I'm not really sure why, but the Flash people at work updated the Spang Makandra display at work with an FLV background of wavy grass. As if the 1920x1200 resolution wasn't killer enough, we now have coarse VCD quality grass animating at 10fps.

I eased the pain by watching the demos from ASD and Excess from last weekend. I really ought to get around writing some incensed article explaining my absence at Breakpoint -to my chagrin I had to explain the situation ad nauseam even DURING the damn event.

When gimmicky design fails

Infinity Art Studio has one hell of a site. I like how they convey their lust for interlaced, over-compressed video playback. I love how they randomly glitch the hell out of the content of their pages to make it look "edgy".

But I absolutely adore how their contact form not only glitches and blurs like the rest of their pages. Get this: when that happens, you lose focus of the form you were just typing in. So type fast and pray to whatever deity that you're on time to finish your sentence.

Wonderful design, but nobody's upstairs.

Internet Explorer 8 not fully retarded after all

Hooray! The IE dev team has buckled under the delighted backlash of web developers world wide and announced that IE8 will render in standards mode by default. As they cheerfully note themselves, this is a blatant retraction of their earlier announcement, which essentially required developers to explicitly force IE8 to not render like it's retarded siblings.

This is pretty heartwarming, especially since Microsoft has a pretty terrible track record for listening to web developers. Backpedaling on this extremely stupid decision is a welcome change to the typical "well, we're the guys eating paint chips for lunch, so it defintely makes sense to us!" stance.

I do secretly wonder what the catch is. Given their track record, They'll probably break something. Like ACID2 compliance :(