I’m caffeinated and listening to Marilyn Manson, so I’ve decided to give you a briefing on my life & work matters during this long, hot summer months.

Nothing fancy, mind you. But this is for the people that’re curious about my whereabouts and why this blog is collecting dust lately.

So, without further ado, what’s keeping me busy:

• Day work. Demanding project on the loose. Much thought going on over features, design, functionality. Meetings, HTML / CSS, a dash of Javascript and PHP. Rinse and repeat.
• PC Magazine. Five pages of the best greek tech magazine out there are pure Sugar, look out for them. Not to forget that monthly greek blogger interview – how cool is that?
• CSS3.gr. Apart from writing articles and blog posts whenever I can, we’re in for some cool updates so keep posted.
• Interact Curriculum localisation. I blame John for proposing me as a Team Leader for the greek localisation team of the Interact curriculum, but it’s a job I enjoy nevertheless. Greek friends, wanna help? Drop me a line at zaxarenia at gmail dot com.
• FancyCage. I’m working on the HTML and Stelios has almost finished with the core functionality. Updates coming soon.
• Blog theme update. I’m so tired of talking about this, but I’m getting somewhere. I’m quite sure about it.
• Tiny personal & family micro-projects.

When not working on any of these, I shut down the iMac and head to the nearest beach because hey, I’m lucky to live in one of the most beautiful islands around.
Plus I read a ton of books simultaneously, both fiction and work-related ones. Katie claims this cannot be, but I make it happen somehow.

So there, it wasn’t that bad, was it?

How do you enjoy your summer, people? Do share in the comments.

Lo and behold, some of the inspirational links of this week, compiled in a short, lovely list for your viewing pleasure:

• Tastespotting.com has the most nailed-it-down interface I’ve ever seen for a food site, of course, heavily aided by its great content. I dare you to check out those photos and not drool, once.
• Not exactly news, but zen living blog powerhouse zenhabits.net posted an excellent post recently, citing 55 ways to get an energy boost. Absolutely worth reading.
• Really cool insight on how to start your own web design workshops by maratz.com. Will prove really interesting for the future (hint, hint).
• This article from sixrevisions.com really nails how difficult is to design for the worst client of all, yourself. Really helped me tying some loose ends here and there.
• I dare you to head over to Pretty Loaded and not get mesmerized by the slew of cool looking preloaders. Yum.
• I love reading case studies. An excellent case study I’ve read recently was that of Wiltshire Farm Foods by Headscape. Very inspiring.

I think I gave you enough links tonight to keep you busy for a while. Now excuse me, will have to drag my sunburnt self back to bed and try to ease my pain.

I’ll draw inspiration from Chris Coyier of css-tricks.com and a dear friend / partner in crime of mine, Yiannis Konstantakopoulos, for today.

Chris Coyier started a Twitter / blog meme, calling people to fill in the gaps in the phrase “CSS is like _______”.

Yiannis wrote an excellent, insightful post concerning all the hullaballoo on the social media field today in css3.gr.

I’ll combine them both and say:

Social Media Experts are _______.

It’s up to you to fill in the gaps.

My take is: Social Media Experts are talking about their work more than they actually work about it.

If you’re offended by this, OK, I add an “IMHO” in there. Or a “most”. As in, Most Social Media Experts are…

Feel free to add your thoughts, positive or negative.

Who cares about gradients, rounded corners, fancy Flash slideshows or tacky jQuery effects.

Who cares about subtle shadows, elegant typography or grid obsession.

The Big Picture by Boston.com does one thing and it does it well: Amaze us with the power of imagery.

It’s the best proof that proper content does not need anything much to decorate it. Just some proper way of putting it on the screen.

Now we’re talking about emotion-based design. Chec out the latest issue about G20 protests in London.

(Thanks @olrandir for reminding me the coolness of it all.)

Some of the links that are still in my “make sure you check them out” list since last week:

• Everyone’s favourite Happy Cog has started the redesign of Mozilla.org – and they’re kind enough to keep us informed during the procedure. Just the kind of stuff I like reading on web.
• Cufón is really gaining traction these days as a viable Flash-free alternative to sIFR – will make sure to check this out on future projects.
• Ego iPhone app by Garrett Murray spoils me – my Mint, Feedburner and Twitter stuff all in one? Ego bliss. Ironically, those are the stats I most often check out.
• This post from ever-inspiring Cocoia blog is not only creative – it friggin’ kicks creativity ass. So nice. So nice.
• I love this metaphor – Ember, an iPhone client for 37Signals’ Campfire, coming from overcommitted apps. Really like the name metaphor. I don’t use Campfire though, so I can’t really tell how convenient such an iPhone app would be.

This concludes another busy Monday, my dear friends. Let’s hope Tuesday holds even more interesting stuff for us. Have a great week!

Today, the good colleagues at Phaistos Networks and yours truly (or, as our secret cult name is, phaistonians) have launched our latest baby project, Pathfinder YouNews.

Essentially, it’s a citizen journalism hub, featuring news, contributions and commentary by Pathfinder.gr users, on various aspects of everyday life.

Lots of work have gone into that project, along with tons of UI revisions, tweaks and little things that should make your life easier using the service. If you’d like an invite to the public beta, just leave a comment over at the introductory post of the service (or here, if you wish) and ask. Oh, make sure you have a Pathfinder.gr account first, it’s essential to participate in the beta program.

I’m quite proud of the work we’ve done for this and I hope it takes off as well as possible.

Be prepared for many more Pathfinder.gr launches during the next few months. Things will be getting quite interesting, I assure you.

Mondays are always the best candidates for random inspiring links. A tiring weekend, too much to do and a harsh week start have contributed to that, I assure you.

So without further ado, I present you today’s list, hot from my Backpack inbox:

• Bowtie starts to excite me – mucho. Check out this extra excellent theme from Jverzier: oh come on, this is too sexee for a desktop.
• If you’re like me, you like to browse design ’stuff’ casually sometime in the day. If you’re like me, dfckr.com is for you. Pleasant design (I love the way they integrated those pesky Google ads in there) and an ambiguous name reek of design from miles afar.
• There goes me, another entry in my ever-expanding “THINGS TO BUY ASAP” linked list: Icon plushies! Make your sofa look like your Dock! Too prosh to just ignore.
• I’m thinking of getting this book to improve my user interaction patterns skills – but then again, I’ll break the “no books till you finish the current ones” pact that I’ve signed with myself.
• This looks promising: The Invoice Machine is an elegant invoicing solution, which also supports Basecamp import. What’s more, there’s a killer free plan, if you freelance just a bit like me.

I hope you all have a good week, people.

You may noticed I’m kinda offline these days, due to the recent change from our family OTE phone and DSL line to some double play greek provider. Which sucks.

I won’t go into speeds and bitrates and whatnot, I’m happy with my ‘net if it’s stable and relatively fast for browsing. What I can’t tolerate though is lack of proper documentation, awful interfaces that just don’t work and lack of proper support.

I’ve spent my first night as a Tellas Zisto customer trying to get my Internet to work, following the instructions on their leaflet obsessively, talking on the phone for half an hour trying to figure out what’s wrong. It turns out, nothing was wrong with my line. It was just that their leaflet had the wrong settings from my area, the modem they provided me with was wrongly set up, and the Siemens Speedstream stupid interface couldn’t work on the Mac, neither on Safari nor on the Firefox.

I’ve never seen something like this. Since the modem was pre-set up, I couldn’t select a different username than ‘admin’, which I had to choose from an one-choice select box. When I tried filling up the password and logging in, this nice interface would inform me that it needs a username. But, I just selected one.

Long story short, I managed to make it work through Windows.

Needless to say, the same settings just refuse to work with my (lovely) Linksys WAG200G. Complete fail. I’ll try again tomorrow with a different router to see if the problem is mine, but for now I’ve had to share my Ethernet through Airport throughout the house. And since the Windows machines around here have problems recognizing WEP passwords coming from the iMac, I had to leave my WiFi unsecured.

So now you know. If you happen to be around my house, hey, drop by! Free WiFi.

I hate it when things don’t work at once.

P.S. I think that most technical people that work on phone support talk in a very different manner to men and women. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get them to understand I’m not the usual clueless user, so they should spare me the shit and go on. Story of my life.

No, no. You didn’t get me straight. I hate debugging perfectly working websites in Internet Explorer 6 as much as the next web designer, but I can’t help but comment on the recent trend of not-IE6 pride.

As web designers, we shouldn’t be proud to exclude a portion (however small) of visitors from our websites. We shouldn’t just use conditional comments to show a big fat “GET A PROPER BROWSER N00B” at IE6 users. We shouldn’t wear our non-IE6 compliancy as a banner, beaming at ourselves. Even big games like Google and 37Signals didn’t do that.

We should try to use the above conditional comments to show a proper, however limited, version of the site to our visitors. Inform them subtly that they use an outdated browser and point them to all the good directions to replace it. Finally, say sorry if they’re not able to change their browser, but they’ll have to cope with a light-edition version of the service.

Then be proud. No need at all to confuse and annoy users just because they use an outdated browser.

And that comes from me, a well filled with user-related rantings and complaints.

A light dose of healthy geekery and cute imagery for this Friday night.

Check out these icons:

These stand for the Coda Plug-in Creator and Coda Plug-in Samples & Source Code respectively. Got it? Code is the seed that the watering tank can help grow.

Doesn’t that make you feel all fuzzy inside? Or is it just my Friday mood?

Well played, Panic.

P.S. For those Mac-loving web designers hiding under a rock these days, Coda has launched its 1.6 version that adds plug-in support to it – you can also add your favourite Textmate bundles! Take that, Espresso.