My Attempt at Gingerbread Superheroes

My husband absolutely adores gingerbread. LOVES it. So for his birthday and Christmas and any other occasion that comes up, I make him some gingerbread cookies. The challenge for me is always trying to figure out new ways to decorate the little shapes.

Back in the beginning of December, my husband sent me this site: Sugar Swings! Serve Some.  It's a blog written by a very talented working mom who makes some amazing sugar creations for her friends and family. The post my husband happened to find was about how she made gingerbread superheroes. They are so cute! I had to try it!

So, I did. My plan was a little foiled, though, as you will see. I had allotted the last couple of weekends before Christmas as my "baking weekends", but something always happens so I end up cramming it all into one day, usually on the 23rd or Christmas Eve. Sigh. Right on queue, it happened again this year. I was put onto a project at work that had some mental timing. I ended up working until 2am or later every single night for three weeks straight, including my "baking weekends". Miraculously, I was given the 23rd off, so I baked like a fiend all day and at about 1am I started decorating my husband's gingerbread people. So, there's no fancy colours or anything, but I did my best with my white sugar icing to imitate Sugar Swings' little gingerbread superheroes. I have some of those animal cookie cutters from IKEA too (I think they're discontinued now - I couldn't find them on their site to include them in my post), so it was a mishmash of creatures. Anyway, here's what I came up with.

This is my PG13 gingerbread cookie. I come from a family that hunts.

Reed Richards of the Fantastic 4

Spiderman… Icing is hard to work with, people!

Green Lantern

The Flash

Superman. His curl sort of melded into his eye.

This is supposed to be Catwoman. But if my husband's reaction is any indication of my lack of skill with icing – "What's the one with the tie supposed to be?" – then, it will need explaining. That line down her middle is supposed to be her zipper. I originally had some provocative cleavage there, but it really just looked like a big blob on her chest, so I took it off and put that "zipper". I know. I know. Fail.

Wonder Woman

Batman. He did used to have eyes, but the icing tends to have a mind of its own. When it started oozing over his eyes, I gave up and just filled it all in. Bats are blind anyway.

Next year, I'll do my best to use colours and thicker icing. And next year hopefully, cross my fingers, I won't have to do it at 1am.

Why Developing for the iPhone Drives Us Batty

Back in June when I was working at Rogers, I was assigned with the task of creating a mobile-friendly microsite. One of the magazines that Rogers Publishing creates was going to have a QR code on the cover and they wanted their readers to be directed to this microsite when they scanned it with their phones.

From what I learned in school, to convert an HTML/CSS site to a mobile-friendly version, you just dumb down the CSS a lot and presto! It's ready for a hand-held device. Kinda sorta.

I ran into some issues. It worked when I tested it in a simulator, but on my iPhone, it didn't. Surprise, surprise.

I learned from my coworker that Opera has a mobile emulator (which you down download here) and used it to test my progress.

I have an iPhone 4, so I figured I better test it on my phone just in case and sure enough, issues. I played with my CSS as far as my knowledge would take me and then let a CSS-whiz coworker take a look. I think she basically redid a lot of my code because I'm a total noob at this stuff still, but the most important things I learned from everything is: why the iPhone drives developers batty and the use of !important.

I scoured the internet to find a solution for the discrepancy between my site working in an emulator, but not on my iPhone. I came across this article, which explains that because Apple is full of themselves and knows that their iPhone is capable of displaying a full web page because its resolution is so magnificent, its mobile browser refuses to read the lovely mobile-friendly CSS you've just written.

I think Apple missed the point. As an iPhone user myself, I hate having to zoom in on a web page my phone has decided is just fine to display in the desktop version, completely disregarding that my astigmatic eyeballs don't do well with 3pt type. Just because the iPhone can display desktop versions of sites doesn't mean it should.

The work around is that you have to force the iPhone to display your site in its mobile layout. From what I understand, the iPhone does read your mobile CSS, because its browser is still recognized as a mobile browser, but it overrides that recognition and goes back to the desktop version. In order to force the iPhone to stick with your mobile CSS, you have to use !important in your CSS.

This is a pretty good article explaining the use of !important. Basically, what !important does is, when written within one of your CSS rules, it tells the browser that that rule is the most "!important" and to display this rule regardless of anything else in the code or other CSS files like your desktop CSS.

So, for example, keeping the width of the page narrow is very important for making your CSS work on an iPhone:

#PageContainer {

          width: 320px !important;

          background-color: #666;

}

By adding !important as I did above, it forces the mobile browser to display the PageContainer's width as 320 pixels regardless of anything else within your CSS that might be conflicting with it.

I used !important for other elements besides the width, but I think it's best to play with your CSS and see where you need it since your site may be different from my mine. I used the width as an example because that's where I was having the most frustrating time.

In conclusion, less is more on all mobile devices, including iPhones. It makes usability friendlier and easier to navigate. When the iPhone tries really hard not to read your lovely mobile-friendly CSS, use !important in your CSS rules to force it  to display the way you want it.

Hope this helps somebody!

All That Mumbo Jumbo About Attaining Your Goals... Actually Works

I've reached the end of my 6 month contract at my job. Don't worry, they renewed it for a few more months until May. But the other day, I was sitting at my computer working on a web banner and it hit me! I've reached my goal! I actually did it! I'm exactly where I wanted to be and I did it! I realized that all that crap they talk about in order to achieve your goals really does work! And I realize that not many people believe that it actually does work, so I thought I'd make a post about it. How I did it. Because it doesn't work exactly as they say it does. Close, but not exactly. They don't always mention one key factor. Here... Let me 'splain.

A whopping five years ago I was working at a job that was no longer working for me. The location wasn't ideal because it was in an industrial area. Not a lot of creative juices flowing in a neighbourhood like that. And it required a long commute to get there. I tried taking the bus, so I could catch up on some reading, but that used up four hours of my day whole day. (Two hours there, two hours home.) The driving was making me lose my mind. Bumper to bumper for an hour all the way there. Bumper to bumper for an hour all the way home. Let's not even talk about the delays if it snowed more than one centimeter! I also found that although I had grown as a designer since I had started there, I was having trouble growing some more and that was frustrating my creative juices.

For two years, I tried looking for a new job. I applied all over the place. I went for a handful of interviews, but things just didn't work out. While I was job searching I noticed that more and more companies were looking for a designer who had skills in both print and web. My web skills were severely lacking since I hadn't kept them up to date over the years since graduating from school, and I realized I needed to upgrade myself. Fiona 5.0, if you will. I tried some tutorials online, but I felt very lost. I looked into taking night classes, but because I was so far away from most colleges, I didn't think I would make it to class in time. And when I thought about it, it was going to take me the next five years of night classes to learn everything I felt I needed to learn. I needed a change now, not in five years. My boyfriend (now husband) was unemployed at the time, only doing odd jobs here and there, so I felt I needed to keep working full-time to support us in case his bank account ran dry and he couldn't support his half of the bills. How could I make changes when I felt there were no options?

It took me a long time before I finally sat down at my desk and thought, "What the hell. No harm in trying all that mumbo jumbo about attaining your goals." So I wrote down a set of very specific goals, like they say you should do:

The office has to be downtown, within biking distance.
It should be in one of those old downtown buildings that they've converted into an office, with wood floors, big windows and brick walls. And they should let us bring our dogs to work.
I will work in a team so I can learn from my coworkers and we can inspire each other.
I will be appreciated and paid what I'm worth.
I will have the opportunity to grow as a designer.
I will have the opportunity to be challenged.

Not too long after, I felt I had no other choice but to quit my job and go back to school. My boyfriend had been doing odd jobs for two years and he was doing okay financially. After further analyzing the situation, I realized that I had enough money saved up to pay for school. And if I got a part-time job while in school, and we spent our money very, very wisely, we'd be okay financially for a while. So I applied for web design courses at several colleges and ultimately chose to take Humber College's two-year Multimedia Design and Production Technician program. It would teach me web design and development and some video stuff too.

Now, here's where all that mumbo jumbo about attaining your goals can sometimes be deceiving. I had written down my goals and I was now taking steps by being in school to achieve those goals. But what they sometimes forget to tell you is that you have to want it! You have to want it very badly! You have to want it more than anything! Not only that, but you have work your ASS off! You have to work harder than you've ever worked in your life! You have to do whatever it takes to make yourself reach those goals! Yes, it will be very, very hard and it will take a lot out of you, but you will reach those goals.

So, how did I do it? It most certainly wasn't easy, I can tell you that! I wrote little goals for myself along the way. I tried to go above and beyond on every single project. I managed my time like a fiend. I took advantage of extra help and working with my class mates so we could solve problems together. I didn't sleep a whole lot during those two years of school because I was pushing myself to be the best that I could be. I surrounded myself with people who supported me, so when I was bawling my eyes out because I didn't think I was going to make it, they were there to pick me back up again. I worked harder than I've ever worked in my life! And eventually it paid off.

I graduated from that program at Humber at the top of my class. I'm extremely proud of that because of how hard I worked. And that hard work and all my accomplishments gave me the confidence I needed when I graduated. I made sure to participate in the portfolio show at the end of the year, I attended FITC, and I got a smart phone to immerse myself in the social media aspect of job hunting and getting my name out there.

Before I knew it, people were calling me to hire me for jobs! It had only been two weeks since my last day of classes when I got a call from the department I interned with at Rogers Publishing. They needed somebody right away. I also got calls from a couple of head hunters who saw my profile on LinkedIn. And just before my contract ended at Rogers, I was hired on at SapientNitro, where I am now. And it's almost exactly the place I wrote down in my goals. Everything matches except the part about allowing your dog to come to work with you. (Good thing I don't have a dog.)

It took me five years. Five years, some written goals and a LOT OF VERY HARD WORK! But I made it. And I'm very proud of myself for that.

Now... What are your goals?