Aside from the grunge style that got the interests of designers, I found a few sites, mostly portfolios, that has common theme — wood designs. Was it or is it or will it be the new trend this year? Below are the 22 out of 29 websites I found interesting.

aj-design.cn

alexbuga.com

carsonified.com

chamadigital.com

cssem.com

davidhellmann.com

destinationorganic.co.nz

eighty4.ca

freshlypainted.co.uk

hidalgofoto.net

ianfarish.com

kendo.bg

labarraca.es

nanamiart.com

nebonmedia.com

parketykulik.cz

philippe.plaideux.free.fr

thirdandgrand.com

tff4.com

volume5.co.uk

vslashm.com

whoism.ca

What can you say?

Breaking news mga kapwa business-minded Pinoy! We can now directly withdraw paypal money to our local banks. Thus making business online a lot lot lot lot lot and 1millions times lot better.

Effective yesterday, PayPal started allowing users in the Philippines to withdraw funds to local bank accounts.

Yes, it’s confirmed. Log in to your PayPal account and see that in the My Account > Withdraw page, you now have an option to directly transfer funds from your PayPal account to your bank account in the Philippines.

Withdrawal transactions are expected to be processed within 5-7 business days.

There is no charge if the transaction amount is P7,000 or more but there is a P50.00 fee if the amount to be withdrawn is P6,999.99 or less.

A P250.00 return fee is charged if you entered incorrect details about your bank account so make sure you input the correct information.

To withdraw, you must attach a bank account first to your PayPal account. Once added, you can directly submit a withdrawal request.

It’s really true!

My newphew recently joined the Pampers Baby Pic Contest sponsored by Pampers ofcourse. I can’t get enough of his cuteness specially when he already started to dance the Itaktak mo by Joey de Leon. He can now identify his nose and tongue and always gets excited when he hears the engine of our motorbike. He would mumble ‘broom.. broom..‘ and then wave his hand. Lhex, as I call him and Davis by his parents, has already turned 1 year old last November and just got his 4th front teeth this month. Yesterday he turned 14months and it would be cool if he can make it on Pampers’ first page by next month! If you think he is cute enough to be on the first page, please vote for him. I gathered a few of his pictures smiling. Just click on each pictures to view a larger image.

Lhex’s official entry

So cool.. His latest picture in Baguio City..

Pictures while playing

First steps with his father

The voting system is a bit of a troublesome because you have to register. The process is not actually the problem but the loading speed, it is so so so slowwwww — i could rant on that all day but that would be on a long topic to discuss here. Back on topic, below is the summary of how-to vote.

1) Register first . You have to enter a baby name though. I really do not know what is the purpose of that because you are only there for voting! Anyway, you must check the box indicating you are to vote only
2) Wait for the verification — uhhh, I think I waited for more than an hour for that verification. Please bare with it.
3) Finally, visit his page and vote. You can vote other babies as well because all of them are so cute. All babies are CUTE and LOVELY!

You can even submit your baby’s pic as well. Let me know if you did

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace
where there is code that I should have completed
where there are defects that I should have fixed
where there are deadlines that I should have met.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much as seek as
to be understood as to understand irate clients
to be supported as to support difficult applications
to be valued as to value quality software design.

For it is in debugging that we find errors,
it is in requirements that we find clarity,
and it is in camaraderie that we find harmony in work.

Amen.

I don’t know if Neri wrote it by herself but one thing for sure I CAN RELATE! I love it!

Wow this is nice and hot news! Finally IE is taking the standards seriously. The lawsuit of Opera to IE might have an effect afterall..

As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.

Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics. Here’s a relevant video.

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

Ok, you might be wondering what is Acid2 Test. I myself was not familiar with it until now.

The Acid2 test was developed by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) as a challenge to browser developers. In a single page, the test makes use of a broad range of features from several different web standards that developers have wanted to have in browsers for some time, and it uses them to display a deceptively simple smiley face.

Now we can sleep real tight that in the coming future, developers and designers will have less headache making their website CSS based Happy New Year IE!

I’ve been a fan of Chris Shiflett’s site since late last year. One thing that really made me come back to this site was not the content but the design - I am not an RSS fan :D. I tried to mimic it and got a very poor outcome. The site is very easy on the eyes. Even the color is gray, I like how he played it with orange so it does not look so boring. The background images looks like wallpaper but it just complements everything. It looks so neat with the metal like surface. I like the fonts — I am a fan of Arial and Verdana - and specially the icons. I love the spacing and alignment of the content! I could not find a thing that I don’t like.

When I read the About section of his website the more I respect him. Shame on me I tried to mimic his site without really considering the background story. Everything was well planned - xhtml validity, accessibility, icons, content, GUI… Just to give you a snippet of what he said:

Accessibility was a baseline design ethic. The markup is ordered logically. The contrast should be sufficient for most users, and text resizing is accommodated as far as possible in the default style; relative values are used for everything. There’s an additional single-column “light” style (linked via the utilities menu above the search form). The site has been manually checked to Priority 2 plus conformance to the WCAG 1.0 with extra screen reader checks for critical objects like the calendar.

I haven’t seen really someone discusses this but he is an expert so I think that should just be really taken into consideration, right? Not everyone I guess but it is a good starting point for me to take notice. I’ll be a little more aware now when I design the next petixe look. If you notice, I am doing some experimentation with my site. I will be releasing this to the public anyway so I’ll try to make it a little close to perfect with the accessibility chu chu… (chu chu means etc.)