So, the British government baled out Northern Rock. That seemed bad enough, but at least it was more of a cheap loan than a bottomless pit.

This week HBOS was incomprehensibly brought to its knees by the failure of Lehman Brothers. The story goes that HBOS loaned Lehman Brothers a wodge of cash; Lehman failed; HBOS realised it wouldn’t get its money back; HBOS had its credit rating dropped; creditors started pulling money out; depositors started getting shaky feet; confidence in the bank was falling – banks live on confidence.

Whilst all this was going on the whole hype and hysteria was magnified ten fold by the stock markets – a load of big players started short selling HBOS shares (i.e. betting the share price would fall) to make money. They benefit if confidence is lost in the bank because that would bring the price down. Now, they wouldn’t have spread nasty rumours would they? Surely not?

Wind forward to today and the USA’s government is baling out all of its financial institutions who are exposed to bad debt, but they’re going a step further – they’re going to nationalise that debt and take it away from the financial institutions.

What? Run that by me again?

When I last checked the USA was purported to be a shining example of how capitalism should work. You don’t get the same social safeguards over there that we enjoy in the UK – if you’re unemployed then you’re right on the bread line, if you get ill then you either have insurance, you pay for it (now or for the rest of your life), or you die (not quite, but you get the idea).

If you can’t pay your way in the USA then you’re on your own. Unless you’re a big financial institution it seems.

I thought that capitalism involved balancing potential profits with risk – you speculate to accumulate, but with it comes the risk that you might not accumulate. You cannot make money 100% of the time on 100% of your investments.

The whole argument behind the bale out is that if the financial institutions collapse then so does the economy and everybody suffers. This is an argument that I buy. However if it was so important for these institutions to succeed then where were the safeguards to ensure that they didn’t lend irresponsibly in the first place?

And more importantly, now that the horse as bolted, where are the strings with this rescue package to ensure that this never happens again? Ever? I’m not seeing any.

From around the year 2000 onwards I can recall having loads of conversations with people down the pub about the credit bubble. Everyone was buying things on credit, house prices were rising sharply – everything seemed too good to be true and when you’re borrowing money you’re going to have to pay it back one day, you can’t borrow forever. If we were talking about it down the pub then surely the government and financial institutions were too? Why weren’t they making sure it was all sustainable instead of basking in the glory of having sailed a good ship?

Also weren’t they squirreling money away because times were good in readiness for a downturn? No, of course they weren’t – shareholder dividends were high, Britain was spending tax revenues like there was no tomorrow with our public national debt still rising.

In conclusion, we seem to have created a monster – financial institutions which know that they can do whatever they want to maximise profits to their all important shareholders and security that when they get it horribly wrong by over-reaching then the people at the bottom will be there to pay them out. If I am right then that is unjust, immoral and wrong.

The little guy is being screwed over and when he wakes up to that fact he is going to be really pissed off about it.

Street Fighter – Powerfoil 1

Street Fighter – Powerfoil 2

Soul Calibur III Set Card 1

Pepper Fairies – Final

Pepper Orient

DOTA Loading Screen Wallpaper

Pepper Portrait

Huma Cover

Snake Bite

Bleaches

Welcome a Legend

Stanley Lau had very humble beginnings on deviantART. He began just another deviant in a sea of many, and he quietly introduced his art the Deviant community, one work at a time. It was immediately recognizable that he had talent, but had not refined it quite yet.

Over the years, he took the communities feedback to heart, and offered up his own back. Along the way he became one of the most recognized artists on the site. And not by following trends or holding his popularity up as a mirror to others, but by sheer hard work and determination and commitment to those who considered themselves fans of his work and believers in his talent.

Credit comment: Deviant art on Stanley Lau’s ‘Deviousness’ award.

Showcase

Ten Brothers

Chunli Style

Pepper Smile

Samurai Spirit 6

X-Men Together

Sakura Sunshine

Wandaful Dance

Warhammer – Forge Of War 5A

VMC Mascot Designs

Pepper Samurai

Typical, after my last post extolling the virtues of how easy it was to install a printer in Ubuntu I hit a problem today.

The symptoms are that you go to do a printer administration task, like add a printer, either through the gnome print manager or cups/cupsd web interface you get and a challenge box: “Password Required” “Password or someuser on localhost?”. You will try all manner of combinations but it keeps coming up.

Reinstalling cups doesn’t help, you seem to have the default /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

It transpired that the critical lines are:

# Administrator user group...
SystemGroup lpadmin

Then the penny dropped – I wasn’t in the lpadmin group. I added myself and we all lived happily ever after.

I should say that this wasn’t on a recent install of Ubuntu – this machine has effectively had 3 upgrades since it was first installed, so that’s its get out of jail free card.

I read today that the web design industry could soon look forward to the ability of having typography as good on the web as it is in print. Currently the only web-safe are supported by all browsers,a collection that totals less than ten. Serif and Sans-Serif fonts make up this limited selection,which include the notorious Comic-Sans typeface, a favorite amongst my relatives when they start design wedding and birthday invites, coining the phrase ‘oh Comic-sans, let’s use that one’.

What’s gone before.

In the early 1990’s Microsoft developed a type format called EOT (Embedded Opentype Format) to be used in their Microsoft Word software. They later had the idea of using this same type format in their Internet Explorer browser software and enabled the browser to be EOT compatible since 1996. Their plan was to get their arch rival of the time Netscape them and make this an Open Format so that the internet of the future had the ability to support rich typography. Well unfortunately, for whatever reason, Netscape decided to use another standard so no format was adopted and the EOT propriety remained with Microsoft.

Now Bill Hill, over on the IE Blog has been fighting the good fight to make typography on the Web as good as we’re used to seeing in print. The main issue with having an open type format on the web is the legalities, similar to how music companies copyright their material, allowing personal use of a paid for track but disallowing a public performance of that same song with additions fees being paid.

Ascender Corporation and its collaborators in the typographic community help maintain the legalities of font use. In its introduction to the technologies of font embedding on the Web, Ascender says,

Fonts play a critical role in the display, printing and manipulation of text-based information and content. Font embedding is a broad and complex topic, and we hope this website becomes a valuable resource for everyone who creates or uses fonts to learn more about proper font usage and licensing.

So what’s changed

Currently only Internet Explorer supports EOT, leaving others browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Opera refusing to support EOT until it is officially recognised as the Open Web Standard. EOT has now been presented to the W3C in an attempt to make this the standard. If the W3C pass EOT then the web design industry could see movement towards having a Open Web Standard for typography supported by all the leading Browsers.

For more information on all things Font related, please visit www.fontembedding.com.

Example of EOT css markup

Will we see any movement soon?

Well this has been in the air for well over ten years already so I wouldn’t expect it to happen overnight. Even if the W3C supported EOT the major players like Firefox, Chrome and Safari have to support it for it to be a success. It only takes one miserable git to spoil the party. All in all it’s a step forward, let’s just hope something happens sooner rather than later.

Half way through developing a content management system a client asked us a question:

Can we select the text sizes in points? Like 18pt for the title and 11pt for the body? We use Microsoft Word and that uses pt’s.

Why? Why do you need to do that? You already have 3 measurement options, Em’s, Percentages and Pixels.

My reply was going to be something like:

If you buy a Diesel car, you wouldn’t fill up with Petrol just because you’re “Used to using Petrol”

But then thinking about it, is there an easy way to do this. Initially Google brought up nothing to help us convert Pixels, EM’s and Percentages to Points, then we stumbled across Reed Design in London. They showed a very useful table giving approximate conversions as a direct result of their experiments.

Here’s a chart that converts points to pixels (and ems and %). It’s an approximation, which will depend on font, browser and OS, but it’s a good starting point.

The Floating Frog has just registered our participation in the Blog Action Day 2008 to raise the awareness of poverty around the globe.

Read more about Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty and how you can get involved.

We have no milk!

No milk = no tea = bad mood

Ok not a proven formula but does occasionally happen.

In the studio we have come up with a geeky way of always having enough milk when we need it most, without having to argue over who’s turn it is to buy it next. The developers created a milk chart on our local dev server. It basically tally’s up who’s bought what and if your at the bottom of the list then your the clown. It’s all a bit of fun of course but nobody wants to be the clown lol

The Milk Chart

The people who use the milk are in the milk list, whose who aren’t are left out.

This weeks cow queen is…

Which reminds me, I better go buy some milk..

Since getting into the industry I have lost count of how many websites I have worked on, it’s certainly in the hundreds. Within the 10 years of mastering graphic design, web design, and multimedia I have have made steady progress, both in the quality, the length of time taken and the approach I make to each new job. Even though I’ve forgotten most of the work I’ve done I’ve never forgot the first website I completed.

This was at college while studying Graphic Design at Westwood College, Scarborough. I decided to take an extra module called ‘Web Authoring’ so I could build a website with my CV on it. Please note a few facts:

1. I never touched a computer until I was 17
2. I never owned a computer at home, not even a Commodore 64
3. I initially hated computers, especially after I lost 6 months work when my Floppy disc decided to pack in.

What’s an Escape Key? A mouse? That has 4 legs and a tail right… you get the message, great.

The website

Here it is, what a piece of work huh! Forgot Web 2.0, this was the stuff of the day. Flash intro’s with spinning text, tables, inline styles this site has it all! I think it was built, and probably designed through Adobe Golive.

Some funny extracts from the site

The local people section was funny, I photographed some of my college friends and compiled a page that had them rotating in an animated gif file.

I also liked the jokes pages, reading them back made me laugh even though they’re years old – oh and I didn’t write these.

and now some crude jokes…

What’s six inches long and gets women excited?

A fifty pound note.

How do you make your bird cry while having sex?

Phone her up.

What do you call a woman with one leg shorter than the other?

Eileen.

What’s worse than being raped by Jack the Ripper?

Being fingered by Captain Hook.

What have parsley and pubic hair got in common?

You just push it to the side and carry on eating!!

What happens to a woman if she has too many facelifts?

She grows a beard.

What did the Buddist say to the hot-dog seller?

Make me one with everything.

Final thoughts

For a website that’s at least 7 years old I don’t think it’s too bad. Missing images and broken links are excusable because this really was the first HTML I coded and it’s been a good learning curve from that point in time. I visit the website occasionally because to be honest it shouldn’t be forgotten about, we should all be proud of our roots, that is of course if we can remember where it started, so to finish..

Can you remember your first website?

A few days ago myself and my partner had our bikes stolen from our shed. The shed was secure and the Police confirmed it was forced entry. After making a claim to my insurers they informed us we weren’t covered! We were planning on using them to ride for charity, the Harewood House Pedal for Pounds event, which has now passed but obviously we couldn’t. This event has passed but we’d love to try again on another event.

All donors will be shown below along with the amount raised. Anybody can donate, if your a friend or just someone who would like to donate then we warmly welcome any donation you wish to make. If your a business then we would love you to donate too, and we will list your details below with a link to your website if you have one.

Making a donation is easy:

1. Click this link

2. Enter code “UZ976″

3. Make a donation

Our vow

If we raise over and above the target then we will donate this extra amount to charity. We will also keep all donors up-to-date with our progress, and once the amount is raised give out special thanks to our donors. Once the charity bike ride event has been chosen, we will let our sponsors and donors know on the status. We will do everything in our power to raise as much money for charity as we can so this whole group effort pays off to those in most need, the charity.

The charity

Still to be chosen as this could be decided upon once the event is chosen. The highest donors/sponsors can help us chose a charity if they support one.

The Target

£600 – This would enable us to replace the bikes stolen and give us the necessary quality we feel would help us take on the more challenging events, and hopefully raise more money.

Current amount raised – £60

Donors/sponsors list

Exposure

Bike crime is rife in Harrogate at the moment, a policeman informed me. I have contacted the following to see if they are willing to support our story and launch a campaign to educate people of this matter:

• Stray FM
• Harrogate Advertiser