JLOOP March Madness Lunch – Round 1
by greg
And for good measure, pool standing as of 5:15 pm on friday
| 1 | No Wammies | 21 | - | - | - | - | Memphis | 8 | 29 |
| 2 | Meagher | 20 | - | - | - | - | Louisville | 6 | 26 |
| 3 | FullCourtneyPress | 20 | - | - | - | - | North Carolina | 4 | 24 |
| 3 | big money! * | 20 | - | - | - | - | Kansas | 4 | 24 |
| 5 | sister katie | 19 | - | - | - | - | Ohio St. | 2 | 21 |
| 5 | Tell me how my bracket tastes | 19 | - | - | - | - | Louisville | 2 | 21 |
| 7 | Hoop Dreams | 18 | - | - | - | - | North Carolina | 2 | 20 |
| 7 | Go Time | 18 | - | - | - | - | Duke | 2 | 20 |
| 9 | Greg’s Rolling Thunder | 17 | - | - | - | - | Pittsburgh | 2 | 19 |
| 10 | Barack’s Picks | 16 | - | - | - | - | North Carolina | 2 | 18 |
| 10 | waffles full of chicken | 18 | - | - | - | - | Louisville | 0 | 18 |
Metrics doesn’t replace strategy
by jay
Great post by Andrew Chen about how A/B testing can lead to mindless pursuit of optimization and cut innovation entirely out of the work.
http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/03/02/does-ab-testing-lead-to-crappy-products/
IE strikes back!
by daniel
Encountered a neat error message in Internet Explorer while developing one of our new sites:
Internet Explorer cannot open the site: http://www.yoursite.com.
Operation aborted
After much frustration, turns out it’s a conflict between SWFObject and Lightbox 2. Explanation is available here.
In short, you just need to add the
attribute to the SWFObject <script> tag… Beautiful!
Star Wars Retold
by jay
OK, this is seriously hilarious.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.
A Farewell to Mario
by jay
Mario Puig was born on March 22, 1973, and left us all too soon on December 15, 2008.
Mario first worked with us at JLOOP as a freelance designer in 2006 and joined us as a full-time designer in November of that year. He was our lead designer through August of 2007 when he left to work for Sapient.
From the very beginning we could tell that Mario was an artist with deep convictions and a great passion for design. In our first meetings – when we talked about working on a few logo sketches and items for a client’s site (that he would later entirely design for us) Mario was soft-spoken. He asked probing questions and took great interest in discovering the essence of the company and the vision for the project. He seemed to be a great fit for the way that we approach our design work at JLOOP.
Our first impressions were very accurate. And although he did not always remain soft-spoken (he fought hard for the things he believed in) Mario revealed himself to be an artist of the highest integrity and a designer with an exquisitely beautiful eye. His attention to detail was unrivaled and he brought the design-threshold of our growing company to a new level during his stay with us.
I often used to joke with Mario that I had to be careful what notes I gave him because the slightest change to a layout just might cause him to have to stay up all night in a redesign. Not for the client – not for me – but for him. It always had to be perfect to his eye. Even though the request might just be to extend a line a few pixels or darken a color a bit – Mario could see the impact on the entirety of the design and he would spend hours (literally hours) adjusting the rest of the elements to match (and god forbid if the change gave him a new idea – that could take days to play out). He was passionate about the interplay of design elements – believed in a healthy respect for the formal structures of design (like grids and columns) – loved typography – and was always ready for a challenge.
One of the biggest projects that Mario worked on while he was at JLOOP was EarthFolio. EarthFolio was a challenging project from many angles and we had been working on it closely for quite a while. It wasn’t until Mario got involved artistically that the project really started to fly. He brought together the challenging architectural needs of the site with a gorgeous yet simple design. He worked many long hours directly with our client as well as collaborating heavily with JLOOPers Tim Henager and Jim Carter to build a very complicated Flash site. We all wanted desperately for the project to be a success and Mario literally lived it – for months.
Another of Mario’s major projects at JLOOP was the rebranding and website design of MHP (formerly Myers Houghton and Partners). So lets see… financial services and structural engineering… not exactly the sexiest projects – but Mario tackled them with the right mix of elegance, formality and ingenuity. Beautiful work.
Some of Mario’s other projects with us include the initial concepts and design direction of sites such as conduitdevelopment.com, cityonahillproductions.com, and primalalchemy.com. Its not hard to see his immense talent.
It was a privilege to have Mario as a part of our team at JLOOP. We don’t think of our company as just a place to work. We are a bit of a family here at JLOOP. We lift each other up and we celebrate each others’ talents. We work hard and we share in the passion of that work. But we also have lives. We care about each other and we have been immensely fortunate to have been blessed with amazing people as a part of our JLOOP family throughout our 8 years of doing this work. All told there have been 19 employees at JLOOP and each and every one has been special to us. Mario is a unique and integral piece of the puzzle that makes up what JLOOP is today. We are better for having had him with us. We have forever been touched by his spirit – as people, as friends, as co-workers, as artists, and as people striving to do good.
Mario and I had our share of late night talks after long days of work. We shared conversation about life’s struggles. To me, it seemed Mario approached his life in the same way he approached his design – in constant search of balance, with a healthy respect for structure, and a hopeful pursuit of harmony – all wound together by a deep and resonating passion. He told me many times that he “just wanted to do great work”. And by great, Mario really meant great (underlined and capitalized). I know his decision to leave JLOOP wasn’t an easy one. He was living a life full of many transitions at that time and I respected the fact that his life journey seemed to be calling on him to make this move. From our team of 8 at JLOOP to a massive crew at Sapient – not a transition to take lightly. He knew it, and I knew it, and we were at peace in knowing that Mario was reaching for a different rung.
I am shaken. Shaken by the loss of a friend. Shaken by such a great talent being taken from us in what should have been his brightest hour. I am thankful for the time Mario was with us – by the legacy he leaves behind at JLOOP. I am strengthened by the desire to do great work – as Mario would have us do.
All of us at JLOOP send our heartfelt condolences to the Puig family. We especially pray for Mario’s children – Cristiane and Oliver.
Farewell sweet Mario.
Google Dependent
by brother mike
A short story poem based on the most popular Google searches.
Google Dependent
I want to be an artist.
How to draw.
Need a way to get my art to people.
How to make a website.
Okay, I got a career, now to meet someone.
How to lose weight.
First date tonight!
How to tie a tie.
Date went well, I think I like her.
How to kiss.
I think I’m in love. We wants kids.
How to get pregnant.
Starving artist and kids don’t work well together…
How to make money.
Get a job?
How to write a resume.
My first Thanksgiving with the family!
How to cook a turkey.
I want to be an artist.
How to lose friends and alienate people.
trulia embeddable graph
by jay
Ringorang’s Decision 08 Election Game
by jay
Check it out and come play with us!
Email Client Market Share
by jay
Check out this report on the market share of email clients from litmus: http://litmusapp.com/blog/email-client-market-share
I must say I find these numbers hard to believe. It seems to me that the numbers on Outlook and gmail must be low. I wonder if it could be because some of the others on the list automatically load images in emails, while Outlook and gmail do not. Otherwise a really interesting read. I haven’t found anything comprehensive on this topic until this… so I hope they keep it up and add some depth to the report.
SproutCore and the rise of desktop web apps
by jay
Found this article to be a really interesting assessment of the trends happening with all the big players around the trend towards web-enabled desktop apps. One of Apple’s announcements at WWDC was their embracing of SproutCore for this purpose. Read on…
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/