I decided to do away with the rouded corners made from images on my site and replace them with rounded corners made using JQuery. This plugin for JQuery is by far the EASIEST solution I have ever come across..sets up in minutes!

The FDIC has published a list of over 100 failed (closed) bank branches since October 2000. There is a link to each bank to help those affected by closings.

At the moment I am learning Ajax with the help of a very easy-to-use class called JQuery. I am a big fan of tutorials when it comes to learning and have found the following sites to be very useful:

• 8 Fantastic JQuery Tutorials for Designers
• 50 Amazing JQuery Examples
• JQuery Tutorials for Designers

I spent the last semester studying abroad in Ireland at the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT), and the work Kelley Corless and I had done on a project for the course has payed off. We spent the entire semester working on telling a story of development for a digital media competition set up by the Irish development agency, Connect-World.

We created an interactive, short animation explaining free trade in a simplistic way for children to understand. We started with hand drawn characters and then animated them using Adobe Flash.

Connect-World, among other organizations and businesses such as the Dublin City Council, RTE, National Irish Bank, Movies.ie, and AIB are all finalists in their respective categories in the Irish Digital Media Awards. The Digital Media Awards web site states,

“Launched in 2003, The Digital Media Awards were engineered to raise awareness of the emerging digital media sector in Ireland and more importantly to act as a showcase for the varied dynamic works being created by companies and third level institutions across a broad spectrum of categories in Digital Media.”

Our animation is now a finalist in the Connect-World category, and winners will be announced February 13th in Dublin.

LIT has been extremely generous in their offer to have me fly to Dublin for the award dinner for the announcement of the winners.

I was reading a chapter from Archaeology: Down to Earth by Thomas and Kelly when I got sidetracked and decided to search online for more information about a set of mounds at Poverty Point in Lousiana. In my search for more information, I found an interactive video created by The Bradshaw Foundation of chronicling mankind’s early start from Africa through out the world. The video is a nice way to understand where and when mankind traveled through out the ages.