Tag Archives: Emmalee

MATC Chicago Trip ’08

Group of Visual Communications Students in front of the metal bean in Chicago

This past thursday was the annual MATC Art Club trip to Chicago. In general the Graphic Design students go, but these past 2 years Emmalee has gotten a group of Visual Communications students to come along.

ViComm students crossing a street - sam looks the most bad ass

This is my third year going on this trip, my first was while I was still in the Graphic Design program, and must have been in Fall ’03. And now ’07, and ’08. This year ended up being the least time spent in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum. At one point while walking around we saw a poster advertising the Field Museum and an exhibit of mythical creatures. When Emmalee saw that she went nuts and decided we should check it out. The day was half over at this point, so most of the rest was used there. Partly looking for Issac, but I won’t get into that.

Bryan Emmalee and Sam

Speaking of looking for someone, I was the doofus who made the busses late to leave this year. The past 2 years they loaded and unloaded in the same spot, this year they had to load in a different spot and I did not catch the notice. I went to where the map said and previous years had gone. I felt so stupid.

vicomm students spelling out vicomm with their bodies

All in all it was a good trip though!

Photo Credits: 1 & 2 – Lucinda, 3 & 4: Emmalee

IE Sucks.

The Horror banner For Vicomm.org
I just spent an hour playing with CSS to fix the layout on Vicomm.org to look right in IE 5.5 and 6.0. It don’t even look like it does in Firefox and Safari. It is just slightly off, and now useable. Designing for multiple browsers should not be an issue too, since there are strict standards.

Browsers like Safari, and Firefox strive to follow them to the letter. While Microsoft seems to care less when it comes to IE. Internet Explorer 7 seems to getting things better though. At least is does transparent PNG files properly. Now if only it was easy to get everyone to upgrade to it.

I started working on this because I popped onto the forums and saw that there were some crazy errors and layout issues regarding the theme. Turns out the host Emmalee is using finally got around to moving us to a new server like he said he would about 2 months ago. Seems it does what he promised though, finally have access to write privileges on the server and it seems a bit faster. And the fix to the theme was just telling it where things were on the new server. It Coulda been worse. He could have nuked our databases.

Once I fixed the issues I decided it was time to fix the errors I saw when the site was used in IE 6. I saw these for the first time when Emmalee was showing the site to some people telling them I made it etc. It was rather frustrating to find out since I had the site looking fine in both Firefox and Safari, and people had told me it looked fine in Internet Explorer.

Well, enough of this rant, I should go to sleep. Seems most of my blog posts are always made at night, when I should be sleeping.