My rules:

• Laugh or play, every day.
• Everyone can be your friend until proven otherwise.
• Nobody or nothing is THAT important to override the above.
• Hold no undeserved grudges.
• Don't take yourself so seriously, you're only here once make it count!
• The more people you meet, the richer your life.
• If you are unhappy, change the scenery, otherwise you bring others down.
• Work = work,  home = home, unless you are bad at time management, they should never meet.
• Have an open mind, a warm heart, and a strong will.
• Believe in your project, if you don't take that seriously, don't expect customers to.
• Learn to say "no" and "I don't know" and don't be afraid to say them.

A quick background, I am a pretty funny outgoing guy. I love working on renewable projects in the following industries: entertainment, cars, luxury goods and fashion. It is not that I freelance a lot, it is that I have not found a place that has a steady workflow, because in all honestly, I am a workaholic. Let me do projects, developing, photo, art, bizdev, print, whatever. Busy is happy in my world. I am a designated hitter with a great record and friends everyplace I go.

I am not in to modern videogames, sci-fi, jargon, the "LA" scene, coffee or sushi. I am most definately a red-blooded meat eater that likes to be proactive. I like to get stuff done, not stand around and talk about it. Get in the game or get off the field!

Tim Hunold iLive Stock transaction
Tim Hunold iLive Stock transaction

Sharepoint SUCKS

and why you were lied to when you were told to use it

Sharepoint is a semi-acceptable way to share content for MS Office products, but it is totally mis-understood. People attempt to describe a Sharepoint like a basic CMS (content management system) or CVS (content versioning system). It does neither, and what it does do, it fails to do well. It is aimed at corporate homogenized, "the default installation and settings will do" crowd. The problems show up the second someone wants to make applications or change the UI and it is always a UI change first. If you can just get over their lies, you might be able to make proper use of it.

Before I continue, I must disclose that I am a Sharepoint developer/designer, and not for some piss-ant tiny company, we are talking Experian, a multi-national credit reporting company that if you don't respect/fear, you probably should get out from under that rock. Sharepoint is such a colossal clusterfuck, that I enjoy it. It is such a huge pain in the ass that I, like my peers, will get top dollar to work on it. Not only am I making serious dough, I am improving my credit score! Working on that AA membership and an ulcer too.

Sharepoint designer right out of the box over promises and under delivers. It is NOT easily skinnable. Sharepoint designer is a specialized, proprietary piece of software for skinning/coding. It is pretty much the only software you can use since no other current products have been ported for direct connections to your server. Who wants to only change the logo and color of the font on half of the pages you'll use anyway. You want to brand your intranet. It attempts to hide files from even the most advanced users, so I hope you enjoy your crappy "blue ribbon" skin, because that is about as good as it gets. Ok, so it hides a lot in directories with underscores _ and the oddly named 1033 folders, that a real sysadmin knows it is a half-assed way MS used to designate English as the default language back in the 80's. Even if you are a fairly advanced user, you have all sorts of hoops to jump through to change the face of the built-in forms, like uploading, search results, et cetera, but don't expect to go to TemplateMonster for a slick new look for your scarepoint deploy.

Sharepoint "applications" are not applications. Sharepoint applications are just poorly manipulated form fields and results pages. Don't expect to get something as simple as tic-tac-toe in Sharepoint, it is just too advanced for this pile of junk. A slightly glorified, slightly enhanced, and heavily over-marketed Web interface for Excel, SP is as current with corporate needs as a 9600 baud modem.

Masterpages frame this crap. Masterpages were MS's ill-conceived attempt at templatizing without templates. You touch one little bit of code, the whole thing vomits back errors. Remember, at this point you are skinning, so your designer needs to be 75% programmer, 25% designer, which will lead to ugly results.

CSS, table-less designs are a BAD idea

Let me say that a lot of CSS designs are very pretty. Tables are called arcane, and out dated, BUT they don't need any work-arounds, hacks or fixes. If you think it has anything to do with page load times, or SEO, you are totally wrong. Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, all of them look at the content as a whole in context and specific H or other emphasizing tags, not the order of the content. Since we all have broadband now, page loads times are a useless argument. If this were true, the extra code-bloat required for div tags would slow it down.

The argument for pure-CSS and only CSS is a moot one. CSS only designers design for a browser they hope people have, not for the facts that corporate users are screwed with outdated IE6 installations and probably the only time they will visit your site is while screwing around at work anyway. Designers are dreamers, but if they were practical, life would be really boring and unpretty. We'd still have avacado green appliances and wood-panelling.

Tables in conjunction with CSS and divs are the correct choice, not just one or the other. If you have a table, it will look 100% the same no matter what browser it is in without hacks like _ or * or other workarounds or position tags.