I've decided to finally give my blog a more suitable domain address. http://sqpixels.net is a geek idea that everyone just didn't get.

Please update your bookmarks to http://e-xperiments.com

Big thanks to my friend Grace for suggesting the name! I was trying to incorporate the "Elena" & "Experiments" together and was thinking quite literally, really long addresses like elena-experiments.com or elenaexperiments.com. What will I do without friends like her?! A few other friends thought it is a much better (and shorter) address to remember too.

I still have sqpixels.net as a forwarder to this new domain so it'll still work.

Huge Thanks to everyone for visiting my food blog!

I went and accidently saved over my original theme and had to redesign it all again! Which is not such a bad thing I guess, because I kindda' made a mess of my previous style.css file. This is less chaotic.

Anyway. In brief.

Been discovering new fun geek apps like Twitter and Joost.

Drooling over new soon to be upgraded versions of Adobe CS3 and the new Apple Final Cut Studio 2.

Also "upgrading" my professional skills and technically organised. Creating organised workflows for all to follow or get their ass kicked.

Still trying to create a better sidebar for the blog.

And wondering what unusual muffin I will bake for Muffin Monday (MM02).

I am trying to give the blog a makeover. I bought this new theme Creative Tape from Multithemes and usually most themes give you an option to change the colour of the links and unfortunately this doesn't have an easy one-click option.

So being the incredibly impulsive and Singaporeanly impatient person that I am, I bravely dove into the unknown world of CSS trying to figure out how to change the colour of links. I've been fiddling and adjusting CSS scripts - without really knowing what I was doing of course. I'm still working on it - hence the very obvious difference from the sidebar and main body. * The developers have since told me how to change it.

It really doesn't help that I am a designer by trade and such details irk the hell out of me. Things like font size, alignment, spacing, font colour, link colour, how it should be 2 pixles to the left or 4 pixels to the right, paragraphs in blogs should not be justified unless unusual circumstance. I am a nazi. Creative people usually are control freaks.

I have demands. I want 3 columns in my blog, I wish there are more people designing better themes for RapidWeaver, I want to have cool designed features like on delicious:days - the most beautiful and well designed blog I've seen.

I wish I could let it go. But I can't and won't rest until I really can't do anything about it. I obviously need to learn CSS scripting.

I am lucky and spoilt - I work for a boss who LOVES buying the latest toys for the office. About two months ago, I was given a 21" Wacom Cintiq21UX to "test and evaluate" for a couple of days. Also that week, I got to work with the well known and well admired Design Guru, Stefan Sagmeister who was in the house and he and his team were so very impressed - and envious ;).

The Cintiq 21UX combines a 21" LCD screen and a pressure sensitive tablet to create a surface you can paint on directly using a Wacom pen. It's a wonderful tool for drawing, painting and rotoscoping. Digital drawing has long been a different world from the traditional pencil and paper. The pencil and paper way is more intuitive and organic. You turn your canvas around, adjust the angle, you feel the lead press against the paper - a highly artistic process. Digital drawing on the other hand is upright, emotionally boring and un-ergonomic. I just completed a DI job and using the Cintiq made it truly pixel perfect! Touching up, erasing, stamping, and painting were literally at the tip of my pen. The ExpressKeys on both sides of the panel are great in replacing spacebar, shift, option controls - the side Touch Strips make zooming in and out a breeze. There is a slight delay especially for super large stills but it's nothing to moan too much about - if you're RAM abundant it's not a problem.

However, I don't use it much for my other work applications simply because of the design of the interface. Menus drop from the top and using the Cintiq is not practical because your hand is blocking everything. For other apps I stick to my Intous3.

After my glowing and gushing promotion of this wonderful technology he immediately went out and bought 2!

How cool am I? *Haha!*

I a mac user and I only just started blogging.

A good blogging software in OSX was not easy to find - it was either too limiting in layout and configuration, or it was too complicated requiring me to use linux. Web based blogging was great but I wanted to use my own domain - which they supported but somehow it didn't work out. I tried iWeb, it had attractive templates and it made creating a website incredibly easy - BUT when it's published it gives you strange names for your urls and it flattens everything including texts - which is not desirable especially for a food blogger who shares her recipes. Makes copy and paste impossible. Also, if you are not publishing on the .mac website - less features are available. I was left disappointed.

So finally after clicking on every possible link that turn up in my google search of "Blog OSX", RapidWeaver by RealMac Software turned up. It appears slightly complicated at first but after a few trials it actually is uncomplicated to use. There are also third-party template creators that provide other template alternatives should you prefer something else beside the default versions. It does help to have some HTML knowledge and basic ones are easy to learn and help is easily found all over the internet. Just copy and paste.

I am grateful to RapidWeaver :)