wtfudge

FINISHED.

2005-02-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

The new HellaBoss site is live. Please disregard this site as it will not be updated from now until doomsday.

killer

2005-01-15T17:06:00.000-05:00

the cms is done (as in, can put it online now). whee.
now to cut out the design elements and code them into the pages. i can't believe i'm this close to being done this project! hoo-ray!

i am a hipster

2005-01-14T13:07:00.000-05:00

i bought index cards today. oversized ones because i like to doodle. i think i will take them back after work however and get smaller ones. i also like to doodle on smaller cards. i am silly. hear me roar.

man, when am i going to get my cms up? jeeze!

last night i almost did it

2005-01-14T08:25:00.000-05:00

i almost bought my first audiobook. after being a daily reader of merlin mann's (where'd you go?) 43 folders weblog for close to 4 months, i decided to check to see if the much-touted "getting things done" (or gtd) book was available through itms-c and it is/was. the trick is though that it's an abridged version of the 2002 printing of the book. i've since mailed the company to ask them what the abridged version is missing over the regular one. anyone have any wierd experiences with abridged books? any suggestions on how to handle abridged materials? i've heard to avoid abridged stuff (mainly dictionaries), but no official word that i'd follow as gospel. you?

last night i beat the water fiend in ff 1 (the kracken - named phil) and tried my hand at the new *-gift shrines scattered about. the two that i tackled (earth and water) are both rough. i managed to beat cerebus in the earth one, but the water one and gilgamesh has me getting rocked and rocked and rocked. i'm looking for a walkthrough on it. currently, i'm at level 42 with all of my characters (geek note: no one has died yet - and when they do, the do it all together. when one gets a new level, they all do. that's tough to do in final fantasy). with this game done, i can finally start to write that review for... whoops! i've said too much.

yesterday i bought my new meds. 60 pills cost me $215 canadian dollars. luckily, they're turning my feces to solid gold, so in the end (haha) the trade-off is good.

2 things

2005-01-13T11:06:00.000-05:00

thing one: how do you change your email address in your apple account at the apple store?

thing two: iwork == ordered; will be reviewing it as soon as it comes. est. ship date: 8 business days.

not an order but an offer

2005-01-13T09:02:00.000-05:00

i didn't order iwork last night because i forgot to. believe it or not, i was actually very busy last night. i got some chores done, stripped wallpaper in our parlour for a couple of hours (it's really an annoying and exhausting job - more later), and finished the design for the new HellaBoss web site.

that's right, you heard me - finished.

i'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out up to now. i'll be slicing it up and making it work over the next couple of days. i plan to have something online at HellaBoss.com this weekend (even a shapeless blog rather than here). i will let you know.

so, no iwork. i'm going to order it right now however. good luck tracer getting the jeepers to go for it. you might get him to get a macmini for his peecee too? hehe. if i was packing the cash, everyone i know would get a macmini. shoot, i might even get one! the small box is faster than my emac already! the niffer posted her thoughts on the shuffle at her site.

mwsf-c

2005-01-12T13:37:00.000-05:00

comments on macworld since i'm not quite finished with HellaBoss yet. the design is 80% and it staying so don't worry about that. i've got the cms working now with jez and frank's help. i'm working on a comment system now that'll allow you to post comments (though maybe i should just launch it and get it over with and add commenting later? haha!).

however, because it's distant and not here yet (i'm looking at this weekend to get the design done), i'm going to post about macworld yesterday. anyone who didn't hear anything about it has been living under a rock. here's what's what:

ipod shuffle: i'm doing the ipod shuffle. the new dance craze. and it's sweeping the nation. someone should create a dance based on it. anyways, when i showed it to her, my wife said, "i would totally buy one." that's huge for the niffer. while she loves the mac (and, luckily, the mat too - at work she has an apple sticker on the back of her peecee monitor to pretend it's a mac), she's never as excited as i am about technology when it comes out. not only is the shuffle the perfect size, but it's also the perfect price. i was thinking about it too - there is no display (which is a good way to keep the price down) which might be bad for most people. but my wife, who uses a portable cd player to walk to work (and has to carry it because it won't fit into her pockets), would appreciate its size and doesn't care about the lack of display because her cd player doesn't have one either. she just "knows" the tracks on the player based on the cd. just like the shuffle would be. even better, if you set it to randomly fill the shuffle, even better - then she wouldn't be stuck hearing the same shizer over and over and over again. 120 songs in her pocket is really a good idea. carrying around ~10 cds and player is heavy and awkward. carrying 1 stick of gum isn't. :) (lifted directly from a post i left at garrett's manrage) i want to buy one of these for the niffer badly. once another freelance project payout comes in (frank?), it's done.

macmini: before this came out, i've been working hard to get my macs networked together so that we can share a printer via my network switch. i finally got things working and it works well. i was thinking that it would be great to have another mac around so that i could use it as a network backup unit. i was thinking of replacing the niffer's imac and using it as backup. i figured that it was too big and that i'd have a hard time keeping the imac out of the way. it was like someone was inside my head with this item. i want one. it's cheap and powerful. the ram (even though they say that you should get it upgraded by trained peeps) looks easy enough to upgrade.

ilife: i just bought ilife on the 27th of december. i cannot upgrade it. boo-urns. great stuff however. if you're into garageband, be sure to pick it up crazy-style. from the keynote, things looked rather amazing re: it.

iwork: i was waiting for this to come out more than anything else. and i'm buying it when i get home tonight. it looks great though there is no spreadsheet app (yet). i like the look of pages and have been looking for a replacement to office for a while. short of excel, i can ditch office (i use mail for email rather than entourage and don't use powerpoint because it stinks). the interface looks 10000% better than appleworks which i've really wanted to use for a while now but couldn't get over the interface to engage it.

other: i'm all over the new imagery on the ilife and iwork boxes. they remind me of scandinavian folk art for some reason. very impressed.

i don't care much about fcphd, etc., or idvd, or imovie so i won't comment on them. i will say however, that it was incredibly interesting to see the president of sony onstage with jobs. anyone else think that?

what was your favourite part of the keynote?

daang, a few more posts then

2005-01-06T08:48:00.000-05:00

work at home continues smoothly. i've actually started work on a cocoa application that should help me get some work done more quickly. since i've no idea what i'm doing in cocoa, it's been difficult. i've learned quite a bit, however. cocoadevcentral has been a huge help. i just wish the search and most of the links worked? :
other things occupying my time are my new ruby gbasp, metroid: first mission, advance wars 2, and final fantasy 1 & 2: dawn of souls. i try to play ff at least 1x per night since i'm doing a big review of it you know for... whoops! i've said too much already.

i'm actually getting lots done on the new HellaBoss too. i've got a design that i'm in love with that i'm tweaking instead of ditching (which is saying an awful lot!). truth be told, however, i'm having too much fun with the HB cms to work on the front-end. ta-ra-ra!

lastly, let's talk xmas. i got: metroid prime 2: echoes, bubba-ho-tep on dvd (brilliant), a neck pillow and travel light (for our trip to florida), some arnold palmer black slippers, a big box of bacci chocolates, a screw-caddy for my drill bits, nails, screws, etc. (now i really need to build a workbench!), and more.

what did you get for xmas?

dang, a few more things. hehe. finally saw the excellent napoleon dynamite, wondering where frankieshakes went off to, and pictures from florida are online using flickr. did you know that using the flickr standalone app for os x, you can drag and drop images from iphoto and upload them in 1 shot?

that is all.

really.

wow.

2004-12-23T15:32:00.000-05:00

i should mention that the reason i'm not really posting here much is because i am building a cms at HellaBoss where I am planning to release something (sans comments for now) tangible by the end of january. sorry for the lack of posts, but i've been very busy over there getting things ready! :)

this close

2004-12-21T08:11:00.000-05:00

friday we're leaving for miami with the family. i had originally planned to hit up the miami apple store and to tour the everglades on a fan boat. alas, tours of that nature are against the law now so that's shot. i'll have to find sommat else to do now. any ideas?

in other news, the things are starting to roll-in now, xmas cards, gifts, freelance payments, and more importantly, freelance jobs. i'm becoming much more certain of my skills and it's helping me secure clients and be more assertive. branding is moving forward and so is the new HellaBoss site. i'm working on the cms as we speak.

more music

2004-12-17T08:44:00.000-05:00

last night the everdelightful dubs sent me a $10 gift cert from itms-c and i used it to buy 5 songs by mewithoutyou and 2 songs by the detatchment kit. all songs are terrific and i was actually surprised to find that they were on itms-c seeing as much of the things i'm searching for were not. i'm this close to picking up all of the nick drake that i can find on there as well as he rocks out on the soundtrack to garden state and i'm loving it.

thursday theatrics

2004-12-16T08:21:00.000-05:00

last night you: got the niffer to buy pizza which you doctored up with tomatoes, green tabasco, onions, pineapple, oregano, and ninjastars; downloaded and installed the demo of burnout menu, the os x 10.3.7 update, and the css master guide on HellaPod (omg, i love hyperlinks on the ipod!); had the great pleasure of watching "bring it on" on city tv; started reading "glenn gould: the performer in the work" (again with all the cancon); isight chatted with jezbian; started using newsfire again; window shopped for digicams; went for another walk around the neighbourhood at 10pm (i've been doing this for the last few nights because i love walking in the snow and feeling the wind pummel my hood as i walk with HellaPod); drew a monkey; had a shower; got chewed out on mike matas' weblog by anonymous; thought a bit about working on the new HellaBoss site; did not do so; and slept with the most darling niffer.

itms-c revisited and bookmarks

2004-12-14T08:33:00.000-05:00

you can't use gift certificates purchased at itms-c at itms-usa. that is very much too badsir since i was going to get a couple of pals a nice gift for xmas. still waiting for some hot indierock tunes to arrive at the store. that said, my pal vince at cyclop media said that their artists were going to be on itms-c in 2005 which is exciting to no end. sitting with $36.08 in my account with no non-mainstream music to use it on! i'm this close to blowing the stack on a bunch of old and great oscar peterson tracks. gotta keep up that cancon.

in other news, i've an idea for a fun project - the great december bookmark swap. here's the way we'll do it up (if you want to participate): export all of your "daily" bookmarks as html and upload them all to your web site. post a link to the document in the comments and share with your fellow geeks some of the sites you check up all the time. i'm sure there are many sites that some of us are looking at that the others are not. ie: there are likely some great design inspiration sites, weblogs, etc. that people would benefit from knowing about, so get to it!

cancon

2004-12-13T08:19:00.000-05:00

this weekend was the great "franksandbeans giftswap" wherein frank and i swapped xmas gifts. in both cases the gifts turned out to be the most excellent itms-c gift certificates that were redeemed for goodies. i should note that i think frank went a little overboard, but i certainly won't turn down the maad cash.

first impressions of the itms-c:

it's just as easy as everyone has said to connect and download tracks. once you've an account set up, simply clicking the "buy song" button gets the deed done quickly and painlessly. even though i haven't used it yet, i really appreciate the "are you sure you want this song" alert that comes up before you finalise it.

the store is missing stuff. lots of stuff. i'm aware that it's fresh, new, and tasty and that things will get changed quickly. right now, however, if i search for that "band of bands", rancid, i get only their most recent album and no operation ivy stuff. there was a lot of music i wanted to purchase already but could not since it wasn't available.

there is a language issue with itms-c for some reason. for fun (after seeing that there were a few bands missing (catpower, yo la tengo, the constantines, evil pupil [where are you, cyclop media?] etc.) i went to the itms-usa to see if the bands were missing from everything or just itms-c. logging back into itms-c (whew!) changed all of my text to french and i couldn't find an option to switch it back. anyone know where to do this from? logging out and back in seemed to do the trick.

the music:

i bought the wilco: a ghost is born album, 2 tracks from snoop dogg's rhythm and gangsta disc (drop it like it's hot and pass it pass it), and to ensure the proper bit of cancon (canadian content) i had to score the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald by gordon lightfoot. all are delightfully "protected aac format".

i've still credit in my account and can wait a couple of weeks before buying more music (provided that some shows up quickly!

this weekend was more "new HellaBoss-working-on". with jez's help, i've created a cms that lets me manage posts to the site so that i don't have to do it through blogger anymore. i will put out an official abp on this site when things switch over. don't expect it for a while tho. the site is looking just fine, however.

posted at yayhooray

2004-12-11T15:06:00.000-05:00

i posted this at yayhooray today:

"hooray for canada. i'm very glad that people can do what they like now, even though it's been the same "free country" this whole time. it takes 9 judges to make a ruling that simply looks at the canadian charter of rights and freedoms and says, "ohshit, we've been mucking with homosexuals this whole time!".

i am certainly glad that conservatives exist in canada/around the world as it takes all types to make up a country and it is good to get everyone's opinion on topics.

when it comes, however, to those ideas restricting citizens of a country based on emotional responses perpetrated chiefly by religious ideas (that are constantly in flux - girls can be "altar boys", women can be ministers, for example), i can't help but think of historical circumstances where religion influenced politics and kept people in-line. the ideas that kings and queens (pun intended) were the direct representatives of god on earth, that girls with birthmarks were witches and must be burned, that the native peoples of various continents were tools to help make an empire great, etc. are luckily things that the whole of a country/society have risen up against and realised (after a lengthy fight where many people are killed, injured, humiliated, etc.) that just maybe there are much bigger things to worry about and that religion and emotional responses perhaps are not the best way to dictate the actions of nations.

when i remove myself from the emotional responses generated by events such as this, as canadians did when women got the right to vote, when americans passed laws that slavery wasn't such a good idea and segregation maybe isn't the best way to deal with people who are different from us, or when the british did when they decided that they should stop paying the crown tax for the light they were using for their crops, i am proud that we are moving forward, finally overcoming trivial obstacles, and are now able to concentrate on more important issues like poverty, health care, separation, starvation, and more.

really, i think there are more important things to worry about than whether 2 fellas can get married or not. i think that terrorism, environmental waste, etc. could be a little more important.

sometimes i think that religious groups in canada who are against things like the freedom to marry (i hate the name gay marriage as much as i hate when people tell me about friends of theirs, and make sure when they're describing them, that they say that they're black if they are - who cares?) are against it so much because if it passes, they won't have anything else to get upset about except video games and that hip hop music. their group might get disbanded. they might stop being paid to complain all of the time. just like unions would if all corporations started treating their employees like real people. if that happend, the unions would certainly be against the disbanding of unions and they would make up a big stink.

just a few idears. sorry to offend, but where i come from, we care about people and encourage and empower them to be all they can and want to be. natives can be lawyers and blacks don't have to be rap stars to be millionaires. white people don't have to be the powerful elite, and women don't have to give birth if they don't want to.

be what you want. do what you want. it's supposed to be a free country - let's make it that way and see what happens!"

mugatu

2004-12-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

actually, i'm redesigning HellaBoss and will be moving my blog over there shortly (read after xmas maybe?). i've shown a couple of people the new look and they're all over it, which is delightful. i really think that i'm coming into my own with this design stuff as i become more comfortable with my work and my ability to get what's in my head onto the screen. it's been a long-time coming, but what can you do? maybe this medication is helping.

3way

2004-12-09T14:47:00.000-05:00

work: xmas party presentation. after the party, i'll post one of my slides. such a geek. what a pixel freak. editing docs that were written in "Claris Home Page version 3.0" - including stripping "livesrc" descriptors from the guts of it. taking photos, trying to get windows to recognise a brand new fuji s7000 camera (stupid windows), and finishing up some projects.

freelance: finished frank's job up. payment arrives this week. new client on horizon with him which is great. working on things with garrett in nyc (specifically, designing one of the best logos i've ever done - i'll ask him if i can post it..). trying to secure some work with jez in oz, consulting with a client on windows (ugh), getting laptop-envy, and more.

home: xmas shopping. the niffer is almost done. shawnwall is done. frank is almost done. i know what i want to get him, but he's shifty. and i'm cheap. hehe. new pills that are 1x/day now instead of 2x/day. they are $106.90 for 30 tablets. there is 36mg of "happy junk" in them as opposed to 20mg before. my hand hurts after a fight with our cat the other wherein he bit into my hand - hopefully nothing's too busted up. i want to buy things using itms-c but cannot. i did buy a great new journal booklet tho. it's all over hot. i'm going to redo some wtfudge stuff in its likeness. be on the lookout.

you: update.

early morning hijinx

2004-12-06T06:46:00.000-05:00

last night i was experimenting with evocam and using my isight to take snaps of me and upload them to my server every 2 minutes to create a sort of tableau. the last picture taken of me was this one, clearly just before i figured that it might be time to head off to bed. evocam's a pretty neato little product, with the ability to stream video to a web server via ftp, to a local web server, take snapshots, use the desktop as a video source so that people can see what you're up to as you work, and more. it's $20 usd. i'm really considering picking it up after my 15 day demo period is over. learn more about it here.

in other news, i had a kernel panic this weekend. i was working on a really basic mockup for a project for dictator garrett in illustrator. i finished it and took a screengrab, expose-d my desktop and renamed the file. since garrett was on ichat, i dragged the file to his picture in my buddy list and boom - kernel panic. restart. forgot to save *anything*. even lost screengrab. ugh. fairly easy to recover, but annoying.

and lo, my first adventure into electronics went well this weekend. we bought a universal garage door remote (we've now 2 of them, 1 for the car and 1 for the house so we can get into the garage more quickly). i had to take the entire thing apart and reset the dip switches according to both insane korean instructions and what was preset in the garage's overhead motor. i've never reset dip switches before! anyways, taking a page from jez's mame cabinet manual, i was all over them and finally got it to work after standing in my garage in -6dc weather with frozen fingers mucking with tiny bits of metal and plastic.

apple idea

2004-12-03T18:37:00.000-05:00

in panther, you should be able to designate labels to files you're saving for the first time right from the save as dialogue. not just "save as file type" but also "save as file type with this label".

nothing purchased, nothing gained

2004-12-03T08:52:00.000-05:00

so, nothing bought from itms-c yet. i wanted to go to the mall last night to check some "real" prices before hitting the itms-c for tunes. i got home last night on the bus at around 8pm or so. what a loooong day.

while out after work (xmas shopping), i checked out music world and humvuh (hmv) for prices on the k-os cd featuring the tracks "bboy stace" and "crabbuckit". the disc was $16.99 and $18.99 respectively. on the itms-c the entire disc is $10.99. can't complain about that.

one thing that i want to figure out 100% is the whole "there are limitations as to how many times you can burn, transfer tracks" thing. anyone know the official rules for this?

work is going well. i've started the custom cms for seminars and trade shows. i've got a little form that allows people to upload all of the data to the database but i can't seem to figure out how to create a hyperlink that lets people delete records directly from the table. searching online hasn't really yeilded any reasonably understandible results yet. i'll keep looking. i would prefer not to link to another page because i don't want to go anywhere else to "confirm that it worked". i'd like the table to update automatically (a brief refresh might be in order, no sweat). ideas?

itms-c

2004-12-02T08:22:00.000-05:00

last night just before bed i discovered that the itms-c was online and kicking. i was too tired to buy any music, but i'm rather happy that it's there finally. have you bought any music from the itms yet? if so, anything i should keep in mind? any suggestions as to what's good out there?

i try not to do it..

2004-12-01T13:34:00.000-05:00

but i'm very excited to see this app. i'm going to download it tonight, try it, and possibly buy it right away. there are very few apps that i've seen that have a brilliant looking interface. this is one of them.

apple updates galore!

2004-12-01T09:01:00.000-05:00

canadian itunes music store by end of november == 0;
where is the music store? i've no idea. canadians today can launch itunes and still get the "sorry, no store in your country yet, sucka" message. clicking on the previously do-nothing browse link dumps you to the usa store again. we seem to be back to square one. ugh. if you see that it's been updated before i do, please make a post. i want to try this thing out right away (though i should wait until i get home..)!

isight webcam in under 12 days (actual time: 6 days total) == 1;
the isight was shipped on sunday. there was an attempted delivery yesterday at 13:23 by purolator courier. a message was left over the keyhole on my front door.

brilliant placement i thought - put the paper in the way of where someone has to go to get into their house. the paper uses a simple sticky section that ahderes it to the door (or whatever). the niffer and i do that sort of stuff if we've a note that the other person needs to read. we don't have a bulletin board or "spot where we look as soon as we come in" except for 3 places: my computer screen, the toilet (to be honest), and the television. so, we use sticky notes to put notes where we're sure to see them. the niffer's getting more into the computer now with her weblog so i might have to change "television" with "tangerine imac". we'll see.

anyways, the note for puro said that i need to go to the puro depot to pick up my package and that i need gov't id to do so. natch, the shipment was under the niffer's name so i was fudged. she had to write me a note and i went to pick it up before my class at fanshawe. after a 20 minute wait, meeting a guy bleeding from the top head in the puro office while he was waiting for a package, and listening to puro employees tooling each other in the back room, i was off (rounding the corner and driving past my old place of work, evil, inc.) back to the college.

loving said webcam == 1;
got the camera. carefully sliced open the box(es), shrink wrap and opened the camera. i was worried a bit about the camera. it's a pretty delicate thing with all the lenses, etc. i wasn't sure how well it would stand up to puro's potential rough-handling of the package. when it arrived, it was minty fresh. i was actually a bit worried that it was just an empty box since the contents were so light. inside the main cardboard shell was a smaller box and a ream of crumpled brown paper to act a shock absorber, and a picking slip. oddly enough there is no apple branding on the slip at all.

anyways, inside the smaller box was the isight, in a box that's exactly the same size as an ipod. the same look and feel too. even belly-wrapped with cardboard that slides up and off the fold-out box. inside the package were a few items:

the camera
a plastic pill-bottle that is used to transport the isight about without damaging it
an apple-branded firewire cable (2 male ends)
multiple stands to put the isight into
a magnetic cable clamp to hold the camera to metallic displays, etc.
an instruction/user guide and warranty information slip

true to apple form, there was no installation cd involved. it was literally "take it out of the box, plug it in and it works". brilliant.

notes:
it took me a bit to figure out how the stands and clips and cable and isight plugged in and the firewire port in the isight was a little snug on the plug-in and unplug. after a couple of uses, however, things were fine. the paper sticky stuff is brilliant and very strong. i'm a little worried what'll happen if i have to unplug it and want to take the mount off (i'm looking at buying one of these - for xmas?). i read on apple's web site that you can use goo-gone to get rid of any sticky residue.

shippers

2004-11-30T14:25:00.000-05:00

update: the isight shipped sunday night. arrived in canada this morning. likely arrived at my house at around noon. i was not home and will have to pick it up at a later date.

i've also been asked to continue teaching at fanshawe for the winter semester of this continuuing education course. very fun.

how have you been?

null and void

2004-11-29T06:52:00.000-05:00

and after a good night's rest, you wake to find 2 messages in your inbox from apple:

"The following products shipped on 11/28/2004. Transit time will depend upon whether you have chosen standard or premium freight options. If your order is shipping standard freight, it should arrive within 12 days of shipment."

it's as though someone heard what i was saying last night and decided to go easy on me. anyways, within 12 days of shipment, i should have my isight. just in time for xmas. hopefully, this week (but am not counting on anything..).

all of the sudden..

2004-11-28T23:27:00.000-05:00

you hate blogger. you're *this* close to using your segpub mysql db to create your own customisable weblog that isn't controlled by blogger. updating the db is easy, but you're intimidated by not only letting others post, but also how you are ever going to figure out how to archive items. your day was terrible. scanning photos for your boss made your scanner break (!?) and you got in a spat with your darling wife and neither of you is comfortable enough to talk. and it's 11.30pm. you just remembered that next saturday you've been asked to speak at fanshawe college to a class on web design and you whipped up a presentation that you hope they will like, but don't really care whether they will or not. you released your students' final project notes to them today. you charged your ipod. you watched your isight order say "we will ship the camera you bought on or before the 26th" and notice that there is no "it's been shipped, sucka" message anywhere. you have eaten a small bowl of popcorn all day, about 5 minutes ago because you felt like you were going to be sick. you bought and broke a replacement windshield wiper blade because you've never installed them before and the hyundai accent instruction manual does not tell you how to replace them. your cats started (and somehow resolved) world war 3. you finally got around to ripping rancid: out come the wolves. you wrote a php script that takes info from a form and updates the sql table it's connected to. you've not chatted with anyone all weekend and realised that outside of the internet, you've no really "close, bestest friends". you're posting mopey blog entries, cleaning your desk, lamenting the return of the new digital camera you borrowed for the weekend, wish you had your isight, hope that your presentation on the weekend will go well, and figured out how to control every button your presentation from the actions layer so that you don't have to put on(release){_root.clipName_mc.gotoAndStop(5);} for every item - you can now just put trans_btn.onRelease=function(){gotoAndStop._currentFrame+1;} instead. or something like that. it's late and you're tired. and hungry. and a jerk. hopefully tomorrow will go better?

2 days late

2004-11-28T08:44:00.000-05:00

normally i wouldn't post about anything this personal, but seeing as it affects both of our lives, this is pretty big.

my isight's shipping date is 2 days overdue.

this morning when i went to check my status, i got a "sorry, you can't access this thing" message, which isn't cool at all. this same sort of thing happened to me when i ordered garbo. in that case however, i was all over upping the hard drive from 40 to 80 gigs in size (yesterday i noticed that i've used 40 of the 80 gigs already! time to get a backup on).

i'm really looking forward to getting the isight and thinking of all the cool things i can do with it. i'm beginning to pine for a laptop as well so that i could turn the isight into a portable camcorder. for now tho, i'm going to be happy with it, chatting with clients, etc. about projects and things in real-time.

i know this is bad, but i'm also looking at delicious monster too. we lend out a lot of dvds, cds, games, etc. a system to org them would be very excellent.

filezilla

2004-11-26T11:44:00.000-05:00

there should be an option to "overwrite the rest of the files in this que list" option in filezilla. as it stands, you're forced to click a box that makes the app overwrite all the next files, but it doesn't quit after that. it seems that you have to back into the prefs to change it.

"overwrite remainder". that's all i want.

jobs and jibs

2004-11-26T08:42:00.000-05:00

last night we had our pre-seasong special olympics soccer coach meeting at tim horton's (now a tradition for me). we talked about players, our rosters, athletes we hoped were coming back to play again this year, and remembered events of the past year and had some good laughs. at the end of the meeting, we were all excited about the upcoming year and things we could do.

namely, we've decided to host a special olympics soccer tournament in london. the forest city hasn't hosted such an event in ~10 years. coming from the city that invented the special olympics, that seems wrong.

so, while sitting there, we started planning and talking about fields we could play on and that we should reserve for the tourney. we're looking at hosting in 2006 so we're going to book fields, refs, etc. now.

as i sat that i started to get excited (as i always do) about the event. i started suggesting that we start to brainstorm re: people we might be able to get to sponsor our event (regardless of how they could/would do it). the more i talked, the more everyone's eyes perked up. at the end, i was nominated to be in charge of planning the tournament. 3 of the 4 of us voted me into that position. to be honest, there were no "nays".

now i'm planning a provincial-level soccer tournament.

you should know that i've created a soccer league for people who don't play soccer at all. we play every saturday in wortley village at 1pm, rain or shine, 365 days of the year (i've been away for a while, but am back now in full force - hi adam!).

i'm certainly keen on soccer, but have never planned a tournament before. especially one that is at the provincial level. especially one that not only requires me to plan the event, but also requires me to work out sponsorship, venues, volunteers, press, etc. it's going to be a huge to-do and i've already started the guest list of attendees in my head. this weekend will be a big brainstorming session with emails flying around to the other coaches. i'm certainly looking foward to planning such a terrific event.

isight order is still open on apple.ca/store. what's going on, apple? taking a holiday or something? ;)

back to work!

<edit>
as a special gift for all the usa-kids who are holidays today, i'm going to give you a thanksgiving present. it's part of my level-two class' final assignment. they've building a web site for a fictional rock band i've made up called, "los diablos". i made that tune with apple's garageband app. it's silly, but fun. los diablos roxxor!
</edit>

<edit 2>
i was worried when i found out that apple was having a black friday shopping event online. i figured that they'd offer the isight for cheap and i'd be messed. luckily that isn't the case. they've got imac g5s for the cheap tho, and some great cheap(er) ipod gear too. no socks tho. :(
</edit 2>

i had you in mi sights

2004-11-25T08:50:00.000-05:00

last night i bought an isight from apple.ca/store. the last time i used the store was when i bought garbo (my emac) and i must say that the entire process is just as good as i remember. it's broken down into many easy-to-follow steps, alerts you to print the page for your records (i printed it and printed it as a pdf just to be safe), and quickly sends you email to tell you that your order is being processed, etc. it's like they took a page from 37signals or something.

freelance work continues unabated, as does full-time work which is going swimmingly. the first snow of the year to stick around has arrived today and i love it very much. i can't get enough of this snow stuff. i mean, sure it's rough to shovel and things get cold, but i like walking around in 4 layers of clothing. i like sleeping under 10 layers of blankets (now, 5 layers with all this "new windows" jazz!). i like watching beads of snow snake across lanes of frozen ashphault. for me, snow is great.

to those who aren't keen on snow, might i suggest that you move? if you come to or live in canada and hate the snow, you're in the wrong place. sorry i'm just being honest (unless you can keep convincing ohio to keep up the pollution so that we get less snow and less rain next year again - but then you'd have to deal with thousands of angry farmers..).

i was just looking at the apple student blog and noticed that nothing's changed. who are they getting to write their blog? i would expect this to be updatded a few times a day by many students. i think it would also benefit by being updated by teachers and it staffers as well. it would be nice to read, "fixed 40 windows laptops today. no serious mac problems to worry about" over and over and over and over again. :)

no-features, sherlock

2004-11-23T13:35:00.000-05:00

apple announces a new college-aimed site to dispell pc vs. mac myths and, natch, sell macs. on the productivity banner, they suggest you use sherlock to find answers to questions you need to know. the question i post to you is this:

do you actually use sherlock during your day-to-day work/at all?

if so, please say how/why/etc. in the comments.

i don't use it all. it's the first thing i drag off of my dock after the quicktime player when i first get my hands on a new mac. maybe i'm missing something. a lot of the features don't work in canada, however. this includes the "get a map to where you want to go" feature that (at last glance, which was admittedly about 2 years ago!) didn't pull up canadian lists and film listings too. the only feature that was worth using was dictionary that i could see.

anyways, make a post or 2 about sherlock and i'll try it out tonight to see if i like it again.

i've got to say tho that the most interesting part of this new minisite is (in addition to the flash..) the "student blog". hopefully nothing like what happened via real's "we illegally hacked apple's code and then tried to sell what we found as though we didn't and you need to voice your opinion against those jerks at apple at this web site but once you start posting bad comments about us and our products, we shut it down!" think will happen there.

what is wrong with this picture?

2004-11-22T23:28:00.000-05:00

what is wrong with this picture?

on the advise of a site i read all the time, i decided to download this shiny new app called ulysses and give it a whirl. please have a look at this image. i know it's small, but if you know your mac, you can tell me what's so wrong/confusing/etc. about the image/ulysses. i'll tell you what it is tomorrow.

have a great night!

6 feet over?

2004-11-22T08:37:00.000-05:00

we're 2.5 discs into the first season of 6 feet under. i'd seen much of the series, but quit watching after showcase started showing the same episode 3 times in an attempt to fill the entire season with the series. there were ~8 episodes that had to stretch over 5 months. that meant that they would show episode one 3 times in a row, then episode two, and so on. the entire time i was wondering why they didn't just show the series, then repeat it at the end instead of dupe-ing them over and over and over. anyways, in the end they lost me and i missed out on the last 6 episodes i think. anyways, i'm catching up and having fun with our marathon pals while doing it. last night's fingerfood feast was delightful.

my favourite character on the show so far is nicholai if you're interested.

freelance for frankieshakes is almost done (tonight, officially) and payment, then a subsequent isight cam will come next. that way we can do even more freelance work together and be in contact the whole time. geeky, i know, but what can you do.

insurance, pdf, and rock and roll

2004-11-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

last night we hit up a rock show with tom and nathalie (and then matt porter and adam and merideth!) by the "please check the foundation of call the office because i think the building's about to fall down they're rocking the place so hard" canadian indierock (and juno-nominated) kit the constantines.

they were incredble. anyone who is killer then 3/4 the way through the show takes off their clothes to continue gets the full-on moy salute. when their father and grandfather came to watch and they still do it, the double salute.

i'm pitching them a new web site at tom's request. he doesn't like theirs much. i actually sat down with the lead singer who started asking me about the web and if there were any web sites that blew off my pants. i tried to think of a couple, but i never can when put on the spot like that. he asked me if i saw the site of the polyphonic spree. i had and it was fun to connect with the singer of a band you're going to watch.

my pal raph got his business broken into last night. i know no other details except that he's currently (natch) flustered aboot the whole situation. he called me today to ask/make sure i still had the files i'd miraculously repaired last night. i do. i'm aboot to burn them on ceedee and get 'em ready for transport. with all that missing computer equipment (his company is called primeweb - i'm currently pitching a new site to him as well, though that might be backburnered now..) i certainly hope he's insurance.

soccer today will be wet and fun. a few folks from the rock show last night. believe it or not, i've an xmas dinner to go to tonight with some family and then we're back home for a 6-feet under marathon (which i think is ironic seeing as kaarlo died earlier this week) until the wee hours.

in other news, i'm working on quite a few projects now and the ritalin seems to be keeping me sailing straight and smoothly through the choppy waters of confusion and add. i'm finishing up some logos for frankieshakes, a bottle label for raph (just a resave/recreate, not a design at all), a mysql video game classification system at HellaBoss (okay..), and 2 entirely new projects with garrett. we've been brainstorming ideas back and forth for the last few days. at this time i certainly can't forget that i'm talking with matthew about another web site, and ronan about some os x icons for an application he's building.

$moy == busy | geek;

whew!

on the topic of ritalin

2004-11-17T06:50:00.000-05:00

yesterday i took the first pill. after a physical, my doc made me a perscription for it. i've 3 weeks of pills before i have to report to him on what happened and how things are. i'm going to continue with it until the end and see what's what. if nothing good's up i'll talk to him about it and suggest that frank's lady knows of some hot herbal love that i could take.

so far tho, so good. i felt the effects right away. sorta.

it's hard to detect the effects unless you're really paying attention, which, as the pill's effects grew, so did my concentration. i'm going to test it more today, but i was certainly able to remain more focussed on the task at hand yesterday at work. i also lost my appetite yesterday too and ate nothing before bed. i just wasn't hungry. this morning tho, i could eat tofu bugs off the ground i'm so hungry.

frank: i got those logos and they are terrible. but i'll try to work with them. :)

time for some breakfast!

from one minute to the next

2004-11-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

my life was going well today. i'd been out of the office all day at a terrible conference on powerpoint and i got home, only to go out again to the niffer's ma's place for a foot massage. i got home and relaxed with her before going for a nice bath.

just before getting in, i found out through a call from my pal tom that my friend Kaarlo had died (possibly today). wow. i've been crying on and off ever since (it's been about 1 hour since i found out).

Kaarlo was a very decent guy. we met while playing soccer (i created a soccer league for people who don't play soccer) through tom and nathalie. he was originally from finland. he worked at the university radio station and was "the voice of the western mustangs". we went curling together and saw the occasional film.

i remember how nice he was: giving me rides home from soccer, chatting it up even when we didn't really know each other in the early days, actually laughing at my terrible jokes. he was one of those people that you don't know well, but you feel like you'd known since you both were in grade 2 after his family came to canada from finland. he was an instant friend. you instantly felt a connection. he was quiet but not afraid to get in your grill if you dissed nathalie on the field.

he was the "finnish mudslide", a nickname i'd given to him relating to his propensity to sliding around on the muddy soccer fields and falling down at least once per game, and always in particularly spectacular (mud clumps spinning into the air) shows of one-legged acrobatics. he'd get up, bleeding from the shins, the elbows, missing his glasses, and shirt half-caked in mud. he'd wipe off the front of the shorts and if you said, "Kaarlo! that looks painful!" he'd say, "yeah, it is" smile and run off only to get the ball, juggle it past 3 defenders, tap it in the goal with the heel of his foot as he faced in the opposite direction, and then fall into the mud in the crease, taking 3 people with him. he won our "injury of the week" award (that i kinda created just for him to be honest) more times than anyone else.

Kaarlo was a great guy. i am very pleased to have known him and consider him to be one of my close friends. i learned to curl with him, he was there at soccer from the start, and i loved to listen to the mustang ads on the radio just to hear his voice.

Kaarlo's memory is just as great as he was. i already miss you terribly.

yet another..

2004-11-15T21:33:00.000-05:00

another weblog for you to bookmark and add to your faves: the niffer's got a blog going and you can find it here: the niffer. please make sure to make a post over there and say hello to her! no blogger account is required to do so, so you betta gets to steppin'!

in other news, HellaBoss is going well.

using crystal ftp...

2004-11-12T13:16:00.000-05:00

..should be against the law.

when i started working where i work now, i bought all the software i'd need to do my job with the company credit card. one of those packages was called crystal ftp up on the advice of a "friend" (haha, hi garrett!). since installing it, it's crashed out on my almost weekly, and disconnects when after i've maintained a server connection for more than 5 minutes.

let's break this down, starting with the disconnects, then the crashing.

the application disconnects me from my server every 5 minutes or so. once in a while. at least 1 time per session. there are no alerts, and sometimes there is no message to tell you that you're not connected. the only way you can tell that you're not connected is when you try to upload a file to the server and it doesn't move at all. even then, there is no "whoops! sorry, i've dropped your connection again." message.

i understand the concept of dropping connections as a security measure that helps to keep user's computers protected from wandering people (though since all the links are bookmarked in the app, anyone can access them anyways). if that were the case, there should be a preference somewhere that lets you set the disconnect time: "5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, never" or something like that. unless i'm a crackhead, there is not a preference that i can find that lets you do that. as a matter of fact, there is a preference that boasts "anti-timeout" that lets you send a pulse to the server to prevent timeouts. it doesn't work.

re: the crashing. man, this thing crashes (i'm using windows xp) all the time. the most spectacular crash is when the app has disconnected from the server, you don't realise it (because not only the title bar [where it normally tells you if you're connected or not] nor the log window updates with any frequency at all), and you drag and drop a file from "your stuff" to "their stuff" (note: it's not called that, panic's excellent transmit app is and i miss it terribly). the app hangs at that moment. there isn't an undo" option in mid-transfer, even if you're not connected.

the crash is painful. it freezes the application. i can't click anything there until it's done doing whatever it is that it's doing. once it's done (if it even finishes), you can close the app the normal way (which i always do since i like to start from scratch instead of slagging through the errors).

if you do that, however, it crashes out on you. even control+alt+delete doesn't work. you hit that, choose crystal ftp and if you're lucky, the app quits. if not, you hard reset the entire machine because no other dialogues work either.

casdk's technical support is equally as responsive. i've sent 3 emails to them over the course of 3 weeks and have recieved absolutely no response. no "we'll get back to you in a few minutes", no nothing. as of this writing, i'm still waiting.

so, i'm looking for a new ftp app. garrett (hi again!) has since told me that he's gone back to cuteftp and likes it. i'm looking for tight windows ftp apps that don't crash out or cripple the entire system.

what do you suggest?

socks

2004-11-12T09:16:00.000-05:00

yesterday after i posted about the ipod socks, i hit it for home and when i got there, i checked out macblog (which i've bookmarked at home, but not here at work for some reason). i mailed emma aboot the coincidence.

anyways, macblog had as their latest post an article about ipod socks too! this sock thing is getting really popular.

checkers came home yesterday and he is such as cute. i am all over this little bizzle. natch, he's all top secret and hiding out while he gets used to the sounds in the house. he certainly hasn't make any photo shoots to speak of so there are no snaps yet.

i also keep forgetting to unplug my ipod when i put the computer to sleep at night. it's killing me slowly with no songs. killing me slowly. killing.. well, you get the idea. the thing is that when the ipod is connected to the computer while it's asleep (especially all night long, all night), the pod's battery drains for some reason. i'm going to look into this on apple's web site.

anyway, this morning i got this idea to write a script that detects when the drive "hellapod" is connected to the computer and reminds me to eject it. natch, that won't work if the pod is already ejected but isn't disconnected, but for now i think that's just fine. it'll be a tiny applescript that hides in the background and waits for the "sleep" action. once it detects it, it'll flash up in huge, honkin' letters (with the quicksilver-esque bezel, addressbook "large type", etc.) "don't forget to unplug $drivename, sucka". like that.

$drivename is important. specifying it as $drivename means that i'll be able to get a new drive name depending on the device plugged in.

i've also started my xmas list and on it is black and decker's bull's eye laser level and stud finder (which'll always point at me, natch). of all the tools i could get this xmas, this would be one that we'd actually use. i'd likely end up using it too much, and go around squaring everything in the house up.

also, with some hella cash i'll be getting after doing some work with my new partner in crime, frank, i'm thinking of scoring an isight digicam. i've always wanted one and now might be the perfect time to get one. do you have an isight? how do you use it? what do you use it for? i think it's going to be isight and bbedit 8 time. each time i do another freelance job, i'm going to *gasp* buy more software and goodies. then, "sock" half of it away for other things (like checkers' future).

<HellaBoss update>
HellaBoss is being developed into something worthwhile! hooray! i've begun the interview process last night with a good pal of mine who builds os x applications. i've actually started to develop HellaBoss mockups that are lasting well into today (i'm actually thinking about them today and i want to keep working on them while at work). anyways, more to come, but suffice it to say that HellaBoss will be an interesting place in the coming year.
</HellaBoss update>

the sock. hint, hint.

2004-11-11T10:03:00.000-05:00

also, i've figured out the ipod photo and iphoto thing. natch, they're not using iphoto. windows users who don't have iphoto but buy an ipod photo wouldn't be able to use it. since they've already got itunes, they certainly can. plain jane. overlook my previous questions about it. though, don't overlook my dislike of the a-team/thriller jacket thing.

the ipod socks look fun, but i've a feeling i can make one for myself.

they're silly things though. at first i didn't like them and thought that it was the gap board-member's outlook on the whole thing and wanting to get 'em into their stores too. why do i need a knitted sock for my ipod? for that matter, why do i need 6 of them (they come in packs of 6)?

apple's site says, "Forgive us if we're stating the obvious, but here's how it works: Just slide your iPod into the sock to keep it safe and warm. Slide it out to dock or change playlists. It's as easy as... putting on a pair of socks." Other sites say they're waiting for the sweatsock versions of the footwear cum playerwraps with their tongues in cheek.

keeping the ipod warm is something i've been thinking aboot lately. what with our incredibly cold canadian winters, any kind of warmth you can provide to an ipod is a good idea. the apple site says that the newest regular ipods require an operating temperature of 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C) and -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C) when not operating. with that in mind, the sock is a great idea. i'm not sure about yours, but my ipod kicks off some heat when it's working and the sock'd be able to retain the heat a bit to help it out.

to interrupt, i keep my ipod in the inner pocket of my jacket to keep it warm too.

anyways, i'm not sure how many of you've used gameboys, etc. in cold temperatures or brought them in from the car and watched the screen fade back into focus and contrast as the lcd warms up. my ipod has experienced a slight rainbowing effect if i hold it in certain directions as the unit warms up. the last thing i need to do is get the display more messed up by cold.

so for heat retention, the ipod sock is a good idea.

from colour standpoints, they're pretty chic too (well more ghic© mathew hoy 2004) and reflect the latest sarah jessica parker/broderick and lenny kravitz gap commercial to a tee. at $30/sock, you're paying $5 each. that's a pretty good deal. it's not often you find apple products for under $10. for those faithful followers with one of every ipod, the socks would make great holders for every version of the pod to date. the socks would make good digital camera bags too for the keeners out there with smaller cams.

another area where the trivial socks would be of benefit is in protection. i know, i know - they're knitted socks, how can they protect anything? the idea is a pretty basic one and one that anyone like me who is hella clumsy can appreciate. if you can't relate, i'll tell a tale of (almost ) woe. my digital camera was once in a pocket of my jacket and after a lunchtime session of photo shooting, i was getting out of the car and leaned over too far. the sleek camera (now hella-bulky, but whatever) slid out of my pocket and landed with a kay-runch on ashphault. luckily, it didn't break and works well to this very day (there are ~3 pixels busted in the display. it's an olympus d510z if you're interested to know. olympus makes great cams, rest assured - a fact that was proven to me when my pal jovino showed me his when he came up to toronto to kick it for a few). anyways, slam. crack. the case split apart a bit but all was not lost.

i'm sure that if i had my ipod in the sock and it (gasp) fell out of my pocket, it wouldn't smash as harshly as the ipod would with its sleek case. i'd need to get one or 2 to test the theory for sure (hint, hint apple...). for that matter, the "grip" created by the knitted sock would "anchor" it into the pocket in my jacket, which would remove the sock's ability to slick out of the jacket pocket. in thinking about it however, velcro at the top would likely help (but might scratch the plastic a bit) to keep the top of the sock closed.

so the sock has a few excellent uses, rather than the plain "buy even more ipod gear" marketing machine that apple is famous for. it's warm, a good container, and offers protection and shock-absorption to precious (and expensive) ipods.

that said, and before confirming it, i've an idea for apple. and that is that they should consider getting local shelters, etc. to make the ipod cozies from scratch. employ local homeless people in local shelters and have them make the socks. then, share some of the profits with the shelters. a good way to help the community and give people a) things to do and b) better shelters. or hit up an old folks home that's stocked to the rafters with ancient knitting grannies who can make them too. they need things to do.

or for that matter (when d gets it going, employ the gang of kids at kn1t to make some designer socks. i can't wait until they start up the ipod sock challenge over there (and if there isn't one coming there, one might come here [or at HellaBoss]).

anyways, get a sock.

ps: they'd also be good to have if you've lots of adult content on your ipod photo as well, but we won't get into that. ;)

firefoxxord

2004-11-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

firefox 1.0 is out. i'm telling my students all about it, how great it is, etc. i've downloaded it for mac and love it lots (though i'm not sure i can bail on safari as my browser, though i use ff to check gmail since it seems to be faster than safari at doing that - any idea why?).

i've been using firefox on pc exclusively for a while now. at least 1 year. i was using it when it was called phoenix and was using mozilla before that.

one thing that i've noticed, but keep forgetting is an error that i seem to get once in a while when a site doesn't come up for whatever reason. have a look at this image:

looking for k10k.net. looking for k10k.net. looking for k10k.net.

you should know that for whatever reason, about 25 seconds before i noticed this, the browser'd given me a "unable to resolve k10k.net" message. the wheel wasn't spinning. the status bar'd quit. k10k.net wasn't coming up. and for that matter, once i got the message, i closed that tab, which dumped me to the current document (which was this, by the way).

yet, in the current page's status area, this message remained, telling me that it's still looking for k10k.net. even after it'd quit doing so. and even after i'd asked it to quit doing so. but apparently, it's doing so.

i don't like to be a stick in the mud, but i think i've found a bug in firefox (unless the browser's still looking for a domain it wasn't able to find before, just to "say that it can"). firefox seems to be a stubborn beast.

has anyone else found any errors or bugs in firefox that they're not sure of? if so, please post those errors in the message area (no reg. required) so we can figure out if they're bugs or not, or alert the ff crew aboot it. even though there's a bugzilla component or whatever. let's tawk, mm?

tuesday morning

2004-11-09T09:22:00.000-05:00

last night i caught a mouse in our house. our cats were chasing it around for about 20 minutes, being completely oblivious to it until they finally sort of cornered it and just watched it for 5 minutes. i caught it in a plastic container and took it outside. i suppose it was mean since it's snowing out there, but mice is mice and i do subscribe to the survival of the fittest theory.

then again, we're getting a guinea pig. at the humane shelter, his name is sage. that name is dumb. we're calling him checkers. we hope he doesn't mind. he was taken to the humane shelter after someone abandoned him last winter outside. jerks. ain' nobody doin' nothin' to my checkers. it's all the niffer's idea too - she had a pig for a while and when she died (the pig), she wanted to replace it. last night before bed we were talking about checkers and this morning too. we were wondering what checkers is up to, what he's thinking about, etc. oh, silly checkers. i will try to post some pictures when we pick him up later this week (background check and all).

yesterday's snow stuck around! hooray!

teaching, level 2

2004-11-08T10:32:00.000-05:00

i've been working on HellaBoss a bit this weekend. and start teaching again tomorrow night (html level 2).

today is the greatest

2004-10-28T09:49:00.000-04:00

it's hallowe'en dressup day today at work and while sucking loudly, my costume is better than it's ever been before. that's not saying much since this year i've got orange hair gel in my hair that's given my scalp and hair an orange tinge. and it's straight up.

for the interested, last night i started the new HellaBoss and am quite happy with the look of things so far. lots of little pixel bits here and there and some clever artwork. i think the direction of the site will be directionless, and will feature illustrations i've done, some pixel icons, and random blips of art that are kicking it on my system.

this includes a lot of stuff, from a long time ago and up until recent times. pixel icons created at an old job (evil, inc.), my pixelpalooza icon contest entry, greeting card progress, logos, early drafts of the HellaBoss sparrow, my world-famous omni-graffle stencil kit (with a new one), and more. the site should be fun with lots of details and neato bits, but will take a while to accomplish.

off to the doc's.

colour ipods and the a-team

2004-10-27T19:18:00.000-04:00

i've read it elsewhere - the u2 ipod looks like the a-team van. i totally agree. except that i would add that the ipod is like the van with the twirl filter in photoshop set to "ugly". man, that thing looks like a reverse-coloured version of michael jackson's thriller jacket. it looks like a dragon i coloured in grade 5 that no one liked because "black doesn't go with red". might be because i don't like u2, but i don't like it.

i'm also not a fan of the ipod photo. no sync through iphoto? doesn't that seem like the hot thing to do? that's what iphoto is for, mm? i'm sure that the next ilife upgrade will feature that ability, however. at that time, the ipod will be silly, but at least understandable.

the idea of showing itunes album art with your music is clever, but hardly important. i don't use that feature at all in itunes. i'd use it, however, if itunes did something i've wanted it to do since the beginning - auto-grab the album art when you import a disc from amazon or somewhere. that would be great. i'm not about to go ahead and find the art. ugh.

what the ipod photo needs to do is ditch the album art thing and add the "show me the pictures of my goddam contacts, sucka" feature. that's the missing feature. photos are not. i'm not excited about it at all. i don't like the colours onscreen, or the way the battery icon looks. i'm a geek and i'm listening to the ramones and want it all my way.

please ignore this post. :)

finals

2004-10-27T08:32:00.000-04:00

last night was the last class of my level html course. in 2 weeks i begin teaching level 2. from what i hear, they're really filling my classroom quickly, which is pretty exciting and fun. nearly all of my level 1 students will be taking level 2. that's neat because when i started, there were 3 people taking level 2 that were pre-signed up, and about 3 in my class who thought it might be fun when i asked on the first night.

level 2 covers things like frames, forms, and stylesheets. i think it should also cover imagemaps, but since i've already covered them, it's not important.

last night, exams and final assignments were handed in. i got all the exams marked while i was waiting there for some students to finish the test/project portion of it. no one failed. many got 30+/30. i love the bonus marks. and the fact that the exam was open book was nice. i did that (open-web as well, now that i think of it..) because if they're doing sites in the field they'll be referring to books and the web for help all the time. seemed fair at the time. level 2's class will be like that as well.

luckily, i've 2 weeks to design the level 2 part of the course, come up with content and slides and more. i've already got an idea or 2 of what i need to get done for it, i'll just have to construct it and move forward. i think i'll use different colours on my presentation slides this time too - a more "in-depth" set of hues that make it look more advanced. haha.

HellaBoss: mia

2004-10-26T09:01:00.000-04:00

"where the heck is HellaBoss?", you've been asking. "are you actually going to build a site?", you've been asking. "how is your scooter?", you've been asking.

first things first: the scooter is out of harm's way. the gas guage was faulty and said that i had half a tank left when in fact i had none. i (ugh) ran out of gas on the road like a chump. however, i'm blaming it on faulty guagery, so all is well. i should be getting the bike back this coming saturday. and then going for my m1 motorcycle license.

HellaBoss is being cleverly updated roughly every week. but with no real content. this week it features a delightful sparrow eyechart that you can download and put up on your wall at home (if you do, be sure to take a picture of it - i will post all the pictures taken that i get!). the real site has been started about 15 times. i'm not happy with any of them yet. not happy enough to even put something crappy up.

also, not sure what to put up, period. should i move the wtfudge weblog over to HellaBoss? should i use HellaBoss as a portfolio site that's a 1-off for people to come to and leave from again? should the site link to my school notes and presentations? what should i do with it? i'm in the middle of an idea vortex at the moment with things swirling all around me.

that said, this thursday i'm going to talk to my doctor about whether or not i have add or adhd and see about an official testing appointment, and possibly some hotmeds to help me organise things and not get this kind of lost.

i've been this kind of lost for about 10 years now and it's getting worse the further i go along. i'm at the point now where i can sit down with a book i want to read and read it, in its entirety and not remember a single thing from it, aside from the pictures. i can read a paragraph over and over and over and even if i force myself to focus on the page (this is really difficult to do - i often get bored mid-sentence no matter if it's the first sentence or the middle one, or wherever), i still won't remember anything, except for the ideas i had to supress to do that.

my problem is that i get ideas. all the time. while i'm reading. while i'm showering, cutting the grass, doing the laundry, shagging, whatever. and for the most part (excluding the last one...), i have to stop what i'm doing to write them down or talk them out. during the course of writing one of these entries, i start and stop between paragraphs about 3 times each to check email (even though it alerts me when new stuff has arrived), jot things down, get sidetracked, etc. i guess in the end, getting ideas isn't the problem.

it's that i don't do anything with them.

or that i start working on them right away and quit them when i start to get a feel for them. i have so very many illustrator files on my computer that feature 10 different illustrations on them at once. most are mockups or plans for future drawings. others are collages that are confusing to look at. i'm all over snap to grid and most are simple stg experiments. they are all variations on a theme and rather boring, but that's that. they are what they are, i guess. other started and stopped projects include: removing wallpaper from my house (some walls are half done), abandoned client projects(!), hundreds of abandoned, half-read books, half-completed video games, half-started web projects (HellaBoss, the redesign of wtfudge), and more.

the next few months should be very fun for me, and maybe for you.

wish me luck!

the apple monopoly

2004-10-25T09:36:00.000-04:00

last night i was listening to this radio show (history of music by allan cross i think?) and they were talking about digital music. when i tuned in, they were talking about all of the formats that existed. they cut to commercial and just before they did, they said that they would talk about a few more things and then close up.

i was going to blockbuster to return megaman anniversary collection for gamecube, in case you were wondering.

anyways, when they came back, the radio announcer started talking about media formats again and got to "apple's aac format. it's the only format they care about because it lets them have a monopoly...". i've heard people talking about apple's strongarm bits before, but never their monopoly. it got me thinking (after i was done rationally talking to the radio and saying that you can play mp3 and audiobooks on an ipod so you don't need to use apple's aac format media on your ipod or with itunes) about this whole monopoly thing.

what exactly is a monopoly? does microsoft have one? does apple have one? does parker brothers have one? does a monopoly exist if opposing companies are selling the same products?

a monopoly is this: "exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service." according to dictionary.com. i suppose that apple's control of its itunes service is a monopoly because they own the format, the storefront (itunes), and the container (ipod).

i suppose i don't get this, however: there are tonnes of other kinds of digital media players on the market. rio, creative labs, dell, pocket pc, sony, you name it. if you go into your local tech-bigbox, you'll be deluged with 1 metric tonne of digital music players. some, like product x by rca, even play videos and pictures.

there are other online media sellers, including microsoft, real (you remember them - the people who hacked aac and sold the resulting files like they did nothing illegal - we should all hack realplayer and sell the product and see what happens), hundreds of music labels with content online for buy and download, and more.

and players. oh, the players! winamp, itunes, microsoft media player, realplayer, & all.

the alternative choices are endless. it's funny because where i live there are few people with $400 to spend on a digital music player. i got mine for free as part of a freelance contract. i can't buy itunes music in canada. i'm forced to use (a download service if you're so bold and brazen) puretracks, or another service. itunes isn't a monopoly in canada. i know many more people who are using alternate players, and alternate computer-based players. from where i stand, there is no dominance.

people here are just as closed-minded towards apple as they've always been. our local bigboxes sell apple products in their flyers, but there are no apple items in the stores. there is an ipod display, but it's tiny and wedged between the irivers and sony car stereos. asking people about ipods in stores gets you the same blank stares you get if you ask about the new imac g5s.

friends of mine in australia cannot buy music via itunes there either. does any other online service sell aac? if not, i'm not sure how apple's monopoly extends north of the usa border.

now granted, when i rip my music from my cds i do it in aac format. but the option to do so in mp3 format is in itunes as well. by having the ipod able to play mp3s and having itunes allow people to import files in non-aac format, i think they're giving people a choice as to what media they listen to. and if you don't want to buy aac, don't (if you're in canada, you've no choice...). buy puretracks or real (shudder). or import your own music as mp3 and put them on your ipod (if you even have one).

by the definition, apple does seem to have a monopoly on the aac digital media format execept, funnily enough, this article on apple's site says "AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia—companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as MP3 and AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital)."

it's funny that the companies who are bitching about apple's evil aac format actually helped develop it in the first place (sony).

and the megaman game was pretty good. i played each of the games, killed 2x guys in each and moved on. as in traditional megaman terms, the game(s) were terribly frustrating to figure out the patterns of the enemeies and full of flicker. it's good for a rental unless you love megaman to pieces, particularly if you're playing with someone else with whom you can share the controller. give it a try!

of dubs and doodle

2004-10-22T09:37:00.000-04:00

last night aw came over and kicked it for a few to pick up the olde mac classic i had in the basement and wasn't using, to tell me about identity crisis series of comix, and to let me listen to bits of shatner's new cd (which was quite darling).

on my way home last night, i was detained by the reality of the london transit system and decided that while taking a breather downtown, i would go to the library and get a book by this paul rand guy i'd been reading interviews with all day yesterday. to my delight and surprise, they had design form and chaos by signor rand and it's delightful. it gives samples of his logo presentations for ibm, next, morningstar, adstar, and more. these presentations are great explorations of ideas of another designer and an insight into the design process, something that i didn't learn at all in my limited schooling at canadore.

at canadore, we mainly took photos, drew bell peppers, and played with quark on old macintosh systems. while taking the course, i felt there was something wrong, or something missing. what was missing was a shred of design theory or design history. there was no "this is the all-powerful grid" lesson, class, or whathaveyou while i was there. natch, i pooched the gooch early, but i guess i was feeling like things were empty and didn't know how to ask for what i thought was missing.

that and i was incredibly lazy, missing home, and stuck in a bit of a rough relationship that was "dragging me down, man".

anyways, these days i'm trying to play catch-up with things that i wished i'd learned in school. i've been looking at the work of other designers and being in love with what i'm seeing out there (john maeda, & all). then, i'm looking at my own work and feeling a little empty, not knowing why my things look the way they do. if i look at the work of some people, i'm always amazed where they get their ideas from, or how their process works. whenever i sit down to try something out, i don't seem to have any ideas. i just (usually) open illustrator, and start drawing shapes and items until things fall into a place that i like.

take for example, the HellaBoss logo (mr. sparrow). when i first made it, i was playing with illustrator, mainly watching myself making curves. i wanted to see how snap to grid created curves (i use "snap to grid" with a grid enabled nearly 98% of the time i've the app open, if you're keen to know) with the pen tool. the first few versions of the sparrow were smaller, more squat birds that looked like quails and finches and not like sparrows or other birds. for a long time i've loved the drawings of nathan j and in one of his images, there are birds in trees that i've been loving. so i was trying to remake one of the birds in the picture.

anyways, after a while of messing with curves and making basic birdforms, i made a green desktop image that i sent to a few pals who liked it (one of the early bird drawings is on my wife's desktop at work since she loves it to pieces). the image packed some dashedline punch and featured a little bird with feathers on its body. it was, like the HellaBoss logo, very basic.

then, i got bored and recreated it because i hated the shape. i then made the most current version (with the tuft at the front of the head, facing right since i'm left handed so it's like the logo is moving away from the hand that created it [even though i mouse with my right...]) and cut my hair to suit.

really.

then i got bored again (this is about 2 weeks ago). i've never stuck with a logo as long as i've stuck with this one. the logo looked too plain. too boring. nothing fancy. no gradients. no 3d raytraced effects. nothing. nothing like i was seeing in demo reels at ventilate. until recently, i've been very much a treat of the week kinda guy. i'm up on pop culture and couldn't see the problem with the new ups logo which i loved to pieces. i would draw trees in illustrator and call them trees. no idea up in here.

so i set to work reworking the plain sparrow logo that currently adorns the HellaBoss site. after a few neat ideas, nothing was sticking with me. so i left it and went back to the other million projects i was/am working on at the moment.

after reading texts by paul rand, i'm glad i did. in actual fact, i love the HellaBoss logo. i love the simpleness of it. i love that you can tell what it is at 16x16 pixels and 10 metres by 10 metres. you can dress it up on solid, ungradiented colours and set it loose. it looks as good black as it does green or hot pink. the eye is cut out so it looks great against another background too. i ditched my gradiented explorations and stayed the course. i will not change it.

i think that regardless of what you think of my illustrator skills, that the logo is timeless, like some of rand's logos. i'm certainly not comparing my work with that of paul rand, but based on some of his essays and thoughts, the logo isn't subscribing to trends. there is no gradient, no powermac, no new $50 bill, no colour of the week, no nothing. it is a logoform that can be used forever, unlike the new ups logo which will need to be redesigned when the gradient function in photoshop goes out of style. i'm suddenly aware of how pretentious this sounds, trust me.

anyways, i'm designing logos to be flags and not to tell a message. i'm designing them to be unique and timeless. pixel or vector, i'm making them scalable to 10 pixels² or 10 metres². i'm making them easy to reproduce if i'm offline or the client needs one drawn in a pinch. the HellaBoss logo is easy to rapidly recreate.

this speaks to something i experienced at this past year's flash in the can event at which i volunteered and introed guest speakers (joshua davis, andreas odendaal, for example). i was in the green room watching some of the speakers sign a poster that the group will auction off to make some extra cash. there were 7 posters to sign and one of the speakers (whose presentation was incredible!) was taking close to 4 minutes to recreate his logo on the poster, and then signed his name afterwards. i couldn't help but think that he was wasting a lot of time and that while the logo was neat (i'm still not sure what it's of!), there was nothing rapid about it. the creation process took 4 minutes to draw by hand, a method arguably 1/2 faster than recreating it on the computer from scratch.

it was party the marker's fault. it was one of those pens full of glitter paint that flows out when you press down on the nib. once he got that figured out, however, all the other posters still required as much time to create. and, compared to his presentation (and the original logo), i wasn't impressed.

i think the re/creation of a logo, especially one that's yours that you use and create often, should take about 10 seconds to draw if you need to. the logo should be clear if you used autocad to plot it out within the exact inch or if you draw it while intoxicated. whether it's hand drawn or precision-drafted, you should be able to tell what it is from across the room. even if it's not 100% accurate, it's distinguishable. draw a crappy version of the nike swoosh, apple's apple, or the nhl's crest and people can tell what it is. that's how yours should be.

too often, logos are the same. they all sport a swoosh that shoots over the top of a word, a spiral (have a look at grant's bit of brilliance - once there, quickly scan the page and note how all of the logos are the same), or something else to be lost at smaller resolutions (unless you work for the company).

it will take a lot of practise to go from here into the future and figure out what works for me, but i think i'm heading off in the right direction rather than following the (confusing and lost) pack.

whew!

octothorpe et

2004-10-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

i'm reading a book called the elements of typographic style by robert bringhurst (a canadian poet, by the by) that i got from veer after i placed and finalised the order for the photos i was talking aboot a couple of weeks ago. veer sent me that book, a book called f-stop designed up by stefan sagmiester, and a really slick veer messenger bag that i love to pieces (as i've been known to dry-hump hell-of the satchels).

the book is brilliant, if not a little overwhelming for someone with no formal type training. it's one of those books i'll have to read a couple of times to get it all. but, so far i've learned what an octothorpe is, the meaning behind ampersands, and the origins of the ·.

it's an excellent read tho. i often read books critically which doesn't help me retain the information inside. as i read a book, if i get to a part that has something like, "a myriad of" in the text, even if i continue reading the book (sometimes...), i don't take in any more information. if the author and editor are bad enough to let spelling errors into the text, it's not cool for me.

so when i've arrived at parts of this book, i've been hit with these same kinds of cerebral alerts. case in point: "twenty one night stands". i got to that and hit a mild hiccup because i wasn't sure what the author was talking about. 21 nightstands? lots of sex? a little confusing. in the next bit, he then explains how important punctuation and emphasis are in text vs. spoken word. try saying twenty one night stands out loud and change the emphasis on every word. you'll become either a poor salesman, or a hussy. and if you're still reading this, a hussy-geek (which won't be a terrible thing to tracinovich).

in other news, my level 1 class is almost over and the level 2 will be starting soon. next week is the final exam for the level 1 group and i've been threatened with a lawsuit if i grade the class (half-jokingly) instead of just passing everyone. hehe. adventures abound there! the teaching is going well, thanks for asking.

this saturday is game day in a-town! that's right, some lads (and lasses) and i are kicking it in aylmer to play/rent some games all day on saturday which is always a good time.

and the freelance work has been rolling in lately too, which is rather excellent. i've been asked for business cards 5x/week for the last month and i think i should really make some up. my pal leeroy works at a print shop and might be able to slip some of mine in under the wire. i'll let you know once i get 'em done up, mm?

you can, you can

2004-10-18T09:42:00.000-04:00

i didn't know this, but you can write basic hyperlinks into the notes in your ipod. just open a text file and start marking up your code with some basic html:

<p>a paragraph in your note.</p>

once you've got that done, you can add some other neat things to the files, like hyperlinks to other notes, and even songs on the ipod!

<a href="notename.extension">the link text</a>

<a href="song=songtitle">the link text</a>

i might be the last person to pick this up, but it's pretty cool junk.

frank, you stuff is coming! :)

technical difficulties.

2004-10-15T18:27:00.000-04:00

should be cleared up shortly. should be.

quickshiver

2004-10-15T08:55:00.000-04:00

last night i performed an update on quicksilver and downloaded the latest version of quicksilver. then, like i had been before it, i attempted to send email via it and found i could not until i downloaded and installed the quicksilver address book plugin. there is something hallowe'eny about quickshiver, but since i just got it before bed last night, i've no idea what it is (aside from the oranje app icon). anyone here using quickshiver and see some neato treats and tricks?

today i should be getting the login info for network solutions for HellaBoss. today, pointers == changed and we'll officially have the domain pointing to the new server setup.

i came up with some great ideas for a client logo i'm working on too. and figured out what i'll be for hallowe'en. excellent.

the latest issue of macworld is pretty great. i love those "1000 great shareware apps you should give a look at" articles. but there are no mentions of xpad (there is voodoo pad), which is disappointing.

hp ipod tattoos

2004-10-14T11:08:00.000-04:00

what an awesome idea for hp to sell printers for the new ipods they're selling! i think i'm going to release some special HellaBoss tattoos in the future, but i have a question about them that i'm not that you can answer: do the tattoos really stick to the ipod? how well do they stick? if i try to take them off, will it leave residue on HellaPod?

for firefox users, i've added a favicon to the segpub Hellaboss. ch-ch-check it out. one of the few things i don't like about safari is how it handles fav icons. aside from when you bookmark sites, is it possible to show fav icons by just going to a web site? i always seem to have a problem with this. anyone else?

and for that matter, have you ever seen a good full-power introduction and in-depth review of how mac os x handles fonts? not just "you can use fontbook to keep track of all the fonts you have on your machine". i mean, "why are there 3 folders of fonts on my machine and if i put a new font in any of the folders it sometimes doesn't show up anywhere, unless i activate it using extensis suitcase (even fontbook doesn't work in some cases)".

anyone?

66.216.83.189

2004-10-14T08:29:00.000-04:00

last night, much to jez and matthew's collective delights, i made a switch. all that "who is your web host" talk finally got me to going. i got paid from a freelance client and sunk the cash into paid-for web hosting as opposed to free hosting though a pal of mine. i went with my ultra breaker-breaker good buddies at segpub down under in australia.

so far, i got more than i bargained for.

i signed up last night, having entered all of my credit card information in their everclever forms and recieved my confirmation email and the normal "welcome to segpub. we hope you like us!" email. i clicked a few links, jotted down some password material (actually, i've a section on HellaPod under notes called passcodes that contains all the main passcodes i use on a regular basis in case i'm someplace away from my comp with keychain set and need to login someplace but forget how. hahaha... it's happened) and proceeded to hellaboss.com.

and nothing had switched over, unsurprisingly. i mean, i hadn't changed the dns pointer with network solutions (a good pal of mine is the main contact - something i've been wanting to fix for a while now - so i can't log in to change it myself). i hit up the ip number (cleverly disguised as the title of this post!) and found the segpub "welcome to..." splash that i mimicked in its place.

i connected via transmit and downloaded the original segpub directory contents to my ~/mathew/sites folder so that i can keep an official record of what's been there before. i changed the image and the title (transmit's got a handy "edit this file" feature built in, but i've found that if you're working on a huge file, you should download it before you attempt to edit it. i've been cut off by a shoddy connection in the past and if you save the file after you've been cut off, it deletes everything in the document) and uploaded them. you can see it here if you're keen.

i set up an email address using segpub's user-friendly control panel service(s). a quick login and i had access to mysql(!), wap, email account settings, web-tracking, and more. everything was pretty simple to use and understand.

what i meant by i got more than i bargained for was that i paid $x/month for this service. that's $x+0 more than i used to pay for hosting because of the generosity of my good pal raph at primeweb (we're in the process of reworking his site). i think the amount i've paid, rather than going to pay for my monthly hosting bill, has gone to tech support questions. you see, because i'm a bit of a dolt (they sometimes call me, "slowie") all of those "easy as pie" comments above took me a bit to get the hang of. after a long text chat with jez, 1 email message, and a 20 minute ichat audio chat that ended with us talking about how where we live has extremes unexperienced by the other, i had all the answers i needed.

and that's why, in the end, i had decided to go segpub in the first place, rather than hostrocket, geocities(!), blacksun, (mt) mediatemple, netkeepers, or any other service available to me. i like the idea that i "know" the owner. i mean, we've never met before, but we've chatted at least 1x/day for the last 6 months. i'd say we're pretty good pals for not having physically seen each other in a non-2d sense. i liked the idea that if i had a problem, i could quickly ask what's up and get an answer. namely, because the owner is a) a pal, and b) the one who sets up, configs, etc. the systems. which means he knows exactly what to do. he doesn't have to "get his people on it and get back to me when they have the time" like other hosts do. if i need help, i can get help. and despite the timezone difference (it's already tomorrow there!), because he's cut from the same geeky cloth as i am, he's up all night and day anyways, so contacting him about problems (i don't anticipate any more), ideas, begging to see the new control panel features, and more won't be a problem.

i also want to mention that not only is jez keen on answering questions quickly, but he's also keen on employing new technology as it comes out. segpub uses the latest version of urchin to track stats and is looking at getting version 6 up with the release of the new control panel features. i'll be taking the tour later this morning to see what that's all aboot.

so anyways, i switched to segment publishing in australia last night. so far they are excellent. i will keep you posted as time goes on.

thirdyear

2004-10-12T13:27:00.000-04:00

sent off, loved, and mailed back with a smewch.

and then thanksgiving was over

2004-10-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

and one more year goes by when i don't eat turkey or stuffing, or gravy. but all was not lost. after helping the niffer's pa close the swimming pool with she, her bro and his ladypal, i went inside to talk to her grandfolks aboot the ipod and charley pride. dinner was pretty excellent and the after-nap was such as delightful.

in the end, i think superman looked like luthor.

we got more things done around the house this weekend, including finally assembling all of the new chairs, moving the piano, removing some non-essential junk to other places, and tackling the overwhelming dishes dilemma.

i finished one logo for the frankieshakes and did not exercise except when we walked downtown to meet pals for snacks and treats. we talked about music, clothes, our lives, and found out that one of our pals is pregnant with a baby. the next day we talked about babies ourselves and pretty much resigned to the idea that we'll either not have any, not have any right now, or adopt someone instead. which leaves us where we were in the beginning: undecided. i can't help but feel oddly about the babytalk. i know we're not ready at all to do anything like that just yet (we're relatively destitute at the moment), but the unintended pressure from our friends is worrying me to the point where i've an upset stomach when i really get down to thinking or talking about it.

i bought 2 pairs of cords on the weekend that were $10 each. wonderful. that is making me feel not so oddly now.

and oh dear! apple is making colour, photo-ready ipods! i'm not sure why people are overly excited about this. they just released new models a month ago or so. also, people have been saying that this would be happening for over a year. did you also hear that apple is making a new tabletMac_mc? wow! jeeze. give 'em a break and buy a new imac or sommat, willya?

fiveaside porno

2004-10-10T21:55:00.000-04:00

my pal matthew from fiveaside just sent me the porno i've been waiting for. it arrived in a brown paper bag with fiveaside industries on the label and it will be billed to my credit card as such. except it's his and i'm jealous. and he didn't really send it. and there isn't porno. but there is, which is good, but it's different, which might be bad, but it isn't.

ahh... have a look.

wherein i discover sans-caffeine

2004-10-10T18:13:00.000-04:00

today i drank my first can of coke sans-caff and i have to say that it's just as good as regular. i don't like sugarfree, however since it tastes like ass because of all the aspertame (which i've heard gives you lupus).

today i'm tired and though my wife is sleeping on the couch, i cannot do so since i am such as a reverse bat and cannot sleep during the day.

i have been in so much as 10 situations where i wish i had a griffin itrip for HellaPod soo badly.

htm-hell?

2004-10-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

okay, i've had this problem for a while and it's really still touch and go. it's about relative urls.

my problem is this: when i put a file in a subdirectory inside a subdirectory and want to link to say a css file at a higher level, i always add too many "../" items to try to find it. often, i'll go through 2 to up to 1 bajillion "../" trying to find the file i'm looking for. does anyone else experience this problem?

better yet, do you have any suggestions on how to overcome it? they are hella appreciated!

iphun with iphoto

2004-10-08T09:08:00.000-04:00

i never thought of this before, but have a look at this. the link points to a site where the author is talking about taking snapshots of web sites and saving them into iphoto.

now, i don't use iphoto, but this might be a good reason to start. it's pretty incredible how the smallest idea can change your entire outlook on a thing (in this case, my much-maligned iphoto).

to be honest, i used to use iphoto plenty. it was a great little tool to quickly collect all of my snapshots, publish them to the web or create slideshows while i'm away from the comp, or whatever. the new smartlists and rating system seems pretty cool (but requires the whole ilife package that i don't have).

after i went to flashinthecan 2003, took plenty of snaps, then went through and mis-deleted the entire set, i quit using it. i also hated the way the app organises snaps in subfolders by copying the images all the time if you create many folders. not only that, but the naming conventions made no sense. for example, in a folder you would find one called "2004". when it was 2003. inside that folder... well... it might be easier for me to show you this (an approximate path to folder 07 the way iphoto keeps things organised):

~mathew/pictures/iphoto library/2004/02/03/07

really makes no sense. i don't think i really sat down with it to figure out exactly what the naming bits meant, but what can you do?

another reason i wasn't big into iphoto was because of the aforementioned image cloning in all of those subdirectories if i created alternate libraries. i used to use an imac g3 400 (dv and tangerine) that the niffer now uses with only a 10g hard drive. i didn't have the space for duplicated images all over the place. the cloned images also served another confusing purpose: despite there being thumbs folders that sometimes contained images and othertimes contained .db files, i could never find what i was looking for. if i created a library folder called "trip to the zoo", i could not go stone cold into the iphoto folderset and find this path:

album/trip to the zoo

you can't find anything with it if you try to go through your images w/o using iphoto. unless you bleed obscure naming conventions (or invented the way iphoto names files).

so, i started using image capture when i gave up on iphoto.

image cap. detects the camera's connection, opens, downloads the images to my photos folder and sits there until i quit it. this is a great way to do things to make sure that i know where the images are and where i want to put 'em, but it's time-consuming and a bit of a bitch if there are tonnes of snaps to put away.

with image capture, i have the following folders set up:


me

friends

events

places

things

and all the images go into subfolders i create based on what the images refer to. pictures taken at a special olympics soccer tourney, for example, go into:

events/special olympics - kitchener 2004

i think after that link i found, i will try iphoto again. the idea of snapping cool web sites for future reference is a pretty good one that would serve as a kind of pantone guide for styles.

ooh. that makes me think: what about a css-style-guide that's set up like iphoto? you work on a document and you can click a style from the "playlists" at the right and in a preview window, the styles are applied based on what code it finds to connect to? that would be pretty excellent. you could collect css docs from all over and keep 'em in there for your own reference. plus, you could work on a doc, and choose a style from your own collection and publish with it. very cool.

whew. all this said, how do you organise your images? do you use iphoto? image capture? or soemthing else? at work, i've taken to using extensis portfolio which is quite delightful, but have not bought it for the mac (yet).

hangups

2004-10-07T10:59:00.000-04:00

i just wanted to say how great it is that HellaPod has such a long charge cable. over 1 metre in length, it's easily charging my ipod (which i left in my desk at work overnight - gasp! i was sooo worried, especially since the cleaners were coming in, that i'd lose it - just like i used to lose money in my desk when i worked at evil, inc.) while staying out of my way.

you see, i've this problem with things touching my hands while i work. i can't wash dishes in the sink if there are more than 1 or 2 objects in there, especially if they're floating. if i'm working on close quarters, i'll take whatever it is apart so i don't have to have my hands being touched while i do things. odd, really.

and this includes mousing. the mouse needs to be free and clear (thank goodness for the periwinkle pointer) of debris and confusion. the cord can't retract, nor can it be bunched up. i need to be able to click and go. if i have to move the mouse, i need to be able to do so and go ahead.

do you have any wierd hangups like that? hate feet? like picking friends' noses, etc.?

cycle update and no power

2004-10-06T11:15:00.000-04:00

taking it to inglis cycle tonight after work. i'll have to walk the bike over, but that's no problem. it's only a couple of blocks away. i bought some great tie-downs at wal*mart to secure the bike into the truck for the ride home. the neat thing about the ride home was that the box of the truck was 1/2 full of cedar mulch. while i did not get a picture, you can be sure that the scene looked like something from a honda showroom - even with the tie-downs.

HellaPod is *this close* from being sans-poweur. dang. i usually charge, but forgot last night. be sure to watch alton brown's good eats tonight on the food channel (unless they've changed that too! they moved a jamie oliver show from monday nights to whenever and put on this italian/mario show instead. boo-urns).

session-two

2004-10-06T10:42:00.000-04:00

last night's teaching adventure advanced into phase 2 of 5 with general instruction about margins, background colours, text manipulation (italics vs. emphasis, bold vs. strong, etc.), hyperlinks, and a big-game image safari. i also handed out a homework assignment - search for domain name registrars from other countries and send them to me. 2 people have already done so. last week's homework assigment was to submit 3 html-learning resources to share with the class. all of the submissions were collected by me and put into a (as of yet) unhyperlinked page and shared with the class.

yoshi takes a dive

2004-10-05T13:54:00.002-04:00

recently, i've particularly begun to notice that when yoshi starts up in the morning, there is a knocking sound that goes away once i start up the bike with some gas. the bike only seems to make this sound when i start it up. aside from the normal sounds associated with engine-running, the only other sound i hear from yoshi is the occasional squealing of the brakes when i stop (i think there is dust and dirt in the brakes from all the construction they're doing on my street at home - i'll take a snap for you tonight so you can see what i mean..). the squealing sound drives me nuts, but it's pointless to get rid of it since it'll just come back after i leave my driveway and go onto the "street".

this morning's commute was just like any other trip to work. i got dressed, then chose what i would wear today since the weather outside is getting frightful. today i chose an old northern reflections polar fleece pullover for warmth, my new wind/water-breaker jacket to fight the chill, and my standard gloves and helment for safety (and warmth - that helmet can sure bake the bean!). oh, and my backpack.

i hit the garage and unloaded the yosher to the driveway/staging area. did a bit of a circle check (note: check) and got onboard. turned the key to on, held the brake like i always do, and hit the starter button. things started up as the normally do. when i turn the key to on, that knocking sound starts up softly and continues until i hit the starter button.

i took off for work as i normally do, riding slowly through the streets around my house to heat the engine up. then, i get to queens avenue and the fun begins. queens ave. is a long stretch of 1-way street that pretty much runs 1/2 way through the city, starting practically at my doorstep. the street runs through the downtown core, and turns into riverside drive. the ride was uneventful (in that i only had to use the horn once vs. an old lady in a land-whale who doesn't beleive that at her age, checking the blind spot is a required part of automobile legislation).

i took queens/riverside to hyde park road and started towards work. my commute is pretty basic. queens/riverside then hyde park. that's it. things we going fine and nothing detectibly different was up with yoshi. he was running smoothly. i was swerving out of the way of road-trenches and superscript potholes (unlike those car-driving suckas behind me who have to swerve to the shoulder to miss 'em).

i got to a major intersection (hyde park and gainsborough road) and stopped for the first time since before queen's ave turned into riverside at a stop light. while there, i heard yoshi clicking like nobody's business. it sounded like the regular knocking sound, but much more pronounced. angry, if i may so. i gave it some gas and the sound went away a bit.

i continued for the remaining 3 minute ride to work and stopped at the intersection that leads into my work, in the turning lane (on the left). as soon as i came to a complete stop, the engine quit out on me.

poof.

like that. without the sound effect. all i could hear was the turning signal clicking away. there was no throttle, no engine-related-i-don't-know-why-more-ladies-don't-get-scooters-because-of-this vibrations, or anything. i was a man on a dormant piece of machinery that was roughly 10 metres from my work parking lot. luckily, with noone coming the other way, i pulled it over to the side of the road and walked it to the lot (after turning it and the signal light off).

i mailed my wife, who called her mom, who is coming after work to pick me and yoshi up with the family f150 pickup truck. i've no idea how we'll get into the truck bed, but we'll have to do it. i teach tonight! i've also contacted a megastar scooter mechanic pal of mine (who i met through friendster) to see if he has any ideas what's up. now, the niffer's bro is also starmech material too, so we should be able to get things straightened out before i have to call hully gully (gaah!). we'll be taking it over to inglis cycle after work tonight. hopefully, things will be fixed up soon.

i just went outside at lunchtime to check the oil. things seem to be fine. i started the bike and it's knocking at me like i owe it back-taxes. dang. time does not heal all.

do you have any idea what's wrong with yoshi?

someone's in the kitchen

2004-10-04T18:45:00.000-04:00

today i was in kitchener having a go at the delicate bits of photoshop (7 in the morning, cs in the afternoon) with mega-guru andy anderson. he's featured in the snap above.

the session was terrific and i wrote on every page in my supplied notebook, mainly small shortcuts to speed up workflow and colour-correcting (well, and much more).

i've taken to using my ipod as a travelguide when i have events to go to like this one. i'll create a new ical event and list out the day's activities as per the prelim schedule supplied before the event. after getting the whole thing in there, it certainly helps me figure out where the room is, when lunch is, who's speaking when, and more. still rocking to HellaPod.

what the fudge are you up to? i haven't heard from you in weeks!

with a new room comes a new post

2004-10-03T22:33:00.000-04:00

today/tonight the niffer and i switched some rooms around in our house, a change we've been wanting to do for a long time now (since we moved in, actually) but couldn't because of poor wiring. with the niffer's dad we corrected that situation this afternoon (and installed a new bathroom faucet). this new room's boss and seems to be working better than the previous zone. we need to get some hella shelves up here, however.

anyone go to the cuban council open house party last night?

kitchener tomorrow. and now, popcorn!

not a pal of mine

2004-10-01T11:07:00.000-04:00

what is wrong with this picture?

all over octoberfest

2004-10-01T09:24:00.000-04:00

well, not really. it just helps to draw in nicely to this post: that i'm going to kitchener this coming monday for a tutorial/training session on the delightful wonders of photoshop through work. it is a 1-day show that runs from 8am until 4pm. i'm not sure how many people will be going to it, but i think it'll be a real barn-burner of a good time. geeks who like art sitting around computers, noodling and doodling. just like my masthead reads.

the event's host is a speaker named andy anderson, who looks oddly like george carlin.

tonight is the king's college homefest gig that my pal tom is dj-ing at. my wife went to school there (i wasn't brilliant enough to go uni) and we're going to chill with some of her old pals. i'm mainly going to chill with tom.

holy doodle i love this HellaPod! i just made a playlist last night called autumn and filled it with swell tracks like:

fake plastic trees - radiohead
treefingers - radiohead
autumn sweater - yo la tengo
country trash - johnny cash
silver trees - the kingsbury manx
the lonely - british sea power
sleep the clock around - belle and sebastian (thanks craig!)

do you have any suggested autumn-related (though title, sound, etc.) tracks i should add to the playlist? if so, please mention them in the comments!

you have the right to be confused

2004-09-30T10:45:00.000-04:00

yesterday a business card was left in the side-door of my house (the one i don't use and therefore didn't see it until this morning). from far away, it looked like a card from the canadian forces, a group i have nothing to do with. turns out, the card is from another group i rarely interact with - the london police department. there was a date, time, and phone number on the card, directing me to call the traffic office. after calling just now and discovering that the constable is on vacation for a little while (training, she said), i left a message for him to call me back on saturday when he can.

the entire ride to work today had me scratching my helmet as to what they could want and have broken it down into 2 things: 1) i got a traffic ticket 2 weeks ago while parking near the galleria. machinations undisclosed, it turns out the ticket was in error and i'm not required to pay it. that may not have gone through the system. 2) i'm driving a motor scooter and do not have a motorcycle (or class m) license.

the latter is more likely the issue (as it sounds rather insane to not have the proper papers to operate the motor vehicle). in order to operate a motorcycle in "yours to discover" ontario, you need a class m license, or a beginner's m permit while you wait to get the full thing. the law is very hazy about exactly what this means, however. i have heard from some people that you need a license if you're not riding a moped. i've heard that the moped classification covers any motorised bicycle that has an engine value of 49 cubic centimetres or less. i've heard lots of things that contradict each other.

one day last summer, i went to the source. i called the london police department the day i was going to buy the scooter. i called up and got officer x (i wish i'd gotten his name now). the conversation went like this,

"hello, my name is mathew hoy and i'm buying a motor scooter today from hullygully. i have a question about licensing requirements."
"okay shoot"
"do i need to have a motorcycle license to operate the scooter, or can i register it as a moped (and not require an m license to operate it)?"
"it depends on the size of the bike"
"the engine size is 49ccs."
"nope"
"nope i don't need a license?"
"right."
"so all i need is a helmet and insurance to operate my scooter?"
"that's right."
"well, okay! thanks!"
"no problem. have a nice day."

and that was it. we rocketed off to hullygully, paid for the bike (~$2300cdn) and left it there. i got all the papers (sans-one, in actuality) and took them to the license bureau in cherryhill near where my wife's pa worked before he moved his office. i went up to the counter with the documents and was told i was missing one that hullygully should have given me (don't get me started about hg!). back i went to hullygully to get the document. i then decided after the clerk told me, to head to the bustling metropolis of lambeth to the license office there to get my papers. i went in, gave them the documents and was issued a shiny red moped plate (which means i'm not required by law to have a class m license). i then drove back to hg, got them to put the plate on the bike and got my wife's bro to drive it home (i was nervous about it still and didn't want to mess up - i'd never ridden a bike before).

i've been driving around the city since the summer without incident. i've been stopped in traffic next to police officers, in front of police officers, and driving past their speedtrap spots. i've never been given more than a quick smile, shrug, or ignore.

i'm a little nervous about what'll be said. i expect that if this is about the bike, they'll tell me to take it off the road until i get an m-class license for it (or beginner's permit).

that said, here is the phase 2 problem with owning a motor scooter that requires an m-license in the province of ontario:

in order to get your full m license, you are required by law to operate your motorcycle on a 400-series highway where speeds are posted at 100km/h, but are laughingly ignored by speeding motorists during the driving test.

it is unlawful to operate my bike on such a highway because i can only go 60km/h. i plan out every route i take so that i stay on -=60km/h roads so as to keep up to traffic and not impede other motorists.

in order for me to get a full m license, i need to own (or borrow) a regular motorcycle and ride it on the 400 series highway system (something i've never done before). my bike has an automatic transmission. a regular bike does not. i don't know how to drive standard (boo-urns, i know) and will have to learn how to do that too.

i can do what my wife's mom does and get a class m beginner's permit (you can drive dawn to dusk, no passengers, no booze, stay off 400 series) and hold it for 90 days. at that time you have to repay to keep the permit ($57.50cdn) or go on to get an m2 license (which is $75).

what a silly billy! a rock and a hard place. a conundrum. out of the frying pan and into the... okay, sorry. to ride a scooter in ontario can be a difficult thing with lots of ups and downs that require specific challenges unrelated to the successful operation of my bike.

and session-two notes for my next class have begun. as has the turning in of homework assignments.

i would recommend a mac

2004-09-28T22:57:00.000-04:00

tonight was the first night of teaching and it was a blast. i had lots of fun fielding questions from everyone in the class and recommending things to them. like a 15" powerbook. and firefox. everyone seemed to be having fun with the presentation too, though some people were a little confused at a few points.

we ran the full 3 hours, however. even a few minutes afterwards. homework assignment for next week is/was to bring in 3 web links that point to either web design portals or to resources that will help you build web sites. very awesome. i'm going to compile them all for the class so they can learn from each other.

charging ipod. sexually.

what? oo! jez! oi, i'm game. :)

we have a winner!

2004-09-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

i finally won a game of solitaire on HellaPod. i'd played about 30 times and was actually going to post to ask if anyone had managed to win a game of it to see if it is actually possible.

i start teaching tonight. i'm tweaking my presentation as we speak and having butterflies in my stomach for some reason. i love speaking in front of others, but i think it's because i want to teach sooo much that i don't want to mess up.

and i'm *this close* to being caught up at work too. i've just a few things left to do.

geek of the week

2004-09-23T21:53:00.000-04:00

that's right kids, i am the geek of the week. don't ask me why, but i've always wanted to do some technical drawings since i was very wee and after reading and looking at this project in awe, i decided to go into things babytalk speed.

that said, i hate to see dubs go out in a blaze of no-space glory, especially with this entry. i should have buffed up the pod a bit, i guess, but what can you do? sorry dubs, but i met your challenge this week too.

all this ipod battle stuff has had me thinking this week - i'd like to make it a full-time site if i can (or at least a pet project for a month or so) that encourages people to submit an image 1x per day for an entire month. we'd likely need some boss hosting and database systems for it (which i don't have). if you're keen on helping out this project, please drop me a line (m at hellaboss dot com). i am very eager to get this going.

as you do.

veer

2004-09-23T15:48:00.000-04:00

not swerving, or sideswiping, or slowly/sharply turning from a target, or from a vector route.

no, i'm talking about the stock type and photo house based in calgary (where grant hutchinson works, by the by). for a project at work, i required some stock photos and instantly thought of veer. having gone to their web site and persuaded (now) 2 companies to purhcase their superhot snaps, i actually got to talk to a sales rep (hi chris!) on a) the phone and b) the email about photos, features, resolutions, geekery, lightboxes, and more.

veer's catalogue is incredible. i work for a dental equipment company. i ran a search in veer's royalty-free snaps for smiles. i got 454 pages of results (at 24 images/page). that kind of selection is incredible for me and my workplace. the only thing bad about it is the time it takes to go through each snap to ensure it's the one you want.

refining the search, i entered, smiles, open mouth and got 154 pages of results. wow. incredible.

anyways, after creating an account, i got access to the everrocking flash zoom tool that allows you to scooter up close and personal on any picture saved in your lightbox (aka: the found-image reservoir™). using flash, this lets you zoom in on a picture you've chosen to get a better view of it. at first (since you can click on an image 2x to zoom it) i thought the zoom reflected the snaps at different stages/levels of resolution. in the end, no, just a slick feature. i mailed 'em about it tho, worry thyselves not.

i placed the order for 4x pictures for our web site. we bought 4 high-rez snaps that we can use wherever we want, should we decide to hang onto 'em. that's right - there is a 7-day return policy on all royalty-free images. if you get 'em and don't like 'em, you can return them within 7 days for a full refund. another great deal.

and i might get a free hat out of the deal because chris the support person (sexless, just in case) was so delightful.

need stock photos? try veer. and shop canadian!

hosting, php, faintheart

2004-09-23T11:52:00.000-04:00

in a panic after i realised that one of our servers doesn't support php i remembered that our other one, with (mt) mediatemple does. i have to break some code out of a conatct page and put the script on the other server. whew.

so far, our hosting experience with mediatemple has been nothing short of stellar. we're using the ssadvanced server package with 1 gig of storage space and more. the tracking results are excellent using urchin, there is php and mysql potential, subdomains, and 10000 email addresses.

in the beginning when looking for a new host, we looked at a few companies around the world and two who were close to home. the ones close to home were not suitable at all. their customer service was terrible. one nameless group's web site told me info x. i wanted to know info x+1 and i mailed to ask them for an answer to a question i had. they told me to refer to their web site in a standard form letter. naturally, most of the info i'd included in my email came from their site. it was quite obvious i'd done some reseearch from them. another 2 companies didn't answer my requests back at all. so, they were out.

in the end, not only did (mt) mediatemple respond when i asked them a question (with a 3 page letter filled with more info than i could possibly want to have, or read in an afternoon), but a sales rep called me using my email signature to make sure i got the email. on the phone, he was relaxed and honest, and very professional. after that call and reply, i advised my current workplace to go with them. and so far, they haven't let me down.

for the hellaboss site, i use blacksun servers for hosting. i did some freelance work for a pal of mine a while ago and in exchange for the work, i offered to "be paid in hosting for a year". the blacksun servers are adequate. nothing special. there is php and urchin tracking. there is no mysql (hence the reason there is no discernable web log over there) support. they have been down about 1 day in the last 1 year of hosting however, which is a big plus. sending in a tech support question got me a reply 5 days later (i have to be honest in saying that i expect someone to be online all the time to answer queries for some reason).

at the end of this year, i'm looking to keep the domain, but transfer it to another location.

right now my options are blacksun (again), (mt) mediatemple, and segment publishing (segpub) - an outfit owned by pals of mine in australia. i don't trust any local shops to save my life (except maybe tracy's fabled hosting service), notably: execulink is out of the running for me.

now, i have been considering hosting my own site, using tangimac, my old (gasp!) tangerine imac that needs to be dusted off and set up again. i require a static ip for it to run, however and have no idea how to do that (yet).

the point of this post?

i'd like to hear your opinions on your host, who you recommend, and more. what experiences have you had with your web host (good/bad)? their tech-support team's turnaround time? who hosts you? who do you host (if that's the case)? uptime? space? bandwidth overages, transfer, and most importantly, price (cdn $ if you can, darlings). your replies will certainly affect who i decide to go with for the next year (or more).

also, i'm looking at this dissection (not for the faint of heart).

quite a few updates

2004-09-22T10:26:00.000-04:00

first of all those astute readers would have seen the update i did to HellaBoss yesterday concerning the class i'm teaching (gasp!) next tuesday. since then, i've taken it down however to make room of item x.

item x is a take on dan cederholm's round-corner backgrounds from both his (terrific) book, a list apart article, and via a chat we had the other day. his demos are terrific, but seem to only cover fixed-width background images. i was keen on getting it to work if the masthead in question stretches the full width of the screen in a liquid way.

so, after some talking with dan the man, i went ahead last night and did it up right. to come: the floating div needs to be hacked in ie6.

have a look!

in other news, i hit the college and picked up my book for the course. it's a great book - i've got another book by the same publisher on unix for mac which is a terrific resource. i waited in line for about 30 minutes at the registrar's office until someone asked what i was there for. after i told them i was going to be teaching (which got a lot of "huh? you're a youngin'" stares from other line-holders), i got taken out of the line to a special spot to talk to someone right away.

after a bit of running around (i spent ~1.5 hours at the college), i finally got my book and saw the classroom (windows comps, ie 6, ns 4.08, corel paintshop image softs). don't worry, i've already asked the course controller to hook up the lab with photoshop and firefox, but not sure that they will be able to. this is going to be an interesting class!

go ?, young man

2004-09-20T07:25:00.000-04:00

i just remembered another thing about toevolt on the weekend. coming from london, with not much experience driving in toronto, we were following the map provided by the event that we printed from the web site (yes, in magenta).

however, for a conference on accessibility and usability, the map had no indications of which direction was north. while it turns out that the way the text reads points to north, when you turn the map around to get a sense of where you really are, it was difficult to recall which way (in one of the many panics we were in) was north to orient ourselves.

re: caption tags - mm? i'll look into it today and see what i can do about that string of snaps below. thanks to dan for the link!

took long enough..

2004-09-19T15:53:00.000-04:00

my hellapod battle snap is a little late this week, but in the end, i'm pretty happy with it. it's the result of going down to the park to listen to the ipod, trade in some old cds ( got the latest ladytron disc), and read dan cederholm's book. a very great read so far, i've already learned a few things i didn't know before, or hadn't really spent much/enough time investigating.

big ben, parliament

2004-09-18T23:45:00.000-04:00

as i'm sure you can guess from the snaps, today was the infamous toe-volt (also discussed at tracinovich's site, crashoverride.

the presentations were all pretty good and all had some valid points to learn. i was a little disappointed with the events during dan cederholm's presentation, as i was keen to learn much more. things were very interesting. from the get-go however, there were tonnes of questions lobbed his way concerning text-size and making text scale at relative levels rather than using pixel settings (as i often do). i took a few notes and luckily, bought a copy of his book, web standards solutions" to learn more later. dan was a great speaker. informative, etc. i wish the ?s would have waited until the end. let me just reiterate that i wasn't disappointed with cederholm's presentation, just the constant string of interruptions during it.

unrelated to the order of the snaps, joe clark spoke on wcag (web content accessibility guidelines) and how it applied to us. this is very much an area i would like to get more into and learn about. i was impressed with his style of speaking and presentation. i wish he would have talked more about how edward tufte is a moron in the hallway.

javier's presentation was about information architecture and how to build sites for all audiences. it was well-received and will be downloaded this weekend. i learned lots over the course of today.

tracy is a great navigator who always brings the right map and is keen on puppies. and nintendo parking garages.

worst alt tags ever, by the way. doing this quickly before bed. two delightfully blurry snaps of cederholm (sans-b.p., by the by. after i'd confronted him aboot it, i realised i was missing them too and that made things even funnier!).

lunch was very tasty and free (which i always like). in the end, there are a few things i wish i'd done before the end of the rillybig shew: got dan to sign my book, took pictures of the fairgrounds - the venue for the event was like it was out of hairy potter, taken some snaps of the custom tee i'd made for the event, taken more tees to share with others, and in general, taken more snaps.

on the way home, tracy and i were talking about doing our own event in london which might be cool. we need to meet more about it however, before we go ahead with planning.

lastly, it was nice to finally meet frank in person and his pal, mike(?). chris was nice to meet again and to others, it was nice geeking with you on a saturday in autumn.

tachyon

2004-09-17T10:13:00.000-04:00

if you're a keener at fanshawe college this fall and winter, you'll be happy to know that i've been asked to teach html level 1 and level 2 back to back starting september 28 and continuuing through until december 7th. classes run from 7-10pm and there are 5 sessions in each one.

you'll also be happy to know that i've accepted the post. teaching web dev! yay!

< update >
such a geek. first thought after, "wow, teaching!" was "oh man, i can get ed. discounts on apple goods as a teacher at the fanshawe computer store!" and checked out apple's site for discounts (~$100 cdn on everything).
< /update >

ipod menu idear

2004-09-17T08:52:00.000-04:00

i wish there was a feature/app that put the current battery level of your ipod as a menubar item that was changeable between a percent and a graphic image. it gets annoying to look at the ipod to see if it's charged or not, and to see if the battery bar is flashing or if it's steady. i think that would be a pretty killer app for ipod owners (mac and pc too).

do you think this would be a pretty cool app? know how to do it? want to try to figure it out with me? let me know!

of mice and mayo

2004-09-15T20:48:00.000-04:00

met with chris tonight at williams downtown, one of 3 people i know of going to toevolt this coming saturday. originally, we were supposed to meet because we'd be traveling down to toronto together, but that's changed. he has some other things to do and as such, can't come back with mr(s). t and i on saturday night.

so, we decided to meet anyway and it was a fun time. at first, things were a little shaky since we'd barely talked on email before, but by the end we were talking geek and mac os freeware until the other outdoor patrons were going pomme in the face.

it was a good meeting and lots of fun.

note to allmaple! get some of those trudeau shirts in, willya? we've been waiting since mid-summer!

last night

2004-09-15T08:52:00.000-04:00

there's nothing quite like being the first one to work in the morning, especially after a lovely scooter ride in what should be rough and wintery weather, but turns out to be rather darling. the ride to work was nice, but i put my new raincoat under the seat, just in case. also under the seat for those interested is a hat, a water bottle, my mileage book (which needs to be swapped with a new one) and pen, insurance card, and owner/operator's manual for yoshi.

for a while i've been thinking of doing a web site that features all of the gear i use when riding the bike, as well as a mileage tracker, and some snaps of yoshi's finer closeups. i've also been thinking of creating a scooter-based event in london called scooterjam where scooter owners and appreciators come by location x to talk bikes, shop, etc.

related, i was toying with the idea of making scooter gear for scooter folks. instead of being forced to wear duds offered by motorcycles (assless chaps, anyone?), or expensive armour (the new bmw catalogue is HellaHot, but way too much cash). i came up with a few things including backpacks, helmets, coats, gloves, raingear, scarves, etc. in this case tho, i've no idea how to move forward with it. i can't really sew well. i know no one who can.

whew. also backburnered right now, but moving up to the bigger front burner so as to get more heat is the HellaBoss redesign. things are moving slowly however, because when i just start moving on a tangent, i see something else online that blows me away and i get caught up in that and lose focus. the HellaBoss stuff now is really starting to look good. i plan to show mostly icons and illustrations on the site. nothing too exciting.

last night's run was okay. i only ran for 10 minutes, but i was really pushing it. i ran about as much as i'd done previously (~17 avg. min run) in 1 go. i did take a brief (untimed) walk to catch my breath.

i started writing in a journal too the other night. the perfect capper to the day. sitting on the new couch under the light and writing down what happend during the day. last night i wrote down what i did to make gourmet spinach grilled cheese (my own recipe) for dinner.

the niffer returns tonight from her folk's place.

how bout those who swing both ways? ac/dcs?

2004-09-13T20:39:00.000-04:00

because of this huge organisational kick i've been on lately (and after reading some interesting bits online..), i've decided to try to redo the way i check email, collect it, keep it, and more.

i came to the realisation today that 99% of emails that i get are messages from people that are updates on their lives. roughly 1% are messages to myself from work, colleagues, files, etc. - or the things that i really need to keep on garbo.

so i've wiped my entire email folder system and started from scratch.

that's tonnes of email from friends and family, my wife, volunteering, etc. all gone. a complete mail refresh.

after thinking about it for a while, i wasn't sure why i was holding onto it. i mean, email from a pal who tells me updates on his or her life is great! i love those kinds of emails. new babies, new houses, lottery winnings, soccer scores, movies they'd like to attend with me/us. those are exciting emails.

but in 2 or 3 months (or with my attention span, tomorrow around 10am) will i remember what they said? will i care? is it wicked not to care*? by that time, i'll have seen them, their babies, houses, sportcars, cotton candy, stereo machines, arnold palmer hand sanitizers, cat odour-supressant, paintjob, nosejob, newjob, and snowjob. by that time, i'll have either a) forgotten their email or b) not cared about the content anymore.

i was hella nervous about it at first. deleting email is a bit like removing part of your memories forever. those emails about setting up going to see ranger rick meets the bobsie twins at rainbow and then out for desert afterwards are great to get and take part in.

but today after looking at emails that were over 1 year old, i realised that the content of the messages weren't important anymore. the mails were planning camping trips which have already taken place, people buying new houses (which i've already been to and commented on in real-life), car dilemmas, and more. what was the point of keeping them around? i'd moved on (especially in terms of my memory - i didn't remember 3/4 of the ~1000 email messages in various folders that i went through, one at a time) and realised i would never look at them again.

so, i took a deep breath, ungrouped the threads in apple's awesome mail application, and started the delete-button-pressing.

i wiped all of my friend folders. all of my job search folders, all of my.. well, actually, i don't remember what other folders i wiped. that's how much i remember a) the contents of the folders, and b) what the actual folders were in the first place.

truth be told, i didn't really pay much attention to the messages in the folders unless they had attachments, which i kept. for about 30 mins while i went through them. i discovered that many of the files with attachments had already had their contents downloaded to garbo. why were they still around? sentimental value? because i wanted to clog email? because i wanted to waste precious hard drive space (by precious i mean this: regardless of the size of my hdd, whenever i get around 1/2 full, i panic. i have 40 gigs left and am getting nervous because i had ~80g. silly. that's a tale for another day, however).

so i wiped them and created a new structure. i created a structure that looks like this:

that's right. from close to 100 folders in the sidebar (hello xpad!), i've now got 3. 5 if you count my inboxes (there is one for my isp mail account, and one for hellaboss).

the way the folders work is this: when mail comes in, i delete it (after reading it, natch) if it's any kind of message from pals that i can reply to quickly. if it's got some important info in it, i flag it and move it to the flags folder. if it's business-oriented, i move it to the appropriate client folder (the client folder breaks down into x subfolders). if the message is something that i need to keep (directions for a camping trip, ideas for a community feature on wtfudge by a pal or two (hi frank!), or something else like that, i've put it into the archived folder.

seems a little odd, but i'm good at keeping an empty inbox. and that's the key to this way of doing things. inboxes need to be empty. after all, they are inboxes. they are the first step to processing digital communication between my contacts and myself. if you've got in and out boxes on your desk at work, you know that it's better to have nothing in the inbox and lots in the outbox (in case the boss walks by). that's how i think email should work. when email comes in, you need to deal with it. read it, keep it if it's important, temporarily keep it for later if you need to think of a longer reply, and/or delete it when you're done with it. keep that inbox clean and clear!

i sat down to think about why i was keeping certain messages and not others. some, i'd realised, i was keeping because the sender wasn't in my address book and i wanted to add them. in that case, rather than keeping them in the inbox, i just added them to the address book, and deleted the mail.

in other cases, they were really good mails with questions i wanted some time to respond to. while i needed to keep them, after i'd answered them, i had no use for them anymore. so i either replied to them, or moved 'em to the flags folder. in other cases, messages were from pals with a new baby that i thought my wife would like to see. instead of holding onto them forever, i forwarded the messsages to her, and wiped them. sounds cruel, but i'd seen the baby in real life. while the pictures were HellaCute™, i didn't need them anymore. but my wife might.

in the end, i cleaned out all my mail messages and feel much better about it, but have some gripes about apple mail that i might not understand yet. maybe you can help:

a) i can't seem to make mail rules that, after i flag a message, move the message to the flagged folder automatically. what is the point of flagging them if i have to move them myself? that seems like just another step in the process.

b) i wish i colour-code or label email messages instead of flagging them. i would love to be able to colour code messages in the same way that i do with my note-taking. blue mails are from work, red are quick messages, etc. while i know i can apply rules that will do this. in some cases i can't apply rules because i don't know the kind of messages they are until after i read them. and once i've read them, i can't change the colours. maybe.

how do you organise your email? any comments or suggestions on how i can make my system work better? can you answer my questions? post away!

*belle and sebastian, the boy with the arab strap.

ps: i also want to clarify that i did wipe messages from my wife. most were either a year old, or "how is your day at work so far?" messages. hardly the stuff i need to keep around, even after they are answered. i'm posting that because there might be some upset about my lack of attachment to messages of sentimental nature.

neato.

2004-09-13T17:34:00.000-04:00

i was experimenting with quicksilver today and found that you can mail from the application. for those who know that already, great. for those (like me) who didn't/don't, it's a pretty amazing feature.

you don't need to lift your fingers from the keys to do this. you just hit applekey+spacebar to bring up the quicksilver submenu, then type [period] and start entering text. hit tab and arrowkey down to "send mail". select who you want to send the message to, and hit return. boom. the message has been sent. and you didn't even have to go into to mail and click any toolbar icons to do it.

spending spree

2004-09-12T21:19:00.000-04:00

this weekend the niffer and i bought a couch, a new mouse, iron-on transfer paper (the reason coming later in the week..), and some blank cds. i finished up a client project which felt good to get rid of (though it was a delightful little project) and i fixed the contextual menu slowness that's been happening on garbo for the last little while.

i also started playing halo again. looking forward to trying out the new mouse with it. the mouse is a microsoft periwinkle wireless usb mouse. so far, it's a great little thing with no wires and a special preference pane that allows me to adjust the tracking, etc. for it.

for the scooter, i bought a new waterproof jacket that prevents me from getting soaked (again).

and my bank account is weeping.

dubs' challenge part deux

2004-09-09T19:54:00.000-04:00

okay, so he hasn't posted his new image yet, but i wanted to get another image in there before he did. and here it is:

that's right dubsie - i'm 1up on you. ;)

upgrade

2004-09-09T11:25:00.000-04:00

new feature at wtfudge: mail this post to your pals. like a post? think a pal could use the note-taking post? click the evelope button beneath the post and email it to a pal of yours.

notoriety

2004-09-08T20:21:00.000-04:00

after reading some interesting (albeit diffused) ideas about note-taking, i've decided to post my current way of doing things for the mildly interested.

i take notes and take notes and take notes. i jot down events, then talk to myself about them on paper. for those who know me, it's a lot like how i act and talk. i go off on tangents, playing with words while i go, composing silly rhymes and songs at the drop of a hat. i'm good at word puzzles and rearranging letters. i love the jumble. i love(d) wheel of fortune when i was a kid. i was good at spelling - and good at misspelling words in ways i thought they should be spelled to make more sense. i like colour, but i love color. like that.

in college, highschool, elementary school, i was a terrible note-taker. in the later levels of education, i had 1" binders stuffed with paper that i didn't use. i wrote down notes in awkward ways (more on that later) and could never find them again. i had coloured cardboard tabs in those binders, but they did nothing but give me a new place do doodle and write down terrible poems, role-playing game stats (rifts was a fave), write about cute girls, and tell brief, 1 paragraph stories to no one in particular.

as i moved out of college and onto a computer, my note-taking skills were supposed to get better. i was supposed to be "getting it" and keeping files and documents in folders on my hard drive where i could find them more easily. i kept documents in my documents folder and images in my images folder. my freelance work was in a freelance folder, and my music was in a music folder. things were good and i was happy.

for about 1 week.

after a while, i created a new folder on my desktop called current projects. i kept all my client freelance work in there. my pictures folder began to include downloaded system icons and album artwork, both of which could be justifiably kept in other folders. i found i create a file and that it could fit into 10 folders at the same time.

i began to save files and make aliases to them in other spots so that they were all linked from the same file. so i could find the files no matter what folder i was in, or on what tangent i was.. on.

all this made for nothing more than confusing folders filled with bits of other files that had no place being where they were. i had documents lying all over the hard drive, often multiple copies of them, which did nothing but confuse me and help fill up my hard drive more quickly.

i posted to my web site for help. i asked others to tell me how they organised their files and folders. suggestions came, but nothing helped.

then, i got to thinking. and acting.

i got up from the computer and got a pad of paper.

i wrote notes. stupid notes again like i did in high school. ones that were related to others. ones with huge arrows that felt like sub-thoughts, like ideas within ideas. things were working well - flowing along. i was happy to be off of the computer to make notes.

then i got fired from an old job that in the end i didn't want anyways. a place where getting mental patients to do your work for you so you don't have to pay employees wasn't the kind of place i wanted to be. luckily, they felt the same way and gave me 5 weeks of severance.

during that time, i hit up the notepad again. only this time, i found a new weapon. then, i found a job placement where i got to employ my new system and found that it worked famously.

and i'm going to share it with you in case you're bonkers like me. the following is written like a gradeschool science fair project experiment summary. sorry for that. i didn't want to do it, but in the end it works. slag through it, won't you?

< purpose >
to write better. to take better notes. to learn more. to communicate with myself better. to remember more. to find information better and more quickly. etc.
< /purpose >

< hypothesis >
i think that this method of writing is great for me to help me take notes and improve my personal, working, and educational life. it may not work for you at all, but i think it will for me. (note: it does. i just needed to fill in this section to go with the overall schema).
< /hypothesis >

< materials >
- 1 piece of paper (or 1 notebook, 1 memopad, 1 forearm, whatever. just as long as you have something on which to write notes. as you'll hear later, graph paper is best - you can draw better grids with it)
- 1 four-colour pen. the kind with the blue bottom and white top. they are made by bic. the seem french. the colours are black, red, green, and blue. the white upper part has a ball on the end for decoration, putting in teeth, tying string around, and otherwise twiddling and fiddling.
< /materials >

< method >
take a piece of paper. lined is good, graph is best. at the top of the page, write the date in black. the black ink of the pen is used for all of the grid-laying. it is the constructor colour. with it, you lay out lines, create arrows, draw boxes, circles, rocks, hens, and picture frames. it is your solid. it is your touchstone. it likes you and likes to help. let it.

anyway, put the date on the page. upper right corner. this is why graph paper's best. you can put the date high up and not lose margin space. or space to other annoying "white space". you can get the most out of the page. and you can turn the page landscape if you want and still have lines to write on. yay graphpaper!

underline the date with black. 2x.

the system of writing the date is important. you must learn to write the date in a new way that isn't like how you did it before, but is incredibly better and makes much more sense than any other way you've been taught. i'd never really been taught. i didn't ever care. i just wrote stuff, left the date off and got lost.

you need to write in descending order. it's the key. the date format is this: XXXX.XX.XX, which can be translated into: YYYY.MM.DD. even further, that's 2004.09.08 (today's date). it is written in descending order because i realised when i was working on my computer that the best way to keep track of a folder was not to label it because labels ended up meaning nothing in the end, but to date and label each folder.

it just seems to make sense to me to write the date this way. you overcome y3k (or whatever) by writing out the entire date. you don't waste time writing wednesday and trying to remember if it's wednsday or wednesday or wensday. you can organise folders in this way too, which helps you keep newly created folders on top of others when you sort by name.

with this system, you can easily see when a note was written and where it should go in case it gets out of order. if you need to (and sometimes i do..), you can go further with it and include the time in the number. 2004.09.08.7.45 is an example of this. i use periods so i don't have to waste time with a colons (2 dots) or on a keyboard, shift semi-colon. who wants that? boo-urns. the date is there for you to see quickly, as is the time if you need it.

now we'll break down the other colours on the pen. they are:
red
green
blue

the red ink is used for quick notes. the red means fire. it means rockets. it means dynamite. it's a dynamic colour and is exciting. notes taken in red are 1 lines long, often less than 10 words. anything over 1 lines needs to go somewhere else.

green ink is a personal note. like a shopping list, to-do list, note about what magazines i'd like to subscribe to, fuel paid at the pump, running times, appointments, etc. green is natural and you're notes to yourself are natural ones.

blue ink is a corporate colour and means work, or professional notes. to-dos at work, meeting minutes, etc. are all blue notes.

coloured notes can be attached to other another. for example, if you're working on a php project and realise that it could help your blog, make a green note about it. if this helps you remember that you need to buy cheese, jot that down in red.

that's an important paragraph because we're at one of the most important steps: arrows and lines. when you take a note and it's related to another, switch to black and arrow them up. you can use lines too, since arrows usually mean that the info goes 1 way and sometimes it doesn't.

i forgot an important part of the process. that's creating a margin. the margin should be a black line that runs down the page (whatever side you want is fine with me) from the top to the bottom. it should be about 4cm from the side of the page where you decide to put it. this is where you keep your main red notes and green notes. while important, they are secondary if you're using this system at work (and i do). in this case, what's important is that you use most of the page for your work notes.

begin to take notes. notice that you can look at a sheet of paper covered with notes and tell them apart by looking at them. you can see how they are connected. you can see what you need to buy at the store on the way home. you can look at a splotch of paper that's covered in ink and not dismiss it because you won't find anything on it. you will.
< /method >

< observation >
i take better notes. i am faster with thoughts. i can get things down on a huge piece of paper and fit lots more onto a page. i find it hard to get lost.
< /observation >

< conclusion >
the system works for me. and i hope it works for you.
< /conclusion >

there are other things too, like where to put the docs when you've filled the sheet. do you keep them around? if so, where? how?

i like to use spiralbound notebooks (sorta*) to note in. the small-ish ones. the ones you can keep under the seat of your scooter if need be, or in your backpack. heck, even xpad (my notepad of choice) is scaled to be that size for when i take notes on my computer. my categories in xpad are blue, mint green, and red, just like my regular notes.

i like the small notebooks. they are quick to get out and quick to put away. and easy to lug around. they are roughly 4cm thick and the metal spirals are roughly 4.5cm in diametre. the ones i use are by hilroy. you can get them a staples, or anywhere.

re: notebooks - binders are annoying. i considered using them for a while, but just couldn't justify the speed lost by having to open and close the binder rings every few minutes to put sheets in, insert others, etc. plus, the paper rips unless you get those ring protectors, and they're annoying and taste gross. so i don't use 'em. i use notebooks.

at first i didn't like notebooks either because you can't add pages if you need to cause there's more to talk about. that's why i use post-it notes too. not the big ones tho. in a pinch, i use the regular-sized ones, but prefer the ~3cm wide ones because they don't obstruct the rest of the page when you stick 'em down. those post-its can contain differently coloured notes just like the pages, but are often red notes because they're so quickly added and removed from the pages.

with this system, you may find that your notes are better taken and more easily read. the only thing that might seem geeky about it (well, aside from the fact that you've got a system to write freaking notes..) is that you're clicking your pen every few minutes in meetings or class. but sometimes it's fun to watch others flip out when you click it to draw black lines every few seconds.

ahh. give it a try and let me know what you think!

* by sorta, i mean that i'd prefer that they were filled with graph paper. in this way, i've overlooked the missing graph paper for the convenience of the size of the book.

that's why i'm looking at picking up a moleskine book in the coming weeks that's filled with graph paper that'll help me take notes better. once i get it, i'll post aboot it and let you know how it goes.

blewger

2004-09-08T18:41:00.000-04:00

today was the day the blogger blew.

i wrote the previous entry this morning at around 8am or so and tried to upload it for 5 minutes when i eventually got a timed out message. i attempted it again and quit halfway through. later this morning, i checked my "edit posts" list and found that both times i'd attempted to upload the entry, they had been recorded and not displayed.

after seeing that, i tried to remove an entry by clicking delete. again, it timed out. i wasn't sure if the entry was there or gone and decided to leave it for a few hours.

finally, today at around 3pm i tried to upload the post again and it finally got through.

i understand that it's a free service that i am thankful for, but this isn't the first time that the ability to make a post has crapped out on me.

cheatin' hart

2004-09-08T07:08:00.002-04:00

HellaPod is fully charged and ready to go for the day ahead at work. added rage against the machine yesterday, and edited my 'fourty ounce' playlist (my top 40 tracks) for a change of pace.

i'll be taking the scooter again because the niffer needs the car again. she required it yesterday too, so i rode yoshi to work in 16 tonnes of driving rain and wound up rather soaked to the bone. i was so wet that i had to borrow a pair of pants from a coworker. my little rain jacket didn't work very well (mainly because of the straps of my backpack, i'll wager.

so i went to wal*mart at lunch and bought what looked to be a fine, full-body variant of what i was wearing earlier in the day. i don't think it's waterproof. after work tonight i'll be going to novacks to have a look at their raingear (as i'm sure that it's all waterproof) and see if it's any better (of if i like it..). i'll be returning the gear i bought yesterday on the weekend.

i've also been turned onto the magic of xml and rss after downloading newsfire and putting some of my fave weblogs into it. sometimes i don't feel like going to sites and this is a perfect way to see what's been updated.

including wtfudge (atom).

work continues unabated

2004-09-07T07:17:00.000-04:00

my street is being torn up to put down new drain pipes. this morning when the niffer left for work, she was greeted by a huge dump truck parked in front of the driveway. luckily i've the scooter and can just whip down the sidewalk if need be to get around the steel beasts.

running in this construction zone has been difficult. avoiding exposed drainpipes and leftaround equipment, negotiating very uneven ground (3' drops in some places between the sidewalk and the street), and muddy intersections. that's the excuse i'm using for not having done it in 3 days. that, and it was a holiday weekend.

this weekend was a good one however. got lots done including hosting jeremy and greg, bbq and swimming (x2), planting our new pear tree (perry), trimming hedges, mowing lawn, weeding front walkway, client freelance projects, and more.

looking forward to work today. moy out.

dubs' challenge

2004-09-03T22:38:00.000-04:00

well dubs, your challenge has been answered. not quite what i had in mind, but cool enough. hope it meets your strict standards. not only got HellaPod in there, but also 7 of me (the 6 reflected images, plus the real me who is somewhere in the image).

if anyone else would like to take the ipod photo challenge, please take a snap and post a link to it in the comments!

fudge, if you'd prefer, take snaps of either a) your ipod, b) your mac set up, or c) your pc set up and post links to them. the more the merrier! :)

casualday

2004-09-03T09:23:00.000-04:00

ride to work today was delightful but the weather is certainly turning colder. or maybe it's just that i keep wearing t-shirts under my riding jacket™? whatever the case, it is cold, but still lovely and i hope to keep it up until at least november. especially if this year's anything like last year.

i love the ipod. did i tell you that before? my current fave thing now is to use ical like a mofo and sync it to the ipod. i find myself going through my contact list and updating people's records just so that i can see more info on it too. i'm at the point in my address book that i've got all my names in there, and all have as much info as i can find for them. i am disappointed that aim/ichat names don't sync over however.

another thing that excites me about the ipod is that it's a firewire device. never having one of those before, i'm glad to have a device that can plug into those sad and fast little ports in the side of my computer. any time i unplug them (which is rarely because i always charge the pod via the computer and not using the attached powerbrick), i switch the ports so they all get used. silly, yes?

i downloaded more music last night. 2 tracks by cibo matto and 2 by mason jennings. the tracks are so good that i'm going to buy the cds this weekend. speaking of which, pals of mine are coming down to visit on saturday to kick it with the niffer and i. we're both excited aboot that idea.

futureshop today is selling gba:sp for $99cdn. get one before the ds comes out! i'm going to wait until just after the ds comes out so that i can get one downtown at a pawn shop for $hellacheap.

in true moy style, i already grown weary the sidebar header type. that may change today.

< update >
sidebar type updated with HellaBoss fave, rosewood.
< /update >

< update part 2 >
new title too. hated the plainjane text. wtfudge now brought to you by HellaBoss heavy industries, inc. let's turn this motherfudging party out!
< /update part 2 >

ya, ya, ya

2004-09-02T12:29:00.000-04:00

finally got around to making some changes to the sidebar including replacing the sidebar titles with a more wranglin' typeface (giddyup std set at 26 point, strong) that is more fun and less-fancy than the one set by todd dominey at what do i know. sorry todd, i think the old sidebar was nice, but a little too fancy for me.

also, i've added links to the sites i read on a regular basis. be sure to check them out. yes, i've added HellaBoss at the top of the list (and bolded it). if you're not on the list and think you should be, let me know and i'll add you. the list is certainly one in progress.

nonmac

2004-09-02T08:53:00.000-04:00

last night i spent a few hours working on some client projects: a poster and a brochure. i haven't tackled the brochure yet, but the poster is looking pretty fine. i'm using lots of gradients and drop shadows on the project, which, while it may sound like a trashy prospect, it isn't. things are looking good. i'm trying for a plasticine look for everything on the page, as though the items are floating from the page. and so far, so good.

in other news my old pals jeremy and greg are aiming to come to london for an actual visit in the next couple of weekends. the niffer and i are both very excited.

good eats are pretty fine last night. the episode was all about cooking in pouches.

sorta kinda

2004-09-01T10:31:00.000-04:00

i was looking on my ipod last night for a few songs that i had in itunes but weren't in my ipod for some reason. couldn't figure it out at all. it was getting odd too, because whenever i performed an ipod update, i would lose 5 songs or so. it was driving me a little batty. was checking all over the winternet for answers. apple discussions, ipodlounge, etc. nothing. just "sometimes if you pirate music you can't do it" and "install the latest system software", both answers i was already quite aware of.

if you're having this trouble, try this:

in the ipod prefs, you may have (like i did..) "sync only these playlists when you perform and ipod update" checked off. if so, check the "sync all tracks in all playlists" instead and perform a sync. all of your music should be on the ipod now (if it's not, i can't help you). from there, change back to "sync only these elite playlists" and have all the playlists checked off so you'll be syncing them all. uncheck them one by one and perform an update each time you uncheck a list item. you'll find the culprit list and you can choose not to sync it.

in my case, i'd created a few lists: "ancient additions", "recent additions", etc. when i was syncing, i had "recent.." unchecked so the songs in that list weren't copying over. i'd been assuming (which makes an ass of you and me, i know, i know) that all tracks were syncing and that the playlists were just a bonus, that the ipod was organising the tracks into the playlists like itunes does. but it wasn't. it was only pulling songs in the checked-off playlists to the ipod and not all of them and then the playlists. does that make sense?

okay..

the way itunes seems to work is this (please refute in the comments - i would love to figure this out!):

insert a cd into your computer (this is mac/pc i'm talking aboot. and be sure it's one that you own, by the way - don't pirate music! if you download a track and hate it, delete it. if you get one you like, buy the cd. onward..) and if you're connected to the web, itunes queries the cddb (cd database) and gets all the track names, album names, track times, (oddly, not cd cover art, which it should), genre, etc. and updates the track list.

you click import and itunes rips the tracks with the queried info in the format you specify (in preferences. i use aac quality all the time and actually have a playlist called "non aac?" where any files not ripped in aac format go so i can see if i need to clean up the list) to your master playlist. you can eject the disc now.

from there, you can create custom playlists or smart playlists (this is how i do the non aac one). you can either drag tracks from your master list into the sidebar-situated playlist you created (the icon is light blue), or itunes will do it for you based on the rules you specify (all songs over 5 minutes in length, for example. purple icon).

the way i see it, your songs all reside in the main/root playlist and the contents of the other playlists are shortcuts to the tracks in your main list.

shew!

this is how i'd assumed the ipod sync worked. that you had one main playlist and that the other ones just linked to the main list via shortcuts. that was my sync problem. i was only importing certain playlists because i was assuming the contents of those lists were pulling from the entire collection that was hiding on the ipod (in an invisible folder, by the way). not the case. if you import a playlist, it imports only that list and the songs contained therein. all others are left behind.

likely repeating myself a bit here a few times over, but i get it. do you?

more on the imac gee five

2004-08-31T17:39:00.000-04:00

a few other thoughts after looking at this picture for a short while:

why isn't apple using their wireless mice and keyboards with this computer? the cables in the back seem to go completely against the aesthetic they're going for (that being, as far as i can see, a clean and uncluttered setup). using wireless components would be the perfect ways to reduce cable clutter to only the power cable.

does apple actually write the text on the wall of the booth? or do they use projectors from overhead? they could likely save some money by projecting onto a simple background rather than having a wall printed every time. if they project from a high enough angle, there would be no one in the way to break up the image too.

the comments i made earlier about the computer's lack of balance come into play when you look at the vertical ports on the back, right side of the unit. i think it looks pretty silly to have the cables all coming out of that side, not to mention weighted when you consider that there will be keyboard, ipod, mouse, external drive, network, printer, random usb, dv camcorder, etc. cables pouring out of that side. also, and i've not had my hands on it yet, so i can't really say for certain, but all of those cables would severely hinder the unit's ability to rotate on the y-axis. depending on the set up, the unit would lose a fair amount of it's rotating power (when i'm saying rotate, i'm referring to it's tipping forward - up and down, it just makes the computer sound wealthy to say tipping power).

i think the perfect way for apple to brand this package is to offer a wireless package with it that includes the basic computer, plus an airport extreme, wireless mouse and wireless keyboard. that would be a) very freeing by way of reducing cable clutter and b) help them move product.

ahh. just some more thoughts. time to recharge the ipod. did you know that HellaPod can hold a solid charge for 7+ hours of continual play so far with ~20% to go? course, i'm basing that on about 4 pixels so it might be off by a bit. :)

frank, chris j., your names aren't on the to-evolt "confirmed and coming" list. wtfudge is up with that?

gee!

2004-08-31T09:20:00.000-04:00

new imac released today at macworld paris and i've got to say that at first, i wasn't all over it.

the main problem i was having was the stand vs. the media-rom drive. i was worried that if someone tried to push in a disc, they'd topple their computers in the effot. i mean, i've one of the old slot-loader tangerine imacs (named tang imac, natch) and the drive's a little "chewy" in that sometimes it feels like i'm pushing a little hard to get that disc in there. either that or there's just a lot of mechanical things going on to pull the disc in. i'm nervous that the act of putting in a disc will cause the screen to wobble too much, or that people just won't want to reach up to put a disc in, or take one out.

i am also a little nervous by the shape. it think it's a bit bricky. i think if they're going to make a tablet, lose the back support.

that said, it's not a tablet. it's a desktop computer. time to look at the good things:

17 and 20" displays. their low-end is my high-end. brilliant decision to go with huge displays, and to have the computer mimic the new studio displays released a few months ago.

the ability to hang the display on the wall is a great idea, and really pushes apple into the "home entertainment" area people keep bugging them about. one of these on the wall next to the stereo components, at a trade show, or on the wall in the nurse's station in a hospital linked to patient monitors is the perfect place for this tool.

it's g5. in a megathin case. based on this, i'm not sure how far away powerbook g5s are, that is, as the u.s. prison system knows, a good thing.

in the end, i'm excited for these new systems and excited to read more about them as people get their hands on them.

what do you think of the new imac?

ate

2004-08-30T13:20:00.000-04:00

ohyah, bbedit 8.0 is out. from the outset, it seems to have an incredible number of additions including one i've wanted for a while - a document drawer to keep track of all of your open files. the old, multi-window was was getting pretty lame. this new method of keeping all the files in in the same drawer, selectable now, seems cool enough.

while we're at it, barebones seems to have redesigned their web site as well (there are still some straggling pages), but things look pretty sharp. additionally, the bb logo seems to be become a red gear as well.

i never really liked the purple on purple thing anyway.

what do you think of bbedit 8.0's feature list? anything there you're keen on?