Daniel Marino

Wrapping up 2007

This will most likely be my last post for the year, so I thought I’d wrap up the year with a plethora of news, random thoughts, and other tidbits. Have a Merry Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) and see you next year.

Home Front
Married four and a half years, two kids (two and a half, and two months), a cat, and a house – life is awesome! I love my family and I’d be nothing without them. Praise God for blessing me with them!

The Trade
Recently, I’ve teamed up with Markup Factory creating web sites and templates as a contracted designer, which has been a fun ride so far. I’m going on three years as a full time web designer at PC Connection, and still freelancing on the side. I’ve done some really fun projects this past year. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. I’ve put a lot more tools in my belt this year as a designer, which include the following: jQuery, Mootools, sIFR, ASP .NET 2.0, TextPattern, and more… I’m also in the process of writing my first article, which is proving to be a daunting task, but I’m committed and will not give up!

Opera sticks it to Microsoft
Opera filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft recently. In short it has to do with Microsoft is dominating the web presence with it’s shoddy product, Internet Explorer. You can read Opera’s press release or Håkon Wium Lie’s letter if you care to learn the specifics of Opera’s action. I’m one of the first ones in line to take a stand against Microsoft, as I believe they’re the devil. However, I think Opera’s course of action is a little frivolous. Yeah, it stinks that Microsoft has the lousiest browser on the market, that it’s pre-installed on every PC on the market, and that over 50% of web surfers are using it. But in world of free trade (for the most part) you can’t really go around filing legal suits against your competition because they dominate the market. Maybe there’s more to this case than what I got out of it, but this seems awfully similar to the court proceedings of the US versus Microsoft. We’ll see what happens, and who knows, maybe the outcomes of Opera’s actions will be a huge push for Web Standards.

Social Butterfly
Over the past couple of months, I’ve started venturing out of my cave and exploring the social scene on the web. I’ve signed up for Linkedin and recently, Twitter. I also signed up for Del.icio.us – I’m constantly switching between three computers and got tired of not having my bookmarks accessible at all times. I’m still not crazy about how there’s an endless choice of social networking tools available, but I won’t lie, if I had an idea for an original social networking tool, I’d be all over it too.

End of Year Stats

• This web site had 1,343 unique page views
• My resume had 264 downloads (huh… funny that I haven’t had 264 job offers…)
• 14 Tweets on Twitter
• 34 Linkedin Connections