However, life is not a constant. It is dynamic, if nothing else.

Routines do have a monotonous down side that they can make us too comfortable and we can easily get stuck in a rut.

So doing something new should be one of our routines also. Embracing the dynamism of life, and being flexible to adapt to changes inoculates us against the fear upset routines.

If the road is removed some would not walk, for others if the road is removed they will happily dance in the grass as they create a new path.

In this video the stunt skilled driver displays how it can be done turbo style, with minimal fuss, and no to-ing and fro-ing. Forget parallel parking, this is the time saving method of lateral car parking. See how it’s done after the break…

(I love the info-graphics overlaid on that clip, awesome work!)

It is surprising energy saving bulbs are not used more widely than they are currently. To not use them is a false economy. Here’s why…

Buying one moderately more expensive bulb with lower running costs, works out cheaper than buying many cheaper bulbs with higher running costs. Apart from saving economically, there are much more important ecological savings to the world we live in.

By reducing our negative impact on the environment, we can also save money. That’s a win-win scenario!

Apparently this hypothetical question is about showing what is important to you. It was posed to me a number of years ago, but with a change of situation over the years my answer has remained constant. In fact, I don’t see my answer ever changing from what instantly popped into my mind at the time.

What would you take with you?

I’ve heard a number of answers, ranging from the obvious; “the family”, “the pet”, through the material; “passport”, “files”, “jewellery”, “phone”, to the eclectic such as “Love”. No, I don’t understand that last answer either, but the question is a personal one and as such it has no right or wrong answer.

From the answer I gave to the question I’ve discovered that what is important to me is a fresh approach to problem solving. In fact the answer partly influenced the creation of thoughtlateral.com.

What was my answer? “The fire itself”.

We love Pixies!

On an obscure night in 2008 whilst creating a design using pixel buttons (which also go by the names of pixel badges, and antipixel, etc)  I thought “Wouldn’t it be a great idea if no pixels were used? Instead the button (or badge) is composed entirely by Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) code!”

Yeah, fantastic! My web fortune is upon me and I can retire in the lap of luxury!

In the sober light of day however, I find the idea is sooo fantastic it had been thought of  years ago (going back as far as 2002 I discovered). So I kept the day job.

Even so,  I’ve not yet come across CSS badges (pixeless buttons) that mimic the style of their pixel counterparts. This may be because no one has tried it, or more likely because my browser doesn’t  get about much. So I set about constructing a demo of a CSS badge (pixeless pixel button) that would look like a pixel button.

The CSS has ‘scope for refinement’ – which is a kinder way of saying it was a quick kludge.

/*CSS code */
table.badge {
border-style:solid;
border-width: 1px;
border-color: #666;
font-size: 8px;
font-family: sans-serif;
color: #fff;
line-height: 6px;
background-color: #fff;
}
table.badge tr {
background-color: #888;
text-align: center;
text-transform:uppercase;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}
table.badge td.main {
background-color:#f60;
}

<!– html code –>
<table cellspacing=1 cellpadding=0 class=”badge” width=”88px” height=”15px”">
<tr><td class=”main”>px</td><td>free</td></tr>
</table>

Some examples I made earlier can be found here.

I refer to these pixeless pixel buttons as “Pixies” because it sounds cute, and is less likely to leave your tongue in a knot when saying it.

Other related sites:

www.pixelbutton.com – the pixel button website where you can create pixel graphics.

ZwahlenDesign, “Web Badges / Buttons” – the site containing CSS web buttons

http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2002/10/22/steal_these_buttons.html – the original antipixel blog post

Lateral thinking can prevent slow speeds online

Bandwidth. How big is yours? Do you care? Well apparently, we are all demanding more of the stuff with streaming video from the BBC iPlayer and other video casting sites. The pessimists write about how it could break the Internet, how it could change the price of a loaf of bread, and even cause your mother to say “I told you so.” (OK, well maybe not as bad as that, but I’m sure it sold a few more papers anyhow).

This causes me to have that 1000pixel stare and get flashbacks when I sleep at night. You see, as a Web veteran from the last century, remembering the day Yahoo (all one page of it) appeared on the Web, and the onset of Flash I get a deja vu feeling about it all.

Back in those Halcyon days, when “surfing the net” meant annoying a fisherman while catching waves, bandwidth was a most precious commodity. Not precious in the way of kilobits, but bits. Yes, every bit counted.. and there wasn’t that many of them to count either!

Having a 56kbps line was a veritable storm drain in the plumbing of data transfer, and web designers pushed out the boat, or graphic content to be exact. In addition to this, more people were getting ensnared in the web daily. How could this fledgling Web grow when so many ‘flies’ were trying to ensnare themselves therein?

Well the answer, other than “very quickly, actually”, is smartly. Smart how? You see, the problem was tackled from two directions, above and below. Capacity was increased by modernising infrastructure and laying new ‘spider threads’ as you’d expect – the tackling from above bit, and this is the main* thrust of the current debate being discussed in the media. (* ‘main’ as in ‘only’)

Now here’s the ‘but’; the problem was also tackled from below by web designers. They created pages more appropriate to the available bandwidth – bandwidth optimisation. To see just how effective this is, compare and contrast the effect of a bumblebee at full kilter hitting a web to that of a midge fly reversing round a bend and nudging a web.

The savings when optimising, compressing, trimming off the fat, paring down to the essentials can be substantial. It’s worthwile. Consider shaving 1% of data off downloading a web page ( this seems a modest task as a quick check of my current 22Kb web page shows I could save about 2kb just by removing extraneous spaces in the code – which is nearer 10% of shaving-savings than 1%!). Multiply this up by the amount of people sucking content out of your server users and your savings just keep stacking up. The more users the more savings.

Every designer and his pet goldfish is using javascript frameworks, CSS, and all other manner of unclean meat in websites these days. Isn’t it time to bring on the code obfuscators that reduce variable name lengths down to a character, and all other manner of compression enabling technologies we can throw into the mix? I think so, in fact, I know so. Optimisation worked very well before and helped the Web become what it is today.

Gone on, impress your wallet, compress your code. You know it makes sense when breaking the bandwidth barrier.