Press “Play”

This blog has been on Pause as long as I remember and it’s about time I revisited this space n’ put on some words.

I don’t know how you’d end up on this page as I can’t even remember if I’ve redirected the Feedburner feeds to the new Blog, ah I forgot to mention I moved to Wordpress after 3 years of Textpattern. Lots o’ incompatibilities here and there, but finally it’s up, well for a while now.

Not fan of premade themes n’ designs, but this one does the trick for now ’till I get the v.6 redesign ready, and I actually like this one.

LensGrab, the new Photoblog

Although capturing Stills haven’t been my hobby for a long while I shockingly fell in love with clicking occasional photos of nature, n’ lots o’ cars. After around a good year now I’ve got a decent collection of selected photos that I could share. Tell me what you think of ‘em. Check LensGrab

The Promise

Now, every now n’ then I’ve been posting about getting back to blogging and pod-casting n’ the whole i’ll-get-you-content kindda’ words, this ain’t gonna’ be another one of those. I just find it wrong to stop though. But I guess I’ve come to the point where I have things to say once again since I tought myself not to comment because there are lot o’ folks out there who could comment n’ be sarcastic better than me. Positive should be my color, let me see if I could handle doing so.

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And we’re down for another temporary cut-off

dot1ne has been off my own radar for sometime, haven’t posted anything that is worth reading for such a long time, but still, gotta’ keep this blog on hold for another month ’till the end of August until I get my schedule back together and get back on my key strokes.

Visitors and feed subsribers have dropped dramatically, feedburner shows less than 100 subscribers, visits have dropped to an average of 170 visitors a day, so it is in a way dying since the content has been pouring so slow and posts have been all scattered among unrelated topics with no relations. Diagnosed with lack of content and posts. Hoping for a better comeback in September. Expect some random posts whenever I catch something noteworthy to post, short ones though. Thanks for being a reader, hope to get it back together with a redesign in September and/or some fresh ideas.

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Life on Auto-Pilot mode

Heard it from many, specially those who know me through this Blog, “You ain’t writing anything anymore”, they say that all the time. It’s mostly every month that I think of writing/posting something, but then I think again and keep telling myself that ain’t a piece to write about and just pollute the cyberspace with nonsense and passive comments or controversy. From what it’s worth, learned that comments are not always opinions. Specially when life passes you by so fast with a year full of surprises and new adventures.

Yeah, kept the “Busy” flag on top of every random point I was spotted, but things I’ve missed are yet more than I imagined, specially the habits that changed. Stopped reading my RSS-Feeds for such a long time, most of the blogs changed style, tone, and became really aged and mature, missed more than 15 issues of my favorite webzine; A List Apart, my favorite designer’s blog John Hicks, can’t believe I’ve actually forgot how to write in Textile format while editing this very post.

I guess things have changed, things that were boring like reading News and Business/Industry updates replaced my reading dose that used to be all Technology/Development/Design. I stopped ranting as I used to all the time, instead, trying to make the change by actions instead of negative and angry comments, it’s really amazing how the transition took place, from an angry observer design critique to a person who actually does the change and makes difference, actions baby! It’s amazing and a bless to be able to do that, lucky!

It all just happened, it’s amazing. I should have some more stuff to share, some of the last year’s experiences in Design, Advertising, Client Servicing, and some off-points, like losses and big wins. It’ll come out, this post should be a good start.

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Back, and to hell with not blogging

Whatever the reasons were behind stopping, well, what matters to me is that I’ll blog, but firmly standing behind this baby. Back in town n’ time to make up for the long time of slow posting and petit posts. Holla at me!

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And my blogging journey ends here

That’s the end for all the rants and talks on this blog. This is probably the last blog post on this site. The last ten days have been very hard at this end. The last ten days have been the toughest all around, and this blog had a hand in that(content, mostly the rants and the controversy) I wish I had cleared it out in terms and conditions style of a page saying that “my views do not necessarily represent my firm–dots and lines”. This is the last one.

I’d like to take a tiny moment over here to thank you all for the page-views, and the comments. All of you who are subscribed through your feed-readers, and all who keeps e-mailing. Believe it or not, dotone is two years old now, but that’s its sky.

Saleh

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And back, Hydra, lost in translation

Back with lots of rants, lots of new experiments, News and dots and lines updates. Let’s get rollin’. In the last three weeks I had to visit Dubai more than seven times. And every time I did, I looked at Hydra Properties adverts and kept thinking who’d make such an awful English slogan translated from an Arabic s-lang, yet a cool Arabic slogan. “?????? ?? ??????” is the Arabic slogan–meaning “It’s about being different”. The English slogan is “The idea of being different” which is a word-by-word translation of the Arabic slogan.

So everytime I go down to Dubai I get to pick on some logo or some advert. Outta’ hand. It’s so easy to spot and reverse-engineer a logo design. Here’s the scenario with Hydra, 90% probability of being right!

The Scenario

Hydra has no real image to portray in the market, being a late entrant in the properties market, being lost among non-freehold rules in Abu Dhabi and the lack of real launches shows the lack of orderly organized PR campaigns and Ad campaigns, which brings me back to the logo.

The logo gets roots from a business plan mission statement. One of the founders keeps on pushing the envelope using those words so it gets sticky. When the time comes for going visual, the Arabic slogan needs to get an English face, but, well, it got translated by an Arabic designer(with really no know-how about English copy writing) who wanted to flex some muscles and show sophistication. So it goes like “The idea of being different”.

Now in the properties and development world, ideas can’t stand for nothing. Offerings do! I’m so in love with the way Schon properties came out, it’s about what you’re actually adding to the stack of crowded people hanging out of the bandwagon.

All so-not-thought-of.

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A short silence until mid-august

As you’ve noticed I haven’t been posting regularly for the past month. I’ll continue a complete silence until mid-august when I’ll come back for more posts due to heavy work load and getting busier at dots and lines and the expansion that is in process.

When we come back, we’ll be talking a little about my first presentation to a group of VCs in Abu Dhabi for my first ever web project in a big scale. A lot more stuff related to SonyEricsson P1 and the unofficial website that we’ve built for it. All in the making.

Until then.

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CSS Transparency Issues

CSS 3 promises the ultimate almighty background transparency in Background attributes–opaque. Until then, and until all the major browser adopt those new properties seen in CSS3 we’re locked up with Transparent PNGs and Opacity properties.

I could use JS effects, or simply have a background that looks transparent(a non-transparent jpeg or gif). Or I could use the technique discussed at ALA on Transparent PNGs and what not. I strongly recommend having normal markup not touched with JS for visual effects. Specially if it ain’t a web-application. I’m also against having to work out many different things to achieve a simple effect.

If all that I wished was right then nobody would’ve gone and found a work around the transparency issues.

Issues Explained

In CSS2 there’s a property that could be used on most of the block type selectors which is “Opacity” ,IE6 & IE7 come with the same property but as a member of “Filter” group. Firefox older than 2.0 misses Opacity and uses -moz-opacity instead. This is the definition.

The problem is here, upon making an element see-through(opacity:0.5; or filter:alpha(opacity=50) in IE) all the children of that element become see-through! And no, setting the children to have different opacity values won’t work. So where’s the problem? It shouldn’t be a problem thinking from the base and why the Opacity property was made, but looking at no way to have only transparent backgrounds makes it a problem since it’s the only markup based solution. Until “background: #000 opaque %50″ works.

Looking at the footer of this website you’ll find the see-through brown rectangle making all the other elements in it see-through, the only part that was not intended to be transparent was the copyright line, the rest were all intended to be that way, but since it worked, I didn’t have to worry about it.

The header of this site uses the same effect but with one difference, the logo is not see-through so Opacity did not work for me there, a see-through PNG came to rescue but then it doesn’t work on IE6! Well, the IE6 users would see the logo w/o the transparent brown box. Same goes with the boxes in homepage. What a mess. No I won’t apply a solution that makes me include a zillion JS files and add 30 lines to my stylesheet. I can live with having IE6 users not seeing the transparent bits.

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Okay, but how much?

Two weeks ago I posted about the amount of bad written CVs and unsolicited job applications I was receiving. A gentle man commented(which I didn’t let his comment go on) “Okay, how much are you offering?”. I’m saying unsolicited applications, that means this is not a Job offer or a vacancy announcement. Funnier it gets. I receive another e-mail saying I read your advices on how to apply to web jobs, so can I send you my CV? (sorry, I had to mention this)

The aim for writing that article was to give you an insight of how it feels to receive such emails and CVs. My goal was to express the need for clear communication and clarity and directness.

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A new habit, blogging everyday

Last week I decided to develop a new habit–blogging everyday. As you noticed, I’ve been posting everyday since last week. So, more of shorter posts to be coming everyday. Extra! Imma’ create a new Section and call it Essays for the articles that I see of value to reference and to categorize the posts on the blog for longer posts. I’ll be moving some of the old posts that I recognize as articles more than blog posts to the new Essay section.

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