John Cloud points out an interest definition of hypersexual disorder from the proposed APA (American Psychiatric Association):

…you have an illness if you spend so much time pursuing intercourse or masturbation as to interfere with your job or other important activities. According to the working language of the diagnosis, “repetitively engaging” in sexual behaviors when you are anxious, depressed or stressed would be considered a major warning sign for the disorder.

The article goes on explaining several rehab methods including “chemical castration.” To keep your mind off sex, all you need to do is finding something you feel passionate about like blogging, designing web sites or spending time with your kid.

In a more serious note, aren’t most men addicted to sex? We just have different ways of dealing with it. Cheating simply ruins your marriage and marriage doesn’t necessarily go with sex. It took me quite a while to learn that marriage goes more with sleeplessness.

After making Visualgui responsive, I changed Simplexpression to fit various screen resolutions. I must admit. I am a bit late in adapting this technique because I never liked fluid layout. I preferred the columns to stay fixed and the images to size exactly the way I cropped them, but the web is changing and designing for a specific resolution doesn’t cut it anymore.

Just a few hours before the new Visualgui.com went live, Andy Clark made a bold statement:

Today, anything that’s fixed and unresponsive isn’t web design, it’s something else. If you don’t embrace the inherent fluidity of the web, you’re not a web designer, you’re something else.

Then Jeremy Keith charmed in:

Increasingly, I’m getting that feeling whenever I visit a website that doesn’t respond to the size and capabilities of my browser. If I get handed a crawlbar, I try to understand the reason for it but more often than not, it’s simply a sign that the website has been built by someone with a non-web, print-based, fixed-canvas mentality. It feels …wrong.

I am not worshipping the ground these guys spit on, but I do recognize the changes in the web game. While desktops are getting larger and larger, we can’t ignore small mobile screens. The web is moving into two opposite directions; therefore, web design is no longer contained in a box. As a result, the site needs to adapt itself to whatever screens the users are browsing on. Thanks to the new CSS3 Media Queries, making responsive web design doesn’t take up too much effort. As a designer, I find it intriguing to see how a site flows to the browser window. My new guilty pleasure of surfing a site is to pull the bottom right corner of Safari to see if I get a crawlbar.

If you want to see examples of responsive web design, check out Media Queries. As someone who works for the University, I would love to see high-ed web sites adapting to responsive design. Big up to Sewanee for leading the effort. My future clients will of course benefit from this new technique. I think it will be an easy persuasion. Who wouldn’t want a web site to display perfectly on multiple screen resolutions?

Instead of following the Grammy, we watched For Colored Girls, a film that drags the colored boys to the mud. After the depressing ending, we tuned into the Grammy for a bit and caught Esperanza Spalding beat both Justin Bieber and Drake for Best New Artist. I was shocked that the Grammy was actually getting it right. The award went to real talent instead of commercial success.

I was glad that she won, but I was also speculating that the Bieber’s fans would be quite upset. I headed over Twitter and I could see all the hate tweets flooded. The little Beliebers attack, threaten Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding.

Up until this past Sunday, Ms. Spalding was probably only known to jazz fans. I listened to her 2008’s self-titled Esperanza two years ago. Her singing did not impressed me much, but her bass plucking was as strong as any big man. Her recent work with Joe Lovano on Bird Songs was hypnotizing. Esperanza Spalding is indeed a bass beauty.

From softwares, scripting languages to CMS’s, every web designer has his own set of tools. With so many choices out there, I find that focusing on a certain skill set is more valuable than trying to learn everything. With that said, I would like to share some of my preferred tools in designing and developing web sites.

Graphic software: Photoshop is still my choice even though I am still not sure how much I know about the software. All I know is that Photoshop helps me accomplish the tasks I want to do when creating photos for the web or making mock-ups. Even when I have the opportunity to create print materials such as business cards, flyers and book covers, I never even bothered to use InDesign. I just ask the print designers for the specs and I do everything in Photoshop. Firework is probably a better choice for making web graphics, but I never spend enough time to get to know the software.

Web editor: Yes, I am still using Dreamweaver and I am not ashamed to admit it. Many hardcore programmers seem to look down on Dreamweaver, but I find it to be quick and easy to use, especially when I have to maintain many pages. The copy-and-paste into the design view has improved tremendously in CS5. Dreamweaver no longer pulls in crazy codes from Words like it used to. Before CS5, I had to use an HTML cleaner my friend and former colleague had made to strip out tags and replaces quotes with unicode characters. It’s a great tool and I still use it from time to time.

Web technologies: I used to be a Flash fanatic, but I moved away from it and concentrated on HTML and CSS. I am glad I did. Flash is still a fantastic tool and I am still using it to create simple motion graphic projects, but I cringe whenever I come across a full Flash web site.

Scripting languages: I am not a hardcore programmer and PHP doesn’t seem so daunting to me. I can write simple codes and modify existing scripts to get what I need. Whatever I need to accomplish something using PHP chances are I can find something similar out there.

CMS: WordPress is the system I am most comfortable with. In addition, its flexibility and ease of use, specially the admin interface, are perfect for running small web sites. I experimented with Drupal in the past, but didn’t get into it far enough to see how easy I could create a theme. I will revisit version 7 in the near future, but for now, WordPress could handle most of the things I would like to do.

Valentine’s Day is coming and if you’re still looking for the gift that speaks from the heart, take a quick glance at Simplexpression. We offer two-day shipping so you still have a bit of time left. We also would like to thank our loyal customers for making the latest purchases. To show our appreciation, we will send along something special from us and we hope you will enjoy it.

In addition to my main responsibility, which is maintaining GWSB web sites, I actively update the GWSB homepage with new banners and videos. Keeping the homepage fresh with new contents make my job more engaging. I also work closely with the associate director of media relations to make the GWSB News, which powered by the rock-solid WordPress system, updated constantly.

One of my contributions to the GWSB News is posting videos. Whenever I get video from the Dean or faculty, I edit the clips using QuickTime Pro and post them on YouTube. One of my favorite projects right now is filming and editing the clips for the Student Voices. The Flip is the perfect tool for this project because of its ease of use. The FlipShare, its organizing, editing and publishing software, is so straightforward and intuitive. Within half an hour, I can make a 3-minute decent clip.

I just received a bunch of clips from the students using the Flip and I am very exciting to edit them to be used on the GWSB News. Since I am not doing anything fancy, the Flip allows me to cut to the point of the video.

Dana’s brother gave me Roger Kamien’s Music: An Appreciation. I find the first part of the book to be valuable in helping readers understand the fundamental elements of music such as pitch, dynamics, tone color, rhythm, melody and harmony.

My co-worker gave me The Penguin Guide to Jazz by Richard Cook and Brain Morton. The book is about 1600 page; therefore, I won’t read it from cover to over but keep it for reference on jazz albums.

The GW Hatchet reports:

The University is scrapping its current website management system – part of a $1 million website revamp started nearly two years ago – claiming it no longer suits GW’s online needs.

As a web developer for The School of Business who had been involved with the project, I applaud the University for making the change. Although Vignette is a very powerful system and I am getting a handle of its complexity from a user perspective, it is not the right CMS for GW. The University is in the process of selecting a replacement. The choices look promising.

Simplexpression opens its door on Etsy. Come and check us out. We will add more items as time permits.

Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, gave an inspiring talk at the GW School of Business about the merits of being wrong, admitting mistakes and how these lessons can apply in our personal and professional lives.