Whenever I see pictures like the one to the left, I wonder how long it took the designer to do.

But that’s because I’m stupid, and often forget that I’m something of a computer programmer.

Check out this site Wordle. It’s f*ckin awesome. Just enter in your own text, or choose a url to read text from – the image I made off of their site is in fact generated from text off of my blog.

It takes seconds, and there are a bunch of font / color / styling options. And all of them = awesome.

Oh yes - There will be lawsuits.

This has to be one of the more absurd (internet related) schemes for profit that I’ve heard. But it does bring me one step closer to a real life version of that scene in hackers when the feds bust into my apartment to arrest me. Or maybe a different, more lawerly, subpoena-eee version of that story. Keep reading.

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UPDATE c/o of Brad Frost – Doing this will invalidate your CSS! However, this is appropriate because 1.) We know exactly what is keeping our CSS from validating and 2.) We did it anyways to get something we want to work in another browser.

This is one of the few situations where it’s ok to ignore the ! in your web developer bar.

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So I made a slight joke about progressive enhancement in a previous post, but let’s be real for a second: If you could easily get all your site features working the same way in every browser, you would.

Well, as far as IE6 – 8 go, you can get opacity to work. Normally we’d code opacity into our stylesheet like so:

It’s super easy to get this CSS rule to comply in IE6+ – but it does involve the inclusion of another CSS invalidating Microsoft filter effect. However, it’s really short and easy to remember, so there’s no excuse for not having opacity affects / rollovers in IE!

And that’s it! Whatever you wanted to be transparent will also work in IE6+! Obviuosly, instead of “0.6″ you’d type in “60″ for the filter rule.

There are actually a bevy of cool features available via Microsoft’s filter rule… too bad it only applies to their browsers, selfish bastards. Here’s a great post containing a lot of CSS2+ matching rules to Microsoft’s filters.

So, until Microsoft buckles under the ease of Webkit, at least get your opacities to be cross browser compliant, people!

Skip the boring stuff, and figure out how to make ringtones here.

A few years ago when my friend got some fancy smart phone, I was immediately jealous of the fact that he could easily use his MP3′s as ringtones. As a (barely) post adolescent with a need for musically identification, the ringtone market for phones sucked. I was lucky enough to have M.O.P.’s “Ante up” as my ringtone for a few years. It generated a lot of dirty looks, but I was never able to find another ringtone that was quite as obnoxious. The jealousy incurred upon hearing my friend’s phone play 2Pac’s “I aint mad at ya” was depressing to say the least.

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So I was walking out of the locker room of the Coles gym @ NYU the other day, and I saw a girl who worked for the gym, as made obvious by her wearing a purple shirt no one would wear unless they had to.

She was loading a vending machine with Gatorade, something my dehydrated body craved at the time. But that’s not all I wanted.

I wanted revenge.

My “education,” while yes, partially made more expensive by my lack of effort in class, has cost WAY more than it’s worth. Yes, NYU’s a fine university, but everytime I see an ad on the subway for the school, all I can think is:

“This ad cost millions of dollars. Somehow, my money went to a subway ad for a university which is already extremely competitive and world renowned.”

I mean, what the fuck NYU? What good is that ad really doing for the university? All these flat screens popping up over the university piss me off too.

But the bottom line is, until they make my tuition cheaper, I’ll still be motivated to say things to working college students filling up vending machines such as:

“Look, I don’t know why, but I really get a good feeling out of stealing from the University. Would you mind looking the other way?”

She looks at me, looks down the hall, and then looks the other way while I snatched a free Gatorade Rain, purple rain.

Score one for me, one for my faith in humanity, and take one away from these penny snatching bastards at NYU.

ed note: In the future, most posts will be about the internet and stuff. Promise.