I gen­er­ally try and keep my polit­i­cal opin­ions at a min­i­mum on this blog, but today is spe­cial. I remem­ber eight years ago very clearly. I had just turned eigh­teen and I was full of excite­ment about the prospect of voting in my first pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. And then, I remem­ber black Wednes­day. Today marks the begin­ning of the end of eight years of dark­ness in this country.

For the last eight years I have been ashamed to be an Amer­i­can. I have been ashamed of the actions of my coun­try at home and abroad. There are too many things that I have been ashamed of to even begin to list. Today, I am proud. For the first time in eight years, I am proud of my country.

I have hope that the tide is turn­ing. I have hope that Obama, the first African Amer­i­can U.S. pres­i­dent, will make a last­ing mark. I hope that he will make a last­ing mark not because he is the first African Amer­i­can pres­i­dent, but because he could be the next JFK or FDR. BHO, anyone? I also have hope that per­haps this elec­tion will embolden the Demo­c­ra­tic party to finally grow a back­bone. It has been far too long since I’ve dared to hope for the future of my country.

Things to be even more hopeful (and happy) about today

In my home state of Mass­a­chu­setts, all three of the ballot mea­sures went my way. There will not be an income tax ban. Yay! for Mas­sArt (and other public ser­vices). It will no longer be a crim­i­nal penalty to pos­sess less than an ounce of mar­i­juana. Yay! for not wast­ing state money on pros­e­cut­ing the War On Drugs. Lastly, start­ing in 2010, there will be no more gam­bling on dog races. Yay! for the greyhounds.

In Maine, where I grew up, they voted down a mea­sure to allow a casino to be built. In South Dakota, where my lovely grand­mother lives, they voted down an ini­tia­tive that would have banned most types of abor­tion. In New Hamp­shire, they went blue across the board: pres­i­dent, sen­a­tor, gov­er­nor, and house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives. In Mon­tana, a red state where I have many family mem­bers (who may or may not be red), Barack Obama very nearly won.

Only Cal­i­for­nia can put a small blem­ish on this day. As it stands now (accord­ing to The New York Times), the propo­si­tion to ban same-​sex mar­riages holds a very small lead.

If that is the only thing that I am dis­ap­pointed about today, that is worth a cel­e­bra­tion. Today is a good day.

Amazon is now pro­vid­ing what they call “frustration-free” pack­ag­ing for some of their products.

Basi­cally, these items are pack­aged at in ready-​to-​ship boxes, minus the retail pack­ag­ing. Amazon can send the boxes with­out using extra pack­ag­ing. It sounds like it saves every­body some money and helps reduce waste. Great call Amazon.

Design-​wise, I’m really dig­ging the way that Fisher-​Price card­board box looks in the pic­ture. Nice and simple.

Paul Ham­mond has a very clever idea about avoid­ing con­di­tional sytlesheets for Inter­net Explorer. Basi­cally, if we just use con­di­tional com­ments for IE to include a class­name in the body tag, we can iso­late the spe­cific IE rules in the main stylesheet.

Pros

• Avoids any extra HTTP requests for files with IE-only hacks
• Slicker than includ­ing that mon­stros­ity inside the head tag
• Allows for easier read­ing and main­te­nance of stylesheets. The IE hacks can be placed where they’re rel­e­vant in the stylesheet.

Cons

• Doesn’t this defeat the entire idea of sep­a­rat­ing out hacks from stan­dard CSS?

Does anyone else have opin­ions on the matter?

Via Yahoo News.

I’ve been steadily work­ing on a new web design project which will even­tu­ally become a custom Word­Press tem­plate. In the design process I’ve slowly man­aged to amass sev­eral browser win­dows full of tabs of related things that I was look­ing at for inspi­ra­tion on the site.

Safari is get­ting pretty slow with all of those tabs so I kind of needed to do a com­plete dump of the tabs. With­out fur­ther ado, here are the links (for my ben­e­fit as much as yours).

Wireframes

• Build­ing a Web­site Wire­frame in Illus­tra­tor
• Why You Should Create a Wire­frame First
• Wire­fram­ing With InDe­sign and Illus­tra­tor
• Wire­fram­ing Part II: Illus­tra­tor Basics

CSS Galleries

• CSSelite.com
• CSS Drive (This site appears to be down as of writ­ing this)

WordPress Themes (Inspiration)

• The­me­For­est
• WP Glam­our
• Cellar Heat: A Free Word­Press Theme

Photoshop and Illustrator Tutorials

• Create a Vibrant Modern Blog Design in Pho­to­shop
• Grunge Border
• Quickly Add Grunge To Text
• Illus­tra­tor Tuto­ri­als

Other Stuff

• Adobe Kuler
• 960 Grid System
• How to: CSS Large Back­ground
• Word­Press Developer’s Tool­box
• Remov­ing Cat­e­gory Base from Word­Press URLs