Here is a short tutorial for Adobe Fireworks (or Photoshop or whatever) users out there. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a pretty looking button – something you can use for your website or anything.

First step is to create 3 rounded boxes. The width and height of the boxes have to be 2px less than one another – as shown in the figure below. The color palettes are also provided in the figure, so you can just use them as a guide for this tutorial.

Second step is to put all these boxes together and aligning them on the center of the first box. By doing this, we will have two different outlines for the button.

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Dichi Michi, is another pretty cool local band that I discovered lately. I am not really a fan of  “genre” (because it can be very misleading), but I can say these guys are in the group of power pop or pop punk kind of music. Although you can see the word happy hardcore stated on their MySpace page, I don’t see anything ‘hardcore’ in their lyrics or music tho. Clothing, perhaps. My fav types of tshirts, by the way. Their EP, Sounds of New Hope, consist of 3 English songs and 1 Malay song. Personally, their songs are pretty fun and melodically enjoyable, unless you’re very particular with lyrical meaning and intelligence on each songs.

I wouldn’t deny that there are definitely influences from Pee Wee Gaskins in their lyrics and musical arrangement (and style) – but that doesn’t matter. All bands started with influences – screw those people who blame you for “sounding so much like <put other famous western band name here>”.

Anyhow, try to listen to them. I hope they will come out with more songs, with better recording, and perhaps will full album later.

Another related band is Nevada, but they don’t have any EP released yet.

Check out: MySpace | The Wknd Session live recording and interview

I have some a lot of favorite websites that I visit regularly. I can spend hours on these websites, which is not a good habit for busy people like me. Ahem.

Emptees is one of them. It is community-generated website, specifically for designers and tee enthusiasts to share (as in show off), and talk about their ideas and designs for amazing tees. Simple concept, simple website design, but great community. It is a product of Indie Labs, which is also the owner of Big Cartel, my another favorite website (different story).

Going through the design one-by-one, admiring the details in the illustration (and wishing how I can draw something like that) and read all the feedbacks – great time waster. I’m not a tshirt designer, because I suck at drawing. But as some of you might know from my Twitter, and my old blog, I’m quite a crazy person when it comes to tshirts. Statistically, I’ve spend over USD500 on online tshirt in 2009. Yeah, that kind of crazy.

Check out their Tees of the Day to see daily selection of amazing tee designs. Too bad the RSS feed on that page is not working correctly.

Just finished first paper test for Computer System Architecture – one of my favorite subject this semester. It is sometimes pretty complicated, but complicated in a fun way. Not like the other subject that shall not be mentioned here – complicated and confusing at all time.