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This could turn out to be a new category in and of itself. Would it be soda-can acrobatics or LG Chocolate Phone Photography? I am not sure. What I am sure of is that the can in this picture is balancing freely by itself (without any help from the keyboard as it may appear to have at that angle). It has just the right level of liquid inside the can which gives it the right center of gravity to balance on the beveled lip as sort of a cantilever mechanism. An engineer might be able to provide a better description of why this works so, but I am a designer, which means I think it just looks cool so I take a picture of it with my techno-gadgetry and put it on my narcissistic blog.

This picture adequately sums up my life for the past few weeks. Caffeine from diet soda enabling me to push and click the mouse a little longer, captured with my new LG Chocolate phone which has been a bright spot in an otherwise dull and gray work week.

My 21 inch CRT monitor at work has a row of dead pixels about one quarter the way down from the top. It appears as a slightly dashed or dotted line of gray and is particularly visible when I have something with a white or light background up on the screen. Normally it is just an annoyance, but it served me well one day this week when Windows was acting up. I was implementing a design and wanted to test vertical alignment in my browser window versus my mockup, so I had the browser window on top of and to the side of my maximized Fireworks window and was attempting to take a screen shot to put into Photoshop and test alignment with a nice straight Photoshop guide.

As luck would have it, the ‘Print Screen’ function had decided to take a break from working as things in Windows will often do. I knew a simple reboot would restore ‘Print Screen’ as it had in the past but I had my test server spun up with 8 or 9 different browsers for testing my CSS. Sometimes rebooting is a major inconvenience.

Just as I was about to start closing windows, I noticed that familiar gray line of dead pixels hovering about 2-3 pixels above the two elements that I was testing for alignment. Sure enough, the distance between the two elements and the dead pixels was uniform so I knew I had it down to at least within one pixel or so which was good enough for the time being. So basically, I utilized a hardware deficiency in my monitor to overcome a software deficiency of my operating system in order to perform a simple task. I should note this on my performance review under “Problem Solving.”

This day was certainly exciting for in my realm of reality despite having working while sick and having had to sit through a snoozer of a training meeting at work. Here is the breakdown of why this day rocked. First, LOST! Our friends on the island came back to begin their run of new episodes. Second, U.S. vs. Mexico in soccer (football), played right here in my backyard at the Cardinal’s new stadium in Glendale. Third, Scion unveiled two new models which were a revamped xB and a new model, the xD, to replace the xA. Add on fajitas for dinner to this mix and it was a great day overall.

Each of these events definitely merits their own post so I will be posting throughout the day as I have time.

It is kind of cool having identical twin sons. We had them at the dentist recently and the he commented that their teeth were the same. They had identical spacing and such with their teeth. Interesting. The photo was taken by my wife for class and I helped with the post processing (photoshoppery!).