramifications on human health can’t be underestimated. Folded Proteins are the machines of biology, and knowing how they work will drive some of the next generation medicine for curing neurodegenerative diseases and some cancers.

To give you an idea of just how powerful DC is, take the world fastest supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner. It’s capable of doing  1.33 pflops (that’s 1.33 x 10^15 floating point operations per second). F@h is doing about 3 times that. To put it another way, it’s about 1,000,000 faster than your new MacBook pro. Impressive.

101 Things Designers Can Do to Save The Earth is an awesome blog that inspires designers do good for the environment. This web site — and the workshop that inspired it — were created by the School of Visual Concepts, Seattle, in cooperation with AIGA Seattle, Aquent, and Olympus Press. Read articles to find out of the many ways you can contibute to saving our planet, or submit a comment and recommend something YOU think could help!

Check this out. Hysterical!

Thanks Shawn for sending us this!

We’ve been using Netflix for years, and recently I wanted to give cable/satellite a try. So I looked up the costs for Comcast and Dish to see what I could get, and if it would be better than having just Netflix. Here’s what I found.

Starter Cable from Comcast:
Pretty descent. TLC, Discovery, Sci-Fi, etc. Definitely a lot of good shows available.
$29.99 1st 6 mo. $55.40 after that. $9.99 installation fee = $522.33 a year

Dish network:
Turbo bronze with DVR and local channels. Has what Comcast has (that I would watch anyway).
$34.99 a month $99.00 install fee (unless you agree to sign up for 2 years) = $519.88 a year

Netflix:
Pretty much any major tv show from last season and back, any movie, plus tons of HD titles. To ensure you get a disc every day you’ll need to rent 5 at a time.
$29.99 a month = $359.88 a year

Yeah, Comcast and Dish do offer cheaper options than what I listed, but unless you spend your days watching Telemundo and C-span, they’re totally useless. I keep wanting to get cable/satellite, but none of them can come close to competing with Netflix.

Not only is Netflix cheaper, but it also has recent movies, HBO series, indie films, foreign films, and documentaries. Some of which you can’t get on Dish/Comcast or at best, pay a lot more to have (HBO is $14.99 a month on Dish). Even if I went out and bought a really expensive HDTV antenna ($80), so I could watch news, and sports, I’d still pay less. Unless you’re a big sports fan, I see no reason to get cable, it costs too much for too little.

Welcome to our new and improved site! Better navigation, cleaner layout, more projects… I especially love the ingenious arrow keys idea (thank you, Alex!) under our portfolio section which makes project browsing a breeze. Enjoy!

Yep, Virgin Galactic just unveiled the WhiteKnightTwo, a commercial plane set to take passengers on sub-orbital space flights. With a maximum altitude of 110KM, riders will definitely get a birds eye view of Earth and a healthy dose of weightlessness.

Tickets won’t be cheap, but I’d be willing to bet this will be way more fun than a trip to Six Flags. If I had that much disposable income, I would be on the wait list in a heart beat. Take a look at their press release for more info.

Some scientists believe that some diets (such as the standard American diet) are detrimental to health, and they believe that a vegan diet represents an improvement, in part because vegan diets are often high enough in fruit and vegetables to meet or exceed the recommended fruit and vegetable intakes. According to the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada, diets that avoid meat tend to have lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, and higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, and phytochemicals.

People who avoid meat are reported to have lower body mass index. From this follows lower death rates from ischemic heart disease; lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.

The authors of The China Study argue that osteoporosis is linked to the consumption of animal protein because animal protein, unlike plant protein, increases the acidity of blood and tissues which is then neutralized by calcium pulled from the bones. However, just not eating meat isn’t enough; it is recommended that vegans eat three servings per day of a high calcium food, such as fortified soy milk, and take a calcium supplement as necessary. American Dietetic Association has said that “appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” Poorly planned vegan diets can be deficient in nutrients such as Vitamin B, Vitamin D, Calcium, Iodine, and Omega-3 fatty acids.

A 2006 study found that in people with type 2 diabetes a low-fat vegan diet reduced weight, BMI, cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol and did so to a greater extent than the diet prescribed by the American Diabetes Association.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends what they call the “Four New Food Groups.” They suggest that vegans and vegetarians eat at least three servings of vegetables a day, including dark green, leafy vegetables such as broccoli, and dark yellow and orange such as carrots; five servings of whole grains (bread, rice, pasta); three of fruit; and two of legumes (beans, peas, lentils).

Some additional images that ware taken here for DiCon Fiberoptics, Inc. For all their FiberLamps® (first image) we used metallic background to emphasize the light and its reflection.

Happy 4th, everyone!

Check out the latest  green vehicle from Hungary. It’s the three seater Antro Solo and it gets a sweet 150mpg. Not only that, but it can run purely on solar power for short commutes of 10-15 miles. If it’s cloudy and you still absolutely refuse to pay $4+ for gas, it can also be pedal powered(!!!). All of this plus a decent top speed of 87mph. Personally I think this thing looks pretty cool, kinda reminds me of the motorcycles from Tron.