-
- My Favorite Music of 2007
-
2007 was a great year for hardcore music junkies such as myself. Today, as the year comes to an end, I wanted to highlight some of the best songs to pass through my ear canals. So here it goes…
-
- Advocates vs. Practitioners vs. Practicality
-
New technologies are popping up at a relentless pace today and staying relevant is now more of an issue than ever. Almost every day there is another new emerging tool along with many advocates promoting how it will change everything. But will it?
-
- What’s on Your Front Page?
-
In the process of redesigning this blog I’ve been stuck on the homepage. What on Earth should I feature on the homepage? Who cares what I put on the homepage? Who is going to the homepage?
-
- My blog up and down this week.
-
If you went to my blog and noticed things were funny or that I’m missing a post you aren’t imagining things. Earlier this week my site got hijacked by some sort of spammer that installed a backdoor in my wordpress install. For a while you could see all of the files on my site including my configuration files tied to the database powering this blog. Bad news.
-
- Geezeo: Get a grip on your finances!
-
I run my own personal business and have a day job. So I have double the fun when it comes to monitoring my checking and savings accounts. On top of that I have credit cards for myself and my business, an auto loan, and a student loan. Managing all of that can be pretty hectic. Fortunately, I’ve discovered an awesome free web 2.0 service called Geezeo and all I can say is this thing frickin rocks!
-
- An Awesome Surprise from The Blakes
-
Tonight I popped up my favorite album from last year, The Blakes self titled album, and to my surprise I saw some new cover art come up in the “More from this artist” box in iTunes. I didn’t hear of a new CD coming from them and indeed I was faked out. It looks like they got picked up by a label due to their popularity and thus have been given the resources to reproduce their debut album in higher quality. If you already have the Blakes original album this duplicate album is worth picking up as you’ll get 4 new tracks from them. But even better, the entire album now sounds much more vibrant. This is some high-def Seattle indie grunge rock. Don’t miss it! My favorite album of 2006 is now my favorite album of 2007.
Just in case you want to make sure you are getting the new copy – here is the original artwork from 2006:
And here is the new artwork from 2007:
-
- UI12 in Review
-
A week ago from today I was flown out to Boston to attend the UI12 conference held by User Interface Engineering. The entire experience was extremely pleasant. I saw many great presentations from speakers the likes of Cameron Moll, Luke Wroblewski, Scott Berkun, Gerry McGovern, and Jared Spool.
-
- Vector Magic: The coolest thing since sliced bread?
-
There are many tools reserved for the lucky few who have the luxury to afford and use Adobe’s Creative Suite. One of them is the livetrace tool in Illustrator. Using livetrace a photograph does not always work out quite that well, it also eats up all of your system resources to perform traces on highly detailed images. To that point, when I first saw Vector Magic, a project from Stanford University, I didn’t think much of it at first. But after using it I can’t help but highly recommend it!
Here’s why
- It’s completely free.
- The software is web based so there is no installation and more importantly the processing is done remotely from my machine.
- It’s incredibly easy, the process is straightforward and the UI guides you through every step clearly.
- Most importantly it works GREAT! I think it can trace photos better than illustrator’s livetrace.
You can even share your images if you’d like. I tried it on one of my photos. You can see the results of a photo I took last week at Harvard Square.
-
- Hawaii
-
Consciousness has been illusive at best. I departed from Honolulu yesterday at 10pm and arrived back in Phoenix at 8am this morning. Thus marks the end of my eight days on the islands of Hawaii.
I have posted a zip file containing a handful of the photos I’ve taken for your viewing pleasure. Some of the highlights of the trip included Kayaking in Kona, cris-crossing a valley in Kuaui via zip line (video link is not me I didn’t have my camera for this), exploring the volcano national park in Hilo, and above all exploring the city of Honolulu and enjoying the beaches off of Diamond Head state park just 10 minutes away from the city. I was really surprised at how active the city is at night.
The thing about Hawaii is that it seems so distant and isolated that you couldn’t live there. I got this vibe through most of the towns I visited, but I have to say Honolulu is exempt from this feeling. The amount of activity during at night puts other laid back cities like San Diego to shame. The city has a perfect balance of activity to it, it’s a busy place but relaxing at the same time.
And did I mention that it’s extremely clean? Sidewalks are made of flagstone instead of concrete, beaches are plentiful, night markets, rooftop live music venues, high end shopping districts, and a wide variety of bars and unique restaurants compliment the beauty of the Hawaiian landscape. That is what impressed me so much: the city is so nice that it ranks as one of my favorite cities to hang out in, but it’s also in Hawaii.
There are so many great trails for cycling, as well as mountain biking, the beaches are some of the cleanest you will venture upon, and there are more unique sports in Hawaii including groups of cyclers, surfers, hang gliders, parasurfers (video is obviously not me, I didn’t get to try this but would like to take a lesson), and more. The amount of outdoor activities is endless. By the end of the day you’ll realize that the awesome night life of the town is just the icing on the cake. What a great place to be.
-
- A New Face For Sitewire.
-
I’m proud today to announce that we have finally finished putting enough spit and polish onto the new Sitewire web page that it’s ready for public attention. I handled all of the design, flash work, and html/css development while balancing other projects brought to me within Sitewire. The experience has been hectic at times but overall unique. For example, during the design phase of the project I wasn’t allowed to work in the office so I worked remotely from nearby coffee shops around town. Even more interesting – we rented truckloads of photography and lighting equipment and converted our office kitchen into a makeshift photo studio to do a staff-wide photo shoot as we didn’t have the time or the budget to accomplish at a professional studio.
A lot of things happened simultaneously during this project. Design concepts and brainstorming were being developed the same time as messaging and copy. This made both phases of the project a little less efficient from a time perspective but much more collaborative as both design inspired new copy and new copy inspired new ideas for design. Though things felt a bit hectic at times, I’m fairly pleased with the final result. The site is a bit heavy, but overall it’s pretty solid. So with that being said I present to you the new Sitewire.com. Take a look and share your thoughts whenever you get a chance.