Fox Jumping on Trampoline

Coding away at the Hacienda

Working today on an exiting project with a deadline in a couple weeks. Always doing something...

Subwoofer Cat

Cancelling Tivo and Cable

You know, something that really upsets me is when a company makes it purposefully hard to sever your relationship with them. I believe this should be illegal. For instance, there is no way to cancel tivo service from your account online. In fact, anything you look up about canceling is actually just articles about how stupid it would be to cancel and how you just don't understand the value. So you have to call... you select the option for billing issues, then for cancellation. You are then subjected to 16 minutes, not of just holding, but holding to energetic music with a voiceover telling you how "if you're thinking of using a cable company's dvr, think again" and that you have no idea how valuable your tivo is. Then the customer service rep picks up (finally... I'll be setting up new service would not have put me on hold so long) and she gives me the same spiel. I have to listen to her talk, even after cutting her off mid-sentence... she picked it up anyway.... And I had to explain why it is that I was cancelling. Then... back on hold for a few more minutes... finally the cancellation.

Now don't get me wrong... I liked the tivo service, but times are different now, every penny counts, and well, most content I want is available over the air and over the net.

Cancelling cable tv was an entirely different matter... worse... I wanted to cancel my tv and change my internet cable package but that was like opening a huge can of worms... they wouldn't give me the online price, the people online couldn't do it for me... I must be wrong about the rates I was reading on their website (after logging in to my account), etc etc etc.

Anyway, I'm not the only person out there "decabling" - check out http://decabled.com/

The Macbook Wheel

This is hilarious




Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Picasa for the Mac

Today iWork '09 and iLife '09 were released, but yesterday, news of another photo management suite on the mac was making it's rounds.

Very interesting TED talk on Chinese Food

Long time, No Write

I know, I know… First let me say Merry Christmas. The season brings a lot of reasons to write and start trying to bring communities of friends back together. And with that, some of the current projects on my plate.

DekiWiki

From MindTouch, I’ve been slowly replacing some cobbled-together legacy infrastructure based on wordpress, mediawiki, phpbb, etc with a dekiwiki. So far it has been able to replace all that software and more.

Firewall

I’ve replaced my Endian based firewall with a symantec SGS 1620 from ebay, and I must say that it is an extremely capable unit that so far is handling everything we through at it, save for one exception… A webserver I use sends what the SGS considers an invalid response and refuses to pass the traffic.

Browsers

Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Konqueror and Flock. I have been back and forth more than I’d like to be, which is more an indication that none of them stand out and are perfect by themselves. On the mac, I am still using safari full time, and on windows I have been leaning toward chrome, but not for any google integration, just for speed and simplicity without sacrifice. On Linux, it’s still firefox.

Design

I still have been working on some design projects, but nothing I am releasing at this time. I have been working on Mail.app templates, general art and logos, as well as some internal designs on novcon.

House

Everything is at a new location now, all wired up, but had a very hard time getting a broadband connection out here. But now the office and everything is all set up and back in operation. And most importantly, the cat has settled down.

Tidying Up Art

I was rolling from this one...

Flock 2.0 Beta2

I downloaded the latest beta of Flock 2 (I'm a little behind, I know) and I must say the speed improvement is pretty good. I was hoping for some fresh UI additions though, so far none. Not to say the the UI is dated, but Flock is known for a very clean/modern UI and for keeping up with design. This post is being sent from inside flock as a test as well. The blog editor is simple, but adequate.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Mail.App Stationery Templates

I've designed a few templates for Mail.App's stationery feature. Please check out the templates here.

Common Craft explains social media

I love Common Craft, and they have yet another video, this time explaining social media.