I’m a Web Designer. It’s a field dedicated to research, problem-solving, functionality, interaction, usability, computation, and integration. It’s logic-driven, language-heavy, and highly challenging. I think the biggest mistake most of my peers make is waiting until after college to jump into their career. If you think there isn’t anything you can do, that nobody will take you seriously until you have your degree, I guarantee that you’ll have another excuse down the road. Intern, volunteer, learn a skill. Let me repeat that last part. Learn a skill. I’ve never accomplished anything with wishes, alone. Goals don’t become real until someone initiates the first step. By the time I have my degree in Digital Interactive Systems, I’ll have 5 years of experience as a graphic designer, and 4 years of experience as a freelance web designer.

You won’t see many ads on this website because it serves as my online portfolio and as a hub for clients to login and monitor the progress of their websites. I plan on integrating more of a user-based model, with a community-rich interface and an emphasis on web design. As clients grow to understand the usability of dynamic websites, more and more of my projects will be implementing databases and privileges for the administrator. My ultimate goal is to create websites that require little to no future maintenance for the web designer. Clients will be allowed to update their pages with a user-friendly system, and on their own time. One may wonder what affect this will have on the web designer’s profits. I believe it will increase them, as well as the credibility of their field. More clients will be looking for better models for their websites and that will, in turn, nessecitate more skilled designers and programmers. There are plenty of run-of-the-mill, mediocre html coders looking to pull a fast one on their customers, and that does nothing but compromise the integrity of the job title. Web designers need to practice proper and ethical means of operation if they’re ever going to get away from clients paying them like bargain bin employees.

First of all, Slusho! comes from one of the many titles Cloverfield adopted during production, to throw off scoopers, allegedly. Interestingly enough, Slusho! is the first in a serious of breadcumbs planted to establish some backstory, outside of what could be extracted from the film. All we know from watching the movie is one person’s perspective from ground-level. We know that Jason was wearing a Slusho! t-shirt, that Rob was going to take a job in Japan as a company’s Vice President, that while Rob and Beth were on the Ferris Wheel, an object fell into the ocean, and that the monster that attacked their city may still be alive.

What further research will tell us is that the monster, in fact, did survive, Slusho! is a company that distributes a highly addictive slush whose ingredients are mined from the bottom of the ocean, and that they operate in conjunction with Tagruato (a drilling company established in 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasake were levelled by the Atomic bomb), the same company Rob was to become vice president of. We also learn that Slusho!’s slush contains an ingredient that turns small fish into whales, and that they awoke the Cloverfield monster before it went on a rampage in NYC. This brings about even more speculation. Was the monster unleashed? How much did Rob actually know about the incident? Was he a pawn or a catalyst? Did his brother really die? How did the tape survive the hammer down? Did the monster grow that large from consuming the deep sea ingredient, or did Slusho! initiate the transformation? Did the object that hit the ocean fall, or was it dropped? Why? More importantly, how did these facts about the film surface on the internet, and are they anything more than theory?

Without a brilliant marketing campaign, and tons of hype, Cloverfield would not have generated such a devoted cult following. If you want to read up on a similar phenomena, Google “Lost Season 4.” Whatever is planned for the sequel, Abrams and crew have found way for the story to write itself. By the time you read this article, hundreds of websites for Cloverfield will have sprung up. Writer’s strike? Who cares.

I thought the entire easter egg-hunting experience was intriguing, but the movie, as it stands on its own two feet, disappoints. Hype can be a double-edged sword. In most cases, a movie doesn’t live up to the expectations established by the trailers. In Cloverfield’s case, it’s a mixed bag. When the first trailer came out during Transformers, the focus was around the victims of a natural or man-made disaster. Explosions rocked the screen, screams pealed over a frantic crowd, and everybody was left in the dark. Around the time of the second trailer’s release, the focus was less on the people, and more on what was causing the devastation. Sources leaked out that it was a monster movie. Now, more and more of the audience was speculating on where the monster came from and how it was created. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t really do much to answer those questions. Rather, it raises even more. The movie delivered, hands down, but the filmmakers chose to present Cloverfield from a very narrow point of view. All we have to guide us is a tape recovered from the site, and one hell of a mystery. In conclusion, to really enjoy project Cloverfield, a person needs to see it as one piece of a large and intricate puzzle, in which, the fun is in the experience of putting it all together. 4 out of 5 stars.

Source(Images): 1
Cloverfield and Images are trademarks of Paramount Pictures

First and foremost, I’m going to dispel one rumor. Yes, Macs do crash. With Leopard installed, they crash a lot. Their reboot screen, may look neat, and the warning message may be polite, but it’s the same result. With all the compatibility issues and bugs, the first generation of Leopard owners are basically fodder to the testing cannon. I can say one thing; when my Mac does crash, it happens in a consistent fashion. Coincidence or not, my Macbook would crash when I had a separate window running in Spaces, but only with memory-intensive programs like Final Cut Pro running in the background. Crashing could have been my Macbook’s way of clearing the buffer.

Back when I operated within Tiger, my operating system never crashed. Applications, however did. Which brings me to my next concern: the amount of incompatible applications with Leopard are staggering. I’ve gotten used to using workarounds to get past bugs, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Take this excerpt from chris.pirillo.com:

• . . .both Apple and Microsoft have a track record of breaking app functionality between OS revisions. Apple generally sacrifices backwards compatibility for overall improvements - whereas Microsoft places shims and hacks throughout Windows to ensure backwards compatibiity at countless costs. . . . link

Another weird issue is when I have Windows XP running with Bootcamp, blue pixels will inhabit my screen around the bottom left corner at certain times, and remain there until I refresh the screen somehow. Apple’s Help page doesn’t provide any solutions and actually shifts blame to Microsoft. Here is a full thread of people’s complaints regarding the issue.

Still, with all these drawbacks, Leopard natively offers 64-bit support, as opposed to 32-bit Tiger, and offers Apple’s next level of Core Technology. Core Animation integrates low-level animation into applications, allowing for a more sophisticated level of interactivity. Spaces and Time Machine both take advantage of Core Animation, seamlessly, due to the fact that the technology takes advantage of Intel’s multi core processors. This allows Core Animation processors to run on their own dedicated core. However, until more developers take advantage of Core Animation, what we have is the potential for more applications to look flashier and run more efficiently in the future. Until then, Microsoft will be in the very same race with their own Seadragon, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ Photosynth.

Issues aside, The Macbook is a really strong piece of hardware. 2.16GHz is plenty of processing power for the average notebook user. Take note that Apple likes to upgrade their notebook processors almost every few months. Back in June, their processors were at 1.8GHz, and today you’ll find Macbooks with up to 2.2GHz. To be perfectly honest, the difference is marginal. You’re still not going have enough power to play most 3d games or create a Motion 3 clip longer than 10 seconds, and you won’t be able to use some of Final Cut Pro 6’s higher end features. Don’t even think about Multi-cam editing with real-time playback. You will, however, be able to run Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and most 2d games without a hiccup. The limitations have less to do with processing power of the Intel Core 2 Duo, and more to do with the fact that video graphics are integrated (Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor). If you want to do high-end media editing or play newer games, a computer with a graphics card is essential. I hope you like spreadsheets. 3 out of 5 stars.

I recommend the Macbook for Graphic and Web Designers. For 3d rendering and gaming, grab yourself a Macbook Pro. People with a greater degree of portability in mind should opt for the less capable, half-as-heavy Macbook Air.

Source (Images): Downloaded from 1 2 3
Macbook and Macbook Air are trademarks of Apple

American TV was the number one reason I wanted to leave the Philippines. I would wake up every morning and switch to American, Australian, British, or Japanese broadcasts because in the Philippines, the only program they put effort into were variety shows. You’d find an actor singing or dancing, or a singer or dancer acting, and they had to be funny at the same time. Donita Rose was an MTVasia veejay who ended up acting in an American film. After that brief stint, which was unsurprisingly overplayed in my community, she disappeared off MTVasia’s airwaves for a while. It seemed like everybody wanted to leave. Living in the third-world is all about hopes, dreams, and aspirations, but it’s desperation that gets you out. I learned that when I was five.

So there I was sitting in front my television set. Some station was broadcasting Samurai X, in Japanese. Rirouni Kenshin. They didn’t color the blood white in this version. I remember how much they censor out of cartoons in the states. In Japan, they didn’t censor it at all. It felt like I had crossed onto some rift between the two nations and their opposing views on the youth’s exposure to media. I was very much an American, but I was getting a small taste of Japanese moral culture. Did that make me any less American? I’ll always wonder. Believe it or not, America is teeming with culture, and you don’t have to go to church to be exposed to it. You don’t have to join a club or commit to a routine. You just have to be an impressionable child, sitting in front of the television.

In my province in the philippines, it was a big deal, when Filipino boxer, Pacquiao, faced off against Ledwaba. The Abu Sayyaf rebels also received more news coverage, as did former actor, Joseph Estrada’s presidency. No matter where in the world, the news is going to lose emphasis or be magnified to some extent by nationalism. Nothing is absolute. Eventually, history will solidify a event in time, but even then, mass agreement will only be relative to the masses.

My own personal history was spent acclimatizing to a uniformed private school, 1 billion grains of rice, a glass of Catholicism with every meal, the black market, and media that was always 6 months behind the United States. Keeping up with the world means living in a country that exports more than it imports.

I was enrolled into St. Louise de Marillac private school the first day of my arrival. I had a girlfriend by the second day, who agreed to teach me Tagalog, the country’s first language, and Bicol, the region’s dialect. In the philippines, you couldn’t go 25 miles without having to learn a new dialect. Grace was sweet, hasty, and short-lived. She had drinks with me after school at a local bar. The place looked like one of those stands set up along the beach, where all the drinks come with little umbrellas and the men wore hawaiian shirts and the women had flowers in their hair. She told me she loved me. Our relationship lasted 3 days. Like they say- easy come, easy go.

We left for home on a Trike. That was their name for a motorcycle with a sidecar. 5 pesos one way. Goodbye, Grace. See you in another life.

The above photo was taken by jikamajoja and is used under the creative commons license.