Stefan Hayden

The amount of literature that has been published about Revenge of the Sith really should not surprise me. Every Star Wars release I read less and less of it as I care less and less about why people hate the movie and how it destroys the original trilogy.

Perhaps its just because I’m only reading people who agree with me but it seems there is a large outpouring of love for this movie and nothing makes me happier.

Perhaps now that it is over the reconciliation can happen between the movies and People who had such large issues with them. In another 30 years I hope these movies are still in our minds like the originals always will be.

I'm just not interested in trashing the dialogue and ticking off all of this movie's weaknesses. I give extra credit for good intentions, and I like hanging out with my friends even when they are total clowns. Star Wars has been a cool friend to hang out with, and I'll miss it. -Mr. Sun

AIGA has a great list of symbol signs that are free for every one but I don’t think most people take advantage of it. While a lifesaver for anyone making a map they are useful in other situations as well.

Working on a site that has to do with recycling I thought there was no better place to look for a quick dingbat then the symbol signs that AIGA provides. Much to my surprise they did not have the recycle sign. In fact while the list is a great resource there seems to be a lot of useful symbols not available such as the biohazard, the nuclear, and handicapped symbols.

In an effort to help other designers not have to spend time designing little dingbat here is my list of useful dingbats:

Recycle Symbol		eps
Biohazard Symbol		eps

A blogging milestone happened in the art department today as I helped Jen, Katie, Christina, and even Mattyo setup a wordpress blog through Dreamhost as you can see from the right side links bar. If this community of TCNJ blogging stays active it will be a great resource for both current and future art graduates from TCNJ.

Blogging will only get bigger and hopefully this will be the first step toward a very vibrant and living community at TCNJ that I hope to cultivate and build.

I’ve wanted to clean up the College Union Board website for a long time now and only now got around to it by making it apart of my senior portfolio. I not only gave it a redesign with a much stronger hierarchy but also added a lot of back end functionality that is needed to keep the site running with out any one overly knowledgeable about html.

After wrestling with FCKeditor between the hours of 12 and 5am I finally got it working. FCKeditor is a WYSIWYG editor that can be implemented in a number of ways. It comes in flavors such as javascript, asp, php, coldfusion, and perl. The documentation was a bit sparse and only included an install walk through for javascript. This was luckily what I needed as what I wanted to do was replace a TEXTAREA with a WYSIWYG editor and javascript seemed to be the only one that did this, though it was the only one documented.

Though it took me a long time to pin point the main problem I was having was with the path to the .js file that was supposed to be running the show. The linked javascript file ended up being src=”FCKeditor/fckeditor.js” while the base path ended up being oFCKeditor.BasePath = ‘./FCKeditor/’;

I don’t know if this is a little quirky or the way it is supposed to act. The documentation was very short for JavaScript with no troubleshooting and the sourceforge forum had no problem that seemed similar to mine.

Another issue I had was that the options that were listed were simply held in an array in the config file and if you did not what an option you had to delete it from the array instead of turning the option true or false which would be better for getting options back if you wanted.

Now that it’s all working I can’t be happier and I know how much easier it will make it for my wonderful event planning organization to update the website.

For those who don’t know Google has finally merged their Keyhole satellite company with their map service and you can get a really nice view of north America from above. A very quick community sprung up around this feature and have been having a lot of fun with it. People are using google maps and Flickr to create memory maps of their home town or locations that have a lot of history with them.

Another fun site related to Google Maps is Google Sightseeing which has been collecting some of the more interesting photos of the world in to one blog.

In the future I see a My Google with the ability to add tags to the whole world. I could tag places I’ve been and maybe even plan out entire trips marking down where I want to stop with a note system similar to Flickrs’. Along with a system to date the notes you might be able to follow me as I travel around and take notes on the world by scrubbing through a time line, or a rang of times. Of course this would all be shareable with the ability to tag and organize notes and groups of notes.

Though I would not be any good at it I look forward to who ever takes their My Google map notes and uses the rss it publishes as their travel blog. I think that would be an interesting read.