I’ve spent some time recently looking at the some of the best 50 CSS-based web sites of 2006, as reported on Smashing Magazine.  It is interesting to see the quality of work that other designers are pumping out, and in many ways serves as a challenge to me to improve my own web design skills to meet the level of excellence they offer.  So this afternoon I set about spending some time on professional development, pushing my graphic design skills to a higher level.  I may not get paid for this, but hopefully it will ensure that future web sites I design will be of a higher quality, and as such I may be in a better position to advertise my sevices to a wider audience still.

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My birthday present to myself arrived today, a nice shiny Tecknet V70 4GB MP3 player.  I haven’t used it yet though, it’s currently plugged into the wall charging up the internal battery.  It is nice and small though, and the colour screen (or what I’ve seen or it so far anyway) looks very neat.  The most hilarious part is the small instruction manual it came with, which was clearly written in Chinese first and then translated by a computer program!  At least, I hope it was translated by a computer – any real person with such a grasp of the English language wouldn’t last long in day to day conversation…

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