zahnster

With my recent announcement that I’ll soon be leaving Zenbe and the comforts of New York City for a dream job with Apple (and warmer climates), I kick off what I know will be a truly exciting year.

In celebration of this, and in light of many others’ posts about their new year’s goals, I present my own list of goals that I will be striving for in 2009.

1. Become financially prosperous
Raised by a single mother, I come from a very working class background. As a child, I watched my mom fight to stay afloat in the financial waters, running into things like unemployment, gender equality, and the general obstacles of life. When I grew up, I knew that I’d have to work my ass off to make it in this world, and my hard work and perseverance are starting to pay off. This year, my primary focus will be on saving money and making investments which will help ensure a financially prosperous future.

2. Have more adventures
This is actually going to be a pretty attainable goal for this year. As I am going to be working remote for a while, part of my money-saving strategy includes moving back home – and home for me just happens to be Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. My dad and stepmom have a well-established life there, having been there since 1999 selling real estate, and by going back, not only will I gain massive benefits from Mexico’s low cost of living, but I will be able to go on tons of adventures and weekend road trips. Mexico is a seriously beautiful country, filled with jungles, mountains, rivers, and valleys, and exploring them has been something I’ve dreamed about for a long time.

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I’ve been a fan of the Slickspeed Selectors test for a while – in all honesty it’s probably the coolest thing Mootools has released (and this isn’t a knock on their js framework). The Slickspeed selectors test does everything right – easy, friendly open-source code which is stupid easy to customize. The tests are extremely useful and can give you some amazing insight on how the framework you’re using for your app compares to the other ones that are out there (and you can even test on your own code!).

After a discussion at work today about how expensive Prototype’s $$ function is in the lovely Internet Explorer, I decided to run the Slickspeed tests in IE7 – something which I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve never done before. I knew the results would be bad – but seeing just how bad they were made my stomach turn. It also piqued my curiosity to dig into this some more.

With the preset settings and my own custom frameworks (I chose Prototype 1.6.0.2, 1.6.0.3, and jQuery 1.3), both Prototype’s came in at over 2 seconds (2142 and 2169ms, respectively). Granted, I’m running my IE’s on a VM powered by a nearly 2 year old MacBook, but an ‘average’ website visitor is probably powered by something on a similar level.

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This post is going to be a bit of a rant, so bear with me and feel free to bitch me out in the comments, but I’ve been getting really annoyed with people’s attitudes towards startups. In general, people seem to have short tempers with performance issues with startups – whenever an app goes down or behaves slowly, the ‘webosphere’ fills up with a bunch of whiners’ complaints.

Well, I’m here now to urge you all to have a little bit more patience and flexibility. In other words, quit your bitchin’.

Having been involved in the web community for over half my life, I would like to think I’m “on the level” with startups, how they work and the people behind them. The web startup culture is full of passionate nerds – myself included. We decided to get into this field because we want to help innovate the Internet, connect people, share information, and overall better ourselves and others through this extremely powerful global communication tool.

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Anyone who follows me on Twitter is probably aware that for the last few months, I’ve been getting my feet wet with Canvas drawing.

For those who aren’t familiar, Canvas is an HTML5 element which enables you to do script-based drawing, specifically Javascript. While not natively supported by the IE’s, the wonderful Explorer Canvas script works very well in converting Canvas drawing to the IE-supported VML. While I hear you can’t do everything with Explorer Canvas, most drawing, coloring, and animations will work just fine.

After getting around the initial mind-warp of drawing with script, Canvas has proven itself to be flexible, fast, and fun, and although it’s very new and not (officially) globally supported, I would recommend that anyone who’s considering adopting it to do so. More >>