I’ve found out some nifty sites with color designs and patterns, these are great sources of inspiration and you can produce some great results by making the right combinations.

The Inspiration Gallery
SquidFingers patterns
DinPattern
ColourLovers

Have fun!

I’ve signed up my latest work, “VideoGames Design and Programming course - Atempo Academia de Estudo” in the CSS Reboot website.
CSS Reboot is a community event for web professionals, the idea is to redesign your old site into a webstandards masterpiece (or not) and show it to the world at may 1st. The gallery will show hundreds of designs and it’s a good place to showcase your skills.
The past events showed some brilliant and not so brilliant designs but at least alot of websites made the transition to standard, accessible and clean websites.
You can view my entry or take a sneak peek at the other rebooters until the grand opening of may 1st, if you’re joining, leave a comment with your site. :)

Yesterday I decided to spend my newly acquired 2100 xbox live points on the Xbox Live Arcade service.
The points enable you to buy gamer pictures for your profile/avatar, themes for your xbox, game specific content (like cars for Ridge Racer 6) and full games from Live Arcade.
There are several categories, spanning from casual games like Hearts, to more action driven like Geometry Wars, strategy and even retro games like Smash TV or Gauntlet (how I miss to hear “Wizard needs food badly!”) so there’s plenty to choose for everyones tastes.
And you can always try a demo before you actually buy the game, a very smart move. Anyway, I spent my points on:

• BackGammon
• Hearts
• Geometry Wars
• Smash TV

There’s a very good entry on Wikipedia concerning Xbox Live, you can check the page for more info. Meanwhile i’m going to continue playing these games until Elder Scrolls Oblivion arrives on stores. See you on Live.

I’ve found out today that Chad Fowler has released a beta version of his upcoming book “Rails Recipes”. The approach for this book is to supply the reader with several case studies regarding diferente problems and situations, it’s a very practical and usefull book.
Specially if you combine it with the “Agile Web Development with Rails” book which I previously talked about.
Right now if you want there’s a way of buying the beta version of the book and have access to 21 recipes in pdf format, more info can be found on the Ruby on Rails weblog.

moo.fx is a lightweight, megasmall, easy to use, fast, cross-browser, javascript effects library, written with prototype.js.
It’s a real blast and I can’t wait to use it in a project or two. In the meantime I recommend a look at these two tutorials for beginners, they’re really well written and straghtforward.

moo.fx tutorial quickie
The Idiot’s Guide to moo.fx

Have fun. :)