Carrier Studios | Design & Web Development

Fear of uncertainty

August 30th, 2010

I can understand fearing change. The fear of losing a job. The fear of losing a loved one. What do I fear? The uncertainty that my current situation won’t change. I’m trying to do what to initiate change, but if nothing comes out of it, I might lose all hope. So I have to keep reminding myself the litany from Dune:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Tags: dune, fear, uncertainty
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Fighting to know yourself

August 5th, 2010

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if the Army didn’t reject me on medical reasons.

How different would my life be right now? Would I be in Iraq or Afghanistan? Would I have experienced what Jessica Lynch did? Would I be coming home with one less leg? Would I be a graphic designer? Would I have gone to college first? So many what-if’s unanswered.

The biggest one, though, is a question I recently posed to Brian – “how can you know what you’re made of until you’ve had to fight?” This is not just a Fight Club postmodernist diatribe, but I really do wonder how character traits change in people once they are in combat and fighting for survival. It’s nice when we can say we have certain principles but never have to actually test them out. Yes, you say under no circumstance would you ever kill another human being. But then there’s that situation where a bunch of enemies are coming to rape your sister, molest your kid, and you’re armed with an AK-47. Would you then? Or would you hold onto your “principles?”

How much cowardice would be thrust forward into the battle arena if we had mandatory military duty in the U.S.? I wholeheartedly believe that many people avoid active service because they are afraid of facing their demons. There are so many questions that have to be evaluated – what is justice, am I performing justice, am I a sinner, am I a hero, do I shoot this kid to protect my brother in the troops, the list goes on. Soldiers are faced with philosophical dilemmas every day, whereas American citizens can ignore the mind-burning questions. Sure, not all soldiers deal with it healthily. Many come back psychologically damage. But the ones who can work through this, and still want to live after all they have seen – isn’t that a true show of character?

I don’t think I can positively label myself (or let others, for that matter) brave, loyal, smart, and resourceful without having the combat experience. Yes, I’ve nearly lost my life several times to medical reasons, but those are different. Fighting through those situations just happened…I didn’t consciously decide “I want to live this life”, mainly because it happened when I was young. I want that assurance that I 1.) Want to live and 2.) am worthy of it. Would I really find that I handle stressful situations well, like my resume would tout?

It’s not that I lament the way my life is going, nor do I wish for the chance to shoot at someone. But really, truly, what is there to be said of my character until it has been put under the most extreme duress? I’m nothing but empty words and actions, then.

This is another reason why I’m training to fight in lei tai. This is the closest I can get to seeing my true self.

Tags: army, character-building, fighting
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Brand Loyalty

March 2nd, 2010

I was reading this CNN article about a PS3 bug that resulted in 24 hours Playstation Network downtime. It has launched this huge battle of X-box v. PS3 – which is better? Each side has valid (and invalid -U SUCKSz) arguments as to why theirs is better, but it made me wonder – what really inspires brand loyalty, especially in technology?

I’m definitely a PS3 person. This is mainly, though, because I’ve been playing all my console games on Playstations the past ten years. The games that I like are released on my console. Sony is already a brand name I’ve trusted from other electronics, movies, and music experience.

I did not have the same trust when Microsoft came out with its Xbox. I knew Microsoft as a software company, not a hardware. It was going to have to prove to me the quality of the product by surviving the timeless quality test. But, since I am a one console gal, I have not switched or given it a chance. The playstation does all I want and more – stream Netflick, watch streaming anime, play games I like, play BluRay.

But this does not mean I will always be praising Sony. I won’t bash people on forums for liking other consoles.

This is like the terrible, terrible mac vs pc debate. I’ve covered this before, but it still irks me that there are fanboys for each side. I guess extremism really bothers me. Why can people not see that there are great feats and egregious flaws in all sides – the best is a compromise. I have both a PC and a Mac. I’m a multi-user.

It’s as bad as politics. American narcissism reigns over logic, and arguments devolve into basic contradictions of “Nuh-uh, I’m right! You suck!”

I posted this one because my huskies and cat love each other

Tags: brand loyalty, mac, pc, ps3, xbox
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Q&A

July 24th, 2009

A computer science friend of mine recently asked me a bunch of questions regarding my web development practices. Here they are:

Q: Do you hack up the javascript on pages as well as all the badass art creation and CSS magic?
A: I do some Javascript. I try to avoid it as much as possible, though, as it’s hard to determine a user’s environment, and many people still have Javascript turned off. The sites I work on don’t have very specific targeted demographic, so I have to try to design en mass. The things I do in Javascript are photo galleries or preload images and such. Now, if it’s a more complicated site with a narrower audience, I allow for more Javascript.

Q: How do you design your sites to be compatible in all the browsers?
A: Browser compatibility is one of the worst and frustrating things ever, that is if you build a site entirely in CSS. Unfortunately you have to do hacks for each browser and a LOT of testing. you can do an if statement in the HTML to redirect to browser-specific CSS, especially for IE6 (that one is the hardest one to get css to render correctly). Dreamweaver has a handy browser-compatibility tool now to check while you code. There are also sites that allow you to input a url and they will screen capture what it looks like in all the browsers. I recommend this.

Q: Other than Photoshop what kinds of tools do you use?
A: As I do both print and web work, I use the whole Adobe Suite. For web specifically, I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash. I’ve tried Fireworks but couldn’t get into it. I use Transmit as my FTP program (one of the best GUI interfaces I’ve found). I think that’s about it.

Q: Where can I see some of your work?
A: http://www.alisoncarrier.com is my portfolio. I’m in the process of updating the site, though, so it doesn’t have my most recent work.

Q: Do you deal with the backend app coding at all or is there a dedicated team for that?
A: Backend coding depends. For my freelance, I do a lot of it. PHP is one of my favorite languages to work in, so I try to take every opportunity to do so, especially if it involves mySQL databases. At work, though, I do mainly front-end stuff, just because of the breadth of projects I’m working on. After that we use freelancers to do backend stuff.

Q: What are most of your sites powered by? PHP on Lamp stack? ASP.NET? Ruby on Rails?
A: PHP all the way. I am a big fan of any open-source, so I tend to use that in my sites. Freelancing, I’m dabbling in ROR, but don’t have much experience. I’m also trying to dabble in Drupal as well.

Hope this enlightens those about what goes on in a web developer’s head. If you have any graphic/web questions, feel free to post them!

Tags: freelance, php, Questions
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