August 29, 2003

Opera 7.20 Beta Out

Opera 7.20 beta was released this week… Not many major changes other than some bug fixes and speed improvements. It supports percentage heights for tables now, which is nice. But for some reason they also added support for the < blink> and < marquee> tags. I have no idea why they would do this… It’s like three steps backwards in the progression of standards. Plus they are cheesy, proprietary tags that had no business being created in the first place. Shame on you Opera.

Rip those tags out immediately! Let them die already!

August 27, 2003

Note to Wallpaper Designers

I’m referring to downloadable digital wallpapers or desktop backgrounds, not paper wallpaper to put on the wall…

It’s really freakin’ annoying when you find a cool wallpaper that you want to download, only to have to click on a link, download a Zip file, unzip it, find the file on your hard drive, open it, then set it as your desktop. Or go into display properties and do it after you’ve unzipped it. Just give us a link to the picture so we can open it in our browser, right click on it, and set it as the wallpaper from there. JPEG files are already compressed, there is no value in compressing them again with a Zip file, unless you are bundling a text file with it or something. But still, put the text on your site, and let people just look at the damn picture!

Apple.com Redesign in the works

Zeldman and Douglas Bowman of StopDesign are teaming up to redesign the Apple.com web site. I can’t wait to see what they come up with. Douglas is an excellent designer and has worked on Wired.com among many other large sites. And of course Zeldman is Mr. standards compliance. I can’t say I really enjoy all of Zeldman’s designs, but his coding is top-notch. Anyway, it will be interesting to see if they are going to stick with the basic aqua-tab design of the current Apple site and just tweak it a little and code it in support of standards, or if they are going to completely overhaul the whole thing. Either way I’m sure there will be a lot to learn from the design decisions they made and I hope they both are able to talk a little about the process on their blogs during or after the redesign.

August 25, 2003

Fat your Fault? Or Big Bad Corporations?

An article at RedNova News entitled Political Debate Looms Over Obesity talks about whether being fat is your own fault or the fault of corporations. Supposedly some people think that it is the corporations fault for advertising their product so much without telling people how bad it is for them. The article also said 95% of the 10,000 advertisements children see each year are for candy, sugary cereals, fast food joints, soft-drinks, etc.

I tend to agree with the people that say it’s your own damn fault for being overweight. I’m getting a little belly myself, but I certainly don’t blame the fast-food restaurants or soda makers for it. I know that stuff is bad for me, but I go there anyway because it’s fast, cheap and easy. I’d rather spend $5 and get some burritos than spend 10 minutes each morning preparing my lunch.

One thing people suggested in the article is not selling so many sweet things at schools, which I would agree with. At school the kids are away from their parents and the parents aren’t able to advise them on choosing a healthy meal, so they end up eating corn dogs and burgers and ice cream every day. Which is where most kids probably get hooked on eating unhealthy foods. Especially if they normally get healthy meals at home, they probably load up on crap at school when they have the chance. All of that plus the fact that kids don’t seem to play very much anymore. They just sit around playing video games all day inside without moving anything but their thumbs. I mean I love video games, and played them a lot myself when I was younger, but my parents at least put a limit on it, and would only let me play like an hour a day. The rest of the time I was playing outside or even playing inside with toys. A lot of kids I see today just play video games every spare minute. They play the PS2 and GameCube and Xbox when they are at home, then when they get in the car they play the Game Boy Advance. I even see kids playing the GBA at restaurants all the time like little zombies off in their own little world. I’ll let me kid have video games, but will use restrictions similar to that of my parents, only letting them play a little each day, and never at the table.

August 22, 2003

OneWord: Interest

Interest sucks. The interest on my car loan is really really high. I think like 15% or more. That’s a lot. I need to refinance it. But I had some late bills a while back, so I can’t. Maybe if someone would refinance my car and lower the monthly payment, I wouldn’t be paying the bills late!

OneWord

August 21, 2003

Checkout Lines

Why is it that when you are checking out at a grocery store and use a debit/credit card, you have to press the debit/credit button, then tell the cashier if it’s debit or credit as well? Why do they have a debit/credit button on the customer’s card swiper, if the cashier has to ask anyway? Couldn’t they just eliminate one of them? The store where my wife works part time doesn’t do both. She just asks if it’s credit or debit, you don’t have to press anything on the swiper thing. Grocery store checkout lines would be a lot more user friendly if you didn’t have to do both.

And the really annoying thing is when it says “press yes or no” so you press the big red button, but that cancels the whole transaction. You were supposed to press the unlabeled button the arrow was pointing at, apparently. Target has good swipers I think. Except that they are at the end of the counter. So you have to walk all the way down to the end of the aisle and turn a little to use it. Very strange.

August 20, 2003

LAUNCHcast

Well after a tip from Adam I signed up for the LAUNCHcast service today. The free version was pretty cool, but kinda low quality and there were commercials. So I signed up for the paid service and now have 7 days to try it out. I think I’ll be keeping it though. It’s only $4 a month, which is less than a trip to taco bell. So I can just pack my lunch one day a month and the cost will be covered.

The sound quality is pretty good, through headphones anyway, which is how I normally listen to music while I’m at work.

I really like the way you can customize your own radio station. All of the rock stations in Chattanooga just play Dave Matthews Band and Matchbox 20 way too much for my taste. I can’t stand Dave Matthews Band. Bleh. So this way I can have the variety that radio provides, with only artists that I like on the playlist. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Plus with the for-pay service, you can set music listening moods, and limit it to genres. So since I like rock and trance, I can set a trance playlist and a rock playlist. That way when I wanna hear rock I can, without a random trance song being thrown in there. And when I want to listen to trance, it won’t be interrupted by some rock song, which would just totally ruin the mood. :)

It’s also nice to be able to find out tons of info about the artist with one or two clicks. If I hear a song I’ve never heard before, I can see a picture of the band that sings it, rate the song, the artist, the album, buy the album online, see videos from the artist, find out what their tour schedule is, other artists like them, and on and on. It’s like super-radio!

Try it at: LAUNCHcast

August 19, 2003

BlogStakes Launches

There is a new fun thing for the blogging community out now… BlogStakes.

It’s a two-way sweepstakes, where the person that clicked the link wins, and so does the owner of the referring site. So if you click this link we could both win a 1-year subscription to BrowserCam! BrowserCam takes screen shots of your site on nearly every browser and OS, and lets you view them on the web. This lets you see how your site will look for everyone, without having 10 computers in your office to test on. It’s $10 an hour for limited use, or $40 a month for unlimited access. The contest is giving away a 1-year’s subscription, so that is a prize value of $480. Not too shabby. There is no real benefit to just take the link and put it on your own blog either, since you win whether you click the link, or link to it. Everybody wins!

Enter the contest

August 18, 2003

OneWord: Acid

On the X-files last night, Arthur Dales told Mulder about his experiences with aliens back in the 50’s. Apparently all of the great baseball players are/were aliens, and they have acid for blood. So if you are going to kill aliens, you probably shouldn’t do it with a shotgun or chainsaw or anything, ‘cause their blood will kill you. Just thought I’d put that tip out there, for anyone that may be planning to go on an alien killing spree.

OneWord

August 17, 2003

Bud Beer Commercials

Here’s a site with all of the Bud beer radio commercials in one place. There is a ton of them I haven’t heard before, and they are all just about the funniest thing ever. That site also has a lot of other funny clips and articles as well. Thanks to Pank for the link.

August 14, 2003

Speed Dreaming

I dreamed that I got a traffic ticket last night. I don’t remember what for. But I think my court date is scheduled for the 15th of next month, so I’m not going to sleep that night so I don’t have to go. If they try to put me in sleep prison for missing my court date, I will have to blow them all up with my super ray gun, bend the metal bars with my bare hands, and then fly out the door to safety on my own personal super island. It has a 24 hour cafe that makes all my personal favorite foods, robot helpers that do all the work and kill intruders, and Wi-Fi access covering the whole island.

Dreams are fun.

Keyspan Digital Media Remote

If I ever get the EyeTV, this is little gizmo is a must-have I think. It’s a tiny remote control that you can use to control iTunes, EyeTV, the DVD player, etc. This way I won’t have to reach all the way across my desk to change the song or TV channel, I can just press a button on my remote control! Technology is great…

Griffin Technology PowerMate

The Griffin PowerMate is a very slick little knob thing that you plug into the USB port on your Mac or PC to control things on your computer. It can be rotated, pushed to “click” and also “click and turned” to do various things in various programs. The obvious thing is to control the volume on your computer, and when you do this, the glowing light on the knob will grow brighter as the volume is turned up, and dimmer as the volume goes down. When your computer is asleep the light pulsates. How cool is that? It’s like your computer’s very own little heart beat.

You can program the functions of the PowerMate to any key combination that you can do on your keyboard, allowing you to use it for just about anything you can think of. Scrubbing video in Final Cut Pro and iMovie, or scrubbing audio in a sound app. Scrolling long web pages if your mouse doesn’t have a scroll wheel, enlarging and shrinking the brush size in photoshop, etc. Looks like a really fun and handy little tool.

Di.FM

Thanks to moochan for pointing me to Di.FM through a thread on TeamPhotoshop. I love to listen to techno/trance music while I’m working on the computer, because I feel like I’m being more creative and getting more done. It’s good background music as well. Rock music usually requires more active listener participation, at least for me, and that is distracting when trying to concentrate on a web site or other project.

This is a great trance station with good quality streams and a really wide variety of songs. I have a few trance albums, but I get tired of hearing the same thing over and over after a while. So this is a nice change of pace. They also have a classical station which I haven’t listened to yet, but classical music is great for thinking, so maybe I’ll listen to that one when I’m reading or something.

Thanks moochan.

August 13, 2003

Typeit4me

After Default Folder X, Typeit4me will probably save me the most time in my daily routine. We have like 4 different email addresses at work, so I can just make a shortcut for each signature to send out with messages. Plus saving URL’s and commonly typed words for our plaques and trophies and such. Very handy.

Default Folder X

Default Folder X is probably one of the nicest looking apps I’ve seen on the Mac. Not that its graphics are astounding or anything, it’s just so useful looking. I spend way too much time flipping back and forth between directories in Windows. It make saving and opening files in several different applications per job a real pain in the butt. This will probably save me more time than any other application, ever. Why isn’t there software like this on the PC?

Dragthing

Again, I haven’t used the Dock in OSX yet, but apparently some people find it lacking. This little app increases its usefulness quite a bit, and Zeldman seems to think quite highly of it, so it can’t be too bad.

Dragthing

Enigmo

Enigmo looks a lot like Sierra’s The Incredible Machine except with much prettier graphics and an overall better look experience. I used to play the Incredible Machine when I was the 8th grade, and it was great fun. Can’t wait to be able to try this new “version” of it. It seems to get some incredibly good reviews as well…

Launchbar

I don’t think I can completely understand the possibilities of Launchbar until I have had the chance to install it and use it for a while, but it certainly looks promising and looks like a real time saver for power-users. Can’t wait to try it out and see what all the fuss is about.

Transmit

Transmit is one of the slickest looking FTP programs I’ve ever seen, and I can’t wait to be able to use it. FTPeel is another possibility, though Transmit is probably more feature-rich and stable, considering FTPeel just came out.

Color Consultant Pro

Color wheel programs are very handy to have around when trying to pick color schemes for your site, and Color Consultant Pro looks like a great one. I’ve used ColorSchemer in the past on the PC, and it was quite good. This one looks to be even more detailed and flexible.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire will definitely be what I use for my News aggregator on the Mac. I am using Newzcrawler on the PC right now, but I still don’t like it very much. I will probably also eventually purchase the pro version of NetNewsWire, and use it to post to my Blog so I can have spellcheck, offline writing, etc. This is definitely a best of breed application, and there really isn’t any other choice for news aggregators on the Mac as far as I can tell.

Image Well

Image Well is a tiny little program that sits at the top of your screen, which allows you to drop image files onto it and resize them, add borders, crop and rotate them, or upload them to your iDisk or an FTP server automatically. You can even take screen grabs with the program, crop them add a label, and upload it.

This will be really great, because a lot of times I just need to crop, resize, or rotate and image, and I really don’t want to have to open up Photoshop to do something so simple. Plus at work I normally send proofs to the customers by taking a screenshot, pasting that into Photoshop, cropping it, adding labels, etc. Then emailing that to the customer.

It would be nice if Image Well allowed you to easily email people the file as well. Maybe they will add that feature later.

CSS Edit

I’ve been using Topstyle on the PC to code my sites recently, but CSSEdit looks like it may be a decent replacement for the Mac. I don’t think it is anywhere near as full featured as Topstyle, but it’s only $15 and at a 1.0.1 release, so I’m sure new and better features will be added continuously. There may be other programs like BBEdit that would work for all my text editing needs on the Mac however. I’ll just have to try them all when I get a Mac.

Detour

Detour is a very handy looking little application that allows you total control over the sound settings and volumes in all of your MacOSX programs. Mute the sound from Safari so it doesn’t interfere with the music you are playing on iTunes, or make only the iTunes sounds go through your main speakers, so you don’t get a loud announcement when you get mail or an iChat message. For only $12, it’s definitely worth it to keep those crazy system error alert sounds and other notification sounds from scaring the crap out of you.

Watson

Though Apple’s Sherlock is basically identical to Watson, I will still be buying Watson when I get a Mac. Partly to support the “little guy” and partly because rumor has it that it is faster, and has more features than Sherlock. Plus if I get the EyeTV to record TV shows, I’ll want to use Watson to do the scheduling.

Watson looks really handy to me, and I’ve never been able to find anything even remotely similar to it on the PC. I think it will make some things so much simpler than having to go to 15 different web sites for everything.

Some of the features it offers that I will definitely use:

Site Search
Search Epinions.com, the Internet Movie Database, lyrics, the New York Times, etc, all from one standard interface. You get to see the data you want without all the distracting ads and other junk they put on their pages.

Recipes
Search recipes of all kinds from the Watson interface. Most recipes even include preview pictures and everything. Perhaps it will enourage my wife and I to make more healthy and nutritious foods! (yeah right)

Google Search
Search Google. Probably won’t use this one very much, as Google is integrated into Safari, but I do like the way you can save searches.

Image Search
Much nicer and more consistent interface than the Google Image Search that I normally use, plus it searches multiple sites at once.

Movies
Very very nice. Order tickets online, view showtimes and trailers directly in Watson. Even add the movie “appointment” to your iCal calendar with a single click!

Package Tracker
Probably won’t use this at home much at all, but will definitely be handy at work, so that I don’t have to go to three different carrier’s web sites to see where a package is. Plus it seems like every time I try to track a package, the interface has changed and I have to waste time figuring out how to use their site.

Phone Book
Yes, yes yes! I can never remember which phone directory site I like, and some even block Opera, so it’s always a pain to look up phone numbers. This will give me a simple, consistent interface to use all the time. It even supports reverse lookup! And when you find the person you need, one click adds them to your system-wide address book, incredible!

Reference
I use Dictionary.com quite a bit and it will be great to have a simple interface to interact with it. You can also search the Bible, the World Fact Book, etc.

Yahoo Browsing
I can’t stand the Yahoo homepage, way too much crap on there for my taste. When I feel the need to browse the Yahoo directory, this will definitely be the way to do it.

Zip Code Lookup
Again, this will be handy at work if someone forgets a zip code or doesn’t give us a city. Will save me a trip to the unfriendly USPS web site.

All of that for only $30 sound like quite a steal to me. Plus they are always adding new features and things to search. All together a great looking product.

EyeTV DVR

The EyeTV Digital Video Recorder by Elgato Systems is quite a cool little device, from the looks of it.

It’s a small box that attaches to the Mac via the USB port, and to your TV via the standard Coaxial cable, or the RCA inputs. The device allows you to watch live cable tv (or broadcast, or satellite) TV on your Mac, as well as providing TiVo like functions such as pause, fast forward, record and rewinding of live TV. You can also plug your analog camcorder, video game console, VCR, or other RCA jack capable device into the RCA jacks, and record from those devices as well. The only problem with this is that there is a 1.5 second delay in recording, so you’d probably die pretty quickly if you tried to record gameplay footage from your GameCube. But hell, I’ll probably try it anyway.

There are no montly subscription fees like there are with TiVo, which is the main thing keeping me from buying a device like TiVo. I just can’t justify paying a monthly fee for cable, a monthly fee for Netflix, and a monthly fee to record live TV.

You can record shows with the click of a button after finding it in the online guide at TitanTV. However some of the reviews I’ve read said this service is slow and buggy, plus it only works with EyeTV directly if you use Internet Explorer. And I am planning on using Safari or Camino when I get a Mac, not Internet Explorer. Another option is to use Watson (see the TV listing screen in Watson) to do your scheduling and browsing, which is the best idea yet. I’ve never used Watson, but I love the idea of it, and the interface for browsing the TV listings looks great. After finding a show you want to record, just hit the watch or record button in Watson, and it will automatically setup EyeTV for you.

After recording shows with EyeTV, you either leave them in EyeTV format to view in the EyeTV format, or export them to Quicktime files to be viewed on any Mac. You can also burn them onto a VCD with Roxio’s Toast, and watch them on most home DVD players. There is also a way to export the video to iDVD to make full DVD’s, though this process is much more complicated than burning normal VCD’s and requires third-party programs to work.

The EyeTV software is also compatible with the Keyspan Digital Media Remote, allowing you to change channels, change the volume etc, from across the room.

The new version of the EyeTV software even allows for simple editing, which lets you easily crop out commercials or save only a snippet of an on-air interview or your favorite sports play.

Elgato Systems even recommends using the QCast tuner to broadcast the video from your Mac to your PS2 wirelessly! This would allow you to have your Mac sitting in your office, but watch the recorded TV shows through your PS2 in the living room. Technology is amazing…

All of that for only $200 seems like a pretty darn good deal to me.

August 12, 2003

Backup List

Well it’s about time to reformat my computer… I’ve been running on this install of XP for over six months, and the whole system is starting to fall apart.

A big reason for that is a couple of viruses I have acquired recently. I don’t think it’s MSBlast though. It was something called Parite or something. Info about what my computer is suffering from is here and here

My computer started opening up a window that told me it would be shutting down in 60 seconds. Then after 60 seconds, it did indeed shut itself down. I ran windows update and installed some antivirus software, but it doesn’t appear to be helping much. The windows have stopped popping up, but i still can’t open regedit or press CTRL ALT DELETE. They just pop open, then close themselves. DVD’s are skipping or freezing, etc. The system is just falling apart, so I’m backing everything up and reformatting it. When I reinstall I will definitely put in a firewall and some antivirus software from the start. I’ve never had virus problems with windows before, but I really don’t want to risk having them again.

But hopefully by the time I need to reformat again, I will have a Mac anyway.

I thought I would make myself a list of things to remember to backup now and in the future, because I always forget something.

• Website files
• Music files
• Bookmarks
• Emails
• FTP server list from BulletProof FTP
• My Documents folders
• Photoshop brushes, patterns, etc
• My Pictures folder
• Download folder

That’s about it. Since I switched to using IMAP for my email, I won’t have to worry about backing it up anymore, which will be really nice. And the rest of my stuff is just some normal data files, and all my programs that I use. Shouldn’t be too big of a deal, though I normally like to set aside a day to do the whole process from start to finish.

OneWord: Shoulder

My shoulders are crooked… One is always dropped down a little more than the other. My mom noticed it one day when she was standing behind me, and said, “Derek! Your shoulders are crooked!” I don’t know why they are crooked. I guess I’ve just developed a bad habit of standing crooked. Or maybe my “mousing” arm is just stronger than my left arm, and the extra weight makes my shoulders lopsided. I don’t know. It’s a mystery.

August 10, 2003

Defend your Castle!

This is a very addictive Flash game…

Basically you have a castle that is being attacked by a bunch of stickmen. You pick them up with the mouse, and throw them into the air, so that they splat down and die. You can also convert your enemies to your own side, then train them to be archers or wizards. However, I didn’t realize this until level 14, and I was already being mobbed by hundreds of the little stickmen. If I had realized that you could convert people, I probably would have been doing a lot better. So I guess I will have to try again.

After a short break anyway… This game is soooo tiring. You can’t blink, or you’ll lose. And your wrist gets extremely tired from flicking the guys into the air. I feel like I’ve been typing straight for 10 hours or something, my wrist is so tired. I killed about 1300 of the little guys, so I probably made at least 1800 flicks of my wrist in about 30 minutes.

Interestingly, there is an ad embedded in the game for gel wrist rest mouse pads, to ease your aching wrist. Pretty clever!

Anyway… You’ll be addicted to this game, so probably don’t start playing it at work.

Play Defend Your Castle!

My Bloginality Personality

Hey, that rhymes!

My Bloginality is INTP!

As an INTP, you are Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving.
This makes your primary focus on Introverted Thinking with an Extraverted Intution.

This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung’s Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type, and more specifically the Architect or Thinker.

As a weblogger, you might not be as concerned about popularity, but more with the ideas and theories that you strive to understand. Because routines aren’t your strong point, you might be more likely to work on the concept of how to do a blog, but not be as excited to keep it up.

This is a pretty good description of me I believe, though with only 4 questions it can’t really be that accurate.

I do definitely love starting projects and coming up with new ideas. I have about 3 sites I’d like to start right now, and 5 or 6 that I have started and abandoned. I enjoyed starting this blog, but I also think I’m doing a pretty good job of maintaining it, contrary to what the test said.

August 08, 2003

OneWord: Beat

Beating a game is something I don’t do very often. Many games just get boring after a while, or you get stuck on some stupid puzzle and can’t go any further. However, I do finish Nintendo games just about every time. They are always creative and engaging to the very end, and it keeps you interested enough to invest 20 - 40 hours in a game. Another game I played to completion a few months ago was Ratchet and Clank. The story was good, voice acting was great, and the characters were really interesting and funny. The gameplay was fun, with lots of mini-games and puzzles and different styles of play thrown in there to keep you interested.

OneWord

August 07, 2003

New Nintendo product, Zelda, Donkey Kong

Anarticle at Gamespot.com says that Nintendo will be announcing a new product next spring. That’s a new product not a new game.

So… I wonder what it could be?

“All these complex, large-capacity games of today require enormous amounts of energy and time of users,” said Iwata. “I want to release a very different product, and by next spring we’ll be ready to announce the details.”

It sounds like it will be a simple, easy to pick up and play type of thing. Perhaps a new GameBoy system? I can see the headlines now…

The GameBoy 2Advanced!
2Simple, 2Fun

It will definitely be interesting to see what they come up with though.

Also confirmed was a new Donkey Kong game for the Gamecube, and a new Zelda game to come out in 2004. Hooray! Maybe I will have actually beaten The Wind Waker by the time the next one comes out.

OneWord: External

I had some trouble deciding how to handle external links on my site… I didn’t know whether to put target=”_blank” in all the links so that they automatically open in new windows, or just make them a normal link and let the viewer open them in a new page if they want. I decided on the latter, because some people don’t like new windows being opened, and I don’t think there is a way to avoid them doing that, if you put target=”_blank” in the link. So this way if you want it opened in a new window or tab, just hold shift and click on the link. Or in Opera you can right click on it and drag down. Or in Firebird you can right click and drag down to open it in a new window, or right click and drag up to open it in a new tab (after installing the mouse gestures extension).

Thunderbird

I complained about my Mailblocks email service a week or so ago, and since then the problems have only gotten more and more frustrating. It’s still ridiculously slow, even in IE or Firebird; and completely unusable in Opera. The IMAP support was pretty weak when I tried that out through Opera’s integrated email client, M2. Plus I don’t feel like paying for a service that isn’t allowing me to use all of the features it offers anyway.

So, I have changed all of my email forwarders to point back to my own server again, and setup an IMAP account to use. I’ve never really used IMAP before, and I must say it is quite amazing. I guess amazing isn’t really a good term actually, but it is very handy and I don’t know why I haven’t used it all along. Here is a good introduction to IMAP, if you’ve never heard of it before.

I also downloaded and installed Thunderbird, the stand-alone email client companion to Firebird. It’s only a 0.1 release right now, but it’s already quite fully featured and stable. In my short amount of use, it hasn’t crashed or anything, and I haven’t noticed any major bugs. It’s not bloated at all, and starts quickly. A whole lot quicker than Outlook anyway. It also uses half the amount of RAM that Outlook does. I also like the mail notification message, which slides up from your start menu to tell you when you have new mail, how many new messages, and which accounts they came in on.

Thunderbird will definitely be my primary email client from now on, and if you are tired of the bloated and virus-ridden Outlook, you should give it a try.

August 06, 2003

Free Web Style Guide

Silverorange has released a copy of their web style guide on their site for free. It’s pretty good and could be a good starting point for styleguides used in other projects. However it seems pretty technical to me… I can’t imagine many content creators understanding much of what is presented in the guide. But I guess if they are trained how to do things, and have the style guide as a reference, it would be a little better.

Check out their Labs section on their site too, it has some other good design tips. Hopefully they’ll start updating it more often soon. Right now it seems to be every week or two that they post something.

August 05, 2003

Great photo retouching portfolio

Some truly amazing photo retouching work by Greg Apodaca. Though I can’t say much for his web design skills, it’s worth sitting through the animated GIFs and frames to see his work. Be sure to click on the detail links on the left to see the zoomed in shots.

Horse Racing Manager

I may finally be able to get my wife excited about me getting a Mac, now that I found out about this software. Virtual Programming has announced that they are currently developing a game for the Mac called Horse Racing manager, which will let you race and breed horses, bet on them, manage them, etc. My wife is obsessed with horses, so if I eventually get a Mac and this game, I may never see my Mac again! I got her Gallop Racer on the Playstation when I still had it, and she played it for hours. It’s the only game I can ever get her to play besides the Sims and Mario on the SNES.

It actually looks like a pretty cool game though, if you like simulation games like Sim City. You can manage every aspect from controlling horses during the races to hiring and firing stablehands. And the graphics don’t look too shabby either. I’ll have to keep an eye on it when it’s released.

OneWord: Stuck

As I’ve discussed before, getting stuck in a game is the worst thing ever. It will kill your interest faster than anything. Nothing worse than wandering aimlessly around a level looking for the next trigger that will open up the next door. That’s one reason Zelda is so great. They give you hints when you get stuck on a puzzle. They are always very subtle though, not enough to completely give it away, but usually enough to get you back on track. More games should really try to do things like that. Or include maps with the next destination marked on them. Wandering around in the wilderness is not fun, and should not be considered a “puzzle”.

OneWord

Spilt.net Launches

Adam Robertson has just started a new blog at Spilt.net. I met him a month or two ago on the teamphotoshop forum, and we have been trading tips and critiqueing each other’s work since then. He’s a great designer and his blog will be something to keep your eye on.

Good luck, Adam, and welcome to the blogging world!

Fires, floods, robberies, and falling trees.

It’s been quite a week for my wife and I and our extended family…

First of all someone backed into my car a week or so ago and dented the driver’s side door up pretty badly. Luckily they notified us of it instead of running off, so their insurance is covering the damages. The door has been replaced, but the paint doesn’t match, so I’m taking it back into the shop this week to have them repaint it and try to blend it in better.

We also sold my wife’s car last week and bought a used Jeep for her, leaving us with very little money in the bank because of the downpayment and so forth.

Then last night I got a call from my wife saying that she thought the house was on fire, so I told her to call 911. She did, and the fire department came out and put the fire out. Apparently the lint from the dryer was backing up under the house somehow, and had caught on fire, and it also caught some insulation on fire. Luckily my wife caught it in time and they were able to put it out without much major damage. We’ll have to have an electrician come out and repair some exposed wires though, before we can use the dryer again. Also I think the dryer got burned, and will have to be replaced.

After the fire department left we heard a hissing sound coming out of the main air conditioning vent, so we took it off to look for the source of the noise, and found a water leak under the house. We had suspected it since last month, because our water bill was 4 times what it normally is, but couldn’t find a leak anywhere. Well now we found it… Apparently the water pipe goes through an air duct at some point, and someone didn’t cut the hole big enough so the pipe has been rubbing against the sharp metal edge of the air duct for 30 years, and it finally broke through the pipe. So now we have to replace 4 feet of water pipe. And we don’t have water ‘cause we turned it off to try to save a little on the water bill until we can get it fixed.

When the fire department came a neighbor also said lightning had struck very near our house, which I think may have possibly started the fire, but who knows. Anyway, now our TV is not working very well, or the VCR, I can’t tell which. It just looks like the cable is scrambled, but it looks fine on the other TV. And my cable modem no longer works apparently, and the sound on our other DVD player has stopped working. Tonight I’m going to spend more time testing everything to see exactly what has been damaged, but for right now it looks like it’s a DVD player, a VCR, a TV, and a cable modem. And of course the dryer.

After all of that I got a call that my grandparent’s house had been broken into, and some valuable coins taken.

Before that, a tree had fallen on a covered trailer of my mom’s, cracking the roof and causing water leaks.

And yesterday, a water pipe burst at my in-laws house, and they had to spend six hours in the mud trying to fix that.

I find it quite strange that all of this is happening within a week’s amount of time… Very strange indeed.

August 04, 2003

OneWord: Tremble

I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared that I trembled. I’ve been to a couple of haunted houses, and they weren’t very scary. Probably because they send you through in big groups, and it’s hard to be scared when you are surrounded by 50 people. If you were alone, and didn’t know it was a haunted house, then it would be really scary.

OneWord

August 03, 2003

Home-Epicurean.com Launched

I’ve been working on Home-Epicurean for the last month or so. I used OSCommerce for the shopping cart script, and an existing logo and identity that the client had for the design. It’s not the most original design in the world, but it’s clean and attractive in my (and the client’s) opinion, and I think it serves its purpose well. The site only has 3 products right now, because my client is just starting the business, and it takes a lot of money to launch a new product, so it will grow slowly after he starts getting some orders.

The site is for selling gourmet foods online. When you order he ships you a box full of frozen gourmet food that you can then cook at your own home. Everything is individually bagged and labeled, and comes with cooking directions so you can feel like your very own gourmet chef. I don’t eat meat so I probably won’t be trying any of his dishes, until he gets the vegetarian and dessert menus full anyway.

Daredevil

I skipped seeing Daredevil in the theatre, thinking it looked like something that should definitely be rented. I was right.

I had never heard of Daredevil before the movie came out, because I don’t really know much about superheroes other than the standard spiderman, batman, superman, etc. But even though I had never heard of him before, the story seemed strangely familiar.

Boy is exposed to toxic waste/radioactive materials, gains super powers, then a close family member is killed by a Bad Guy™ which fills the boy with anger and hatred toward the Bad Guy™. Then boy gets a costume, brings justice to rapists and muggers, and eventually has some showdowns with super villains.

I guess that’s just the way comic books are, however.

The movie was farely entertaining however, with some good fight scenes and a cool radar effect which shows how Daredevil can see like a bat by “seeing” the sound waves bounce off of objects. A lot was left unexplained however, such as why Daredevil sleeps in a tank of water, and why he has scars all over his back and is taking a ton of medication. I didn’t really understand what that was all about.

The love story part of the movie is also farely cheesy. Daredevil meets a lady and sleeps with her the second time they meet, immediately falling in love with her, only to have her die about 15 minutes later in the movie. I guess it was supposed to be love at first site or something, but it still felt really fake and rushed.

The supervillains, Bullseye and the Kingpin also felt much more “comic booky” than the main hero did. Their acting was over the top and exaggerated, whereas Ben Affleck seemed to take the part way too seriously. Bullseye stole the movie in my opinion… Colin Farrell seemed to have fun with the part and he also had some really great lines.

The ending of the movie was kind of depressing though. Daredevil loses the girl and doesn’t kill the bad guys so you don’t really get the feeling that he won at all. Maybe they were just hoping for a sequel so they decided to leave all the main characters alive or something.

OneWord: Chord

I was in a band once, but never knew any chords or anything. I played the bass and just memorized patterns on the neck of the guitar, like I do everything else. I really should have learned the notes though, because not knowing anything about music made it difficult to learn/write new songs, etc.

August 01, 2003

Note to Self: Stop drinking photographic chemicals

After reading an article on one of the chemicals contained in Mountain Dew and other Citrus sodas, I’d really like to try to stop drinking Mountain Dew, or any soda for that matter. However I feel like Fry in the Slurm Factory a lot of the time. Even after he found out that Slurm actually comes directly out of a giant slug’s rearend, he still couldn’t stop drinking it.

So anyway, according to that article Mountain Dew contains Brominated Vegetable Oil, which is used to make dyes, photographic chemicals, gasoline, etc. It’s so toxic that they can only put 1 ounce of it in 5,500 cans of Mountain Dew. Plus it’s permanently stored in the fat cells of your body, you can never get rid of it.

Not to mention all the other health risks associated with sodas like everything mentioned in this article, Liquid Candy.

Drink more water, drink more water, drink more water.