My name is Wil Alambre and this is my website! I’m a thirty-something web developer that lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. You can find out more about me by using the navigation menu on the right, or browse through my collect blog articles and interesting links below...
Wil's Daily Links for Monday
Bit.ly Pro Makes it Dead Simple to Create Your Own URL Shortener
Wil's Daily Links for Saturday
Wil's Daily Links for Friday
Zero rupee note combats Indian bribery
Facebook Eyes Webmail With Project Titan [Facebook]
Wil's Daily Links for Thursday
Rich-Text Editors for 2010 and Beyond
How Innovation Dies at Microsoft [Microsoft]
Hourly Comic Day 2010
I participated in Hourly Comic Day earlier this week, a semi-regular event where a bunch of people make a journal comic every hour they are awake. and then they show these journal comics to other human beings, sometimes on the internet.
If you enjoy it you can click on the image below to see a bigger version at my Flickr account.
State Of The Internet
Originally posted at Focus.com…
Interesting stuff that is pretty much inline with my experiences.
To comment, please visit the original article at the Focus site.
Wil's Daily Links for Wednesday
Shutup.css
Stevenf would like to improve your browsing experience. Shhh, Internet. Don't ruin this moment.
Wil's Daily Links for Tuesday
Microsoft Office 2010 hits Release Candidate status
The 82nd Annual Academy Award Nominations!
First Bill Waterson interview in 15 years
Chris sez, "Bill Watterson, creator of the timeless comic classic Calvin & Hobbes, looks back on the strip with no regrets in his first interview in 15 years. Short, but definitely worth reading."
Wil's Daily Links for Monday
All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend
In one very real sense the whole thing was an exercise in public communications, a process by which two very large companies made a case for themselves in the public arena.
52nd Annual Grammy Awards Recap
Reminder: Windows 7 RC shutdowns start in a month
Will your big-screen Super Bowl party violate copyright law?
The Losers
Wil's Daily Links for Friday
Google Slowly Choking the Life Out of IE6 [Google]
Sam & Max Season 1 on sale for $5
Monopoly Boards Are Circular Now. Circular! [Board Games]
After 3 months, Newsday
In October
Wil's Daily Links for Thursday
'Secret Armory of General Knoxx' Borderlands DLC revealed
After 3 months, Newsday's web site gets 35 subscribers
In October
R.I.P. Miramax Films: 1979 - 2010
24th anniversary of the Challenger disaster
The Morning After The Night Before
Stephen Fry's Thoughts On The iPad: All 2,180 Words Of It [Apple]
Wil's Daily Links for Wednesday
Nasa Admits Mars Spirit Rover Won't Be Moving Again [Nasa]
Rogers Canada forces Android update that takes away root access
Rogers, Canada's only carrier with Android handsets, has cut off data to customers until they run a mandatory firmware update. Nominally, this fixes a 911 bug: but it
Steam offering Psychonauts on the extreme cheap
Wil's Daily Links for Tuesday
Bagger 288: The World's Biggest Machine
We All Drink From The Yellow Submarine (Tea Infuser) [Tea Infusers]
SoCal school district bans the dictionary
Southern California's Menifee Union school district has banned the Merriam Webster's 10th edition from use in fourth and fifth grade classes, over this salacious definition of "oral sex": "oral stimulation of the genitals".
OSX at work, Win7 at home?
Last week, Apple finally released updated Windows 7 drivers, allowing me to get my Windows 7 Boot Camp partition working smoothly on my 17” Macbook Pro. I haven’t really been missing Windows 7, I barely used it at work since installing it a month or two ago, but being able to boot up my laptop into either Mac OS X or Windows 7 was a big selling feature for me. For all the internet flame-wars about which operating system is better, I have always found reasons to like them both, enough to enjoy having both installed on my machines.
One of the main reasons I like having Windows 7 installed is that it is not the operating system I am using at work. As a web developer who spends eight to ten hours a day working on a computer, I find it often hard to come home and sit in front of the same machine for more hours, even though I kind of want to; video gaming, blogging, surfing the internet, my own web-based side-projects… all things I enjoy doing, but have a hard time doing so after basically spending all day already doing that.
Having OS X for work is great, as there are a multitude of great apps to work in and with. Many of my respected colleagues in the same field as I work on Macs, which means there are programs, systems, applications, widgets, tweaks, and more geared directly for them (and me). It certainly makes my job easier and more enjoyable.
Having Windows 7 for home is a refreshing change of pace. Microsoft’s latest operating system is polished and works smoothly; I haven’t noticed any of the headaches or frustrations many people were experiencing with Windows Vista. More importantly, it works different, responds different, feels different, and I’ve set it up different. I have a Twitter gadget always open at one side. I have a Steam account with all my video games at the ready. I have Google Chrome installed, as well as Windows Live Writer (which I am using to write this, my first attempt at using this program). I don’t have an HTML editor installed, I don’t have an FTP program installed, I don’t have an SVN client installed.
If I need to do work, either at the office or at home, I can boot up in Mac OS X, and have an environment dedicated to that. If I don’t want to work, I can boot up in Windows 7, and have an environment purposely separated from where and how I work.
It’s something that feels comfortable so far. I’ll see how it works out.
Wil's Daily Links for Monday
I lost The Game (and so did you)
The Agitator just infected me with a nasty little mind virus called The Game.
Canada
It's been a year since Canada's National Film Board - a publicly funded body charged with promoting the cause of Canadian filmmaking - put its archives online in embeddable, streamable wrappers. A year later, they're calling it a success, and they've released a TON of crunchy stats to prove it.
Wil's Daily Links for Friday
Bing Adds Food Recipe Search to Make You Drool [Food]
Canada's National Film Board online archive: a success story
It's been a year since Canada's National Film Board - a publicly funded body charged with promoting the cause of Canadian filmmaking - put its archives online in embeddable, streamable wrappers. A year later, they're calling it a success, and they've released a TON of crunchy stats to prove it.
Wil's Daily Links for Thursday
Firefox Has Been Hitting the Gym
Final Fantasy I and II coming to iPhone, iPod Touch
YouTube Now Testing HTML5 as Alternative to FlashWil's Daily Links for Wednesday
BookMooch
Lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter.
New York Times to spend 2010 erecting a partial paywall
BumpTop 3D Physics-Based Desktop Now Available on Mac, With Multitouch [Software]
OK Go explains the screwed-up state of the music industry
Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has published a tremendously informative, frustrating, and important open letter about the reason that the band's videos can't be embedded on sites like this. OK Go rose to prominence on the strength of its viral Internet videos, but now EMI, its label, won't allow embedding for its videos, because no embedding is possible. Kulash is clearly frustrate...
Wil's Daily Links for Tuesday
JQuery Celebrates 4 Years on the Web With New Release
Wil's Daily Links for Monday
Leaked document: How the EU planned to force changes in Canada's copyright
Michael Geist writes in with revolting news about the EU-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the EU's tactics on copyright: "The European Union and Canada are scheduled to resume negotiations on a free trade agreement with the EU hoping to pressure Canada into new IP and copyright reforms that include term extension, DMCA legislation, resale rights, and ISP liability. Now a negotiating stra...
Wil's Daily Links for Friday
Famous Knots of the World Illustrated in Earbuds [Image Cache]
Wil's Daily Links for Wednesday
Avatar, The Videogame (Atari 2600 Edition) [Image Cache]
Wii to get Netflix Streaming in Spring 2010
Gmail Makes Https The Default Security Setting on Gmail [Google]
Wil's Daily Links for Tuesday
Pimp My Bridge: Disraeli Edition
Wil's Daily Links for Monday
Penny Arcade is looking for a designer
One of the leading webcomic on the internet is looking for a designer. I think I know a couple folk who will be looking carefully at this job posting :P
Firefox 3.6 almost ready, release candidate available
Verizon: metered billing much fairer than all-you-can-eat
Canada Post Rates Have Gone Up
View Source considered beneficial, endangered
Alex Russell's essay, "View-Source Is Good? Discuss," considers the role that the browser's "View Source" command played in making the Web into the world's dominant platform, and looks at the threats posed to the idea that anyone can see how the Web works:
Sketches; Pulp Story Characters
A couple more doodles, posted to my Flickr account...
It didn’t take long for my little barbarian king to get named... Kapow! On a side note, fat horses are amusing to draw :)
Playing around with the webcomic idea. Based on the old pulp story magazine concept, I might actually flip through a couple sub-stories; a barbarian era, a detective noir yarn, and a retro-space-age tale.
Starting with Kapow’s barbarian story, I would need a villain. Or in this case, a villainess. Lots of pointing spiky bits, so you know she means business, and a big miter hat, so you know she’s in charge. I particularly like the black miter, as it makes her look like some sort of anti-pope!
Playing around with the design of Kapow’s unnamed villainess. She’s becoming more simplified, to match Kapow’s own simple designs, and am considering giving her hooves... hooves are evil, right? Also, since Kapow got a fat horse, it seemed to make sense that she would get a thin one.
Just a variety of doodles that I did tall-wise. I think I prefer drawing width-wise, though. Kapow and the villainess’s styles now finally line up, with her extraneous detail being shed.
Some more pulp character doodling, this time with some focus on the space-age era. To go with my male hero, I have a female heroine, and possibly a quick doodle as to what the evil alien race would look like... tentacles are evil, right? Aren’t they like the hooves of space? :)
@laerenielwen So far, I prefer it over the older version; it moves all things I regularly access to more accessible places.
- Marlo Vivo #1
The Trouble With Being Very Good At Being Very Bad, part 1 - Marlo Vivo #2
The Trouble With Being Very Good At Being Very Bad, part 2
- Metal Fire #7
False Maria, part 1 - Metal Fire #8
False Maria, part 2 - Metal Fire #9
False Maria, part 3 - Metal Fire #10
False Maria, part 4
- Time Capsules #4
The Plane That Came Down And Woke Up the World
- November 2009
Molly Greenwitch