Archive for January, 2010

Vancouver Olympics Main Media Centre

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

During the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver – the press and media will be based in either one of two buildings – Canada Place will be home to over 2500 journalists and is called the MPC (Main Press Centre) and right beside it, the IBC (International Broadcast Centre) where over 7000 video/radio broadcasters will be based. A good chunk of the IBC is taken up by NBC and CTV.

MPC

MPC

IBC

IBC

Here are some pictures of what it will look like inside the venue.

Entrance to MPC

Entrance to MPC

Press Workroom

Press Workroom

MPC Hallway

MPC Hallway

Olympic rings

Olympic rings

Testing In Internet Explorer

Monday, January 25th, 2010
Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

I guess I speak for all designers when I say that Internet Explorer is the worst browser to design for.  Each version has it’s own quirks and hacks.  Even when you write standards-based code, it will always render differently in Internet Explorer (esp. earlier versions).  I’ve completely given up on IE v. 5 and just test my layouts in IE v. 6 and above.  I figure that if you are still using IE v. 5,  you won’t be able to tell the difference between a broken layout if it hit you on the head anyway, so why bother?

As much as possible, I refrain from using any IE hacks on my CSS – except for the PNG fix.  To see how your website renders on Internet Explorer’s earlier versions, here are a couple of tools to help you out:

  • IE NetRenderer – Found at http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer. Just choose which version of IE you want to test for and enter the url of the website you are currently designing and it will return a snapshot of the site rendered according to the selected version.  I find this a quick and very useful tool especially if I just want to see how other websites (those I didn’t create) render.  It’s also useful for Mac users.
  • IETester – this is actually a software package that you install on your PC and is my tool of choice for testing all my websites.  I highly recommend using this tool instead of installing separate standalone versions of IE. Download the tool at http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage.
  • Lastly, there’s the standalone versions of IE.  If you prefer that, you may visit http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE where there is a compiled installation package with IE versions dating back to version 3.

Journey to the 2010 Olympics

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

2010 Olympics Mascots

So some of you might’ve heard that I’m volunteering for the 2010 Winter Olympics here in Vancouver.  For all you people living near or below the equator, the Winter Olympics is big in countries where there’s snow (mainly the North).  There was actually a debate about this among fellow volunteers on which of the olympics is more popular – being that most of my colleagues are Canadian, winter wins out – I sided with summer olympics though as I don’t remember ever watching the winter olympics growing up in the Philippines.

I have gotten a lot of questions about why I’m volunteering and what it takes to be a volunteer . . . regarding the 1st question, I’ve always wanted to be a part of the olympics and since competing as an athlete is definitely out, I guess  I’ll take whatever role I can fill . . . the call for volunteers actually started 3 years ago and I signed up right away.  After a year and a half, I was phoned and interviewed – that was the first contact – afterwards, I got a callback and was asked  to appear for an in-person screening and interview.  This particular process took half a day as I recall, I was asked to submit identification for various security clearances . . . The third part involved a whole day of orientation and lectures – the people taking part in this process would  make up TEAM 2010.  After picking up my accreditation and uniform, I showed up for a final day of orientation 2 days before my 1st shift and our schedules were finalized.

My first shift was on a Wednesday and it started very early in the morning – 730AM.  It dawned on me really fast that while my actual role was technology help desk – there were paid contractors responsible for each and every hardware on site and we were asked not to touch any of them.  We would shadow these “contractors” when there’s a support ticket and provide back-up.  We were also given trivial tasks such as mapping printers/desktops located all around the Main Media Centre which is actually a vast 2 bldg. complex comprising of Canada Place and the new Vancouver Convention Ctr.

It’s interesting to see such a huge undertaking being managed mainly by one organization, the Vancouver Olympic Committee.   I would be posting more about my Olympic experience here on my blog – as a rule though, there are certain restrictions on what I can and cannot post, so I guess most of it will have to wait til after the Olympics.

Free Fonts for the New Year!

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

I haven’t had a chance to post anything new lately as I’m now employed full-time and have other responsibilities. I hope to still be able to update this website with more information as I just logged into my dashboard to find out that I have 50 pending comments! Surprisingly, most of it isn’t spam . . . so because of that, I’m encouraged to post something new.

For all the designers out there, I know you will agree with me when I say “You can’t have too much fonts” — so here are a few free font libraries for you to download and install . . .

I love typography

I love typography

  1. Font Squirrel (My Favorite Font Resource!)
  2. exljbris Font Foundry
  3. Free Fonts from Kernest.com (Note:slow-loading!)
  4. District Thin – Font
  5. dafont.com (Note:lots of free fonts-very few good ones to be found)