Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Every now and again you get to do something really unusual and fun. We recently got to do one of those projects: a video for the Spiceworks annual IT user conference. It has zombies, bacon, an orange dinosaur, nerf guns, explosions, and more. Check it out:

Do me a favor: if you like it, favorite it and share it with your friends.

What I went through to order my iPhone 4S:

• First, I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade because the account was past due.
• I logged into AT&T to check.
• Called my wife to confirm she hadn’t made payment.
• Made payment.
• Went back to Apple to purchase iPhone and was eligible.
• Went through several screens and it changed our plan.
• Went to AT&T website to purchase instead but iPhone was gone.
• Logged out and back in.
• Got the iPhone purchase screen and followed the prompts.
• Discovered the plan changes were required by AT&T.
• Couldn’t find explanation of whether it would fuck up my family plan. It probably will.
• Went back to Apple because I trust them more.
• Went through the purchasing prompts.
• Debit card was declined.
• Tried again.
• Debit card was cancelled.
• Remembered that AT&T called me yesterday because they shipped me a new card because my existing one had been compromised.
• DROVE HOME.
• Picked up the new card and activated it while driving back to the office.
• Tried to purchase iPhone 4S AGAIN.

And I finally placed a successful order.

Here’s something cool for front end developers: a Firefox plugin that turns a page’s DOM tree into a 3D visualization that you can interact with. From the Mozilla website:

Tilt is a Firefox extension that lets you visualize any web page DOM tree in 3D. It is being developed by Victor Porof (3D developer responsible with the Firefox extension itself), along with Cedric Vivier (creating a WebGL optimized equivalent to the privileged canvas.drawWindow, see #653656) and Rob Campbell (who first thought about creating a 3D visualization of a webpage). Everything started initially as a Google Summer of Code project, but now, with an enthusiastic team behind it and so many new features and ideas, it has become an active Developer Tools project.

"Once your brand is on Facebook, the question becomes: How you engage those fans and sustain a meaningful online dialogue with your customers."

It’s the little things that count. I drove to Starbucks this morning, waited in line for a while, got up to the counter to order my coffee…and realized I didn’t have my wallet on me. I asked the barista to hold my order while I checked my car and, when I didn’t find it there, I drove straight home, panicking that I might have lost it somewhere.

At home I found it on the nightstand, right where I left it the night before. Kissed my boy on the head again. Kissed my wife again. Left the house and drove to Starbucks again.

When I got there, the barista was so happy to see me because, on my first visit, she had sensed my dismay and made me a cup of coffee on the house. And when I drove off she wasn’t able to give it to me.

That made my day just a little bit brighter.

Just works my ass. I needed a FAQ just to empty the trash can.

I’m not a huge fan of ‘the fold’ but I am a fan of content. Can you find it in this:

In case you’re curious, the top edge of the article title is 800 pixels from the top edge of the page. AOL paid over $300 million dollars and that’s what they got for their money.

Below is a list of books that I’ve bought but either haven’t read or haven’t finished reading. The majority of them are Sitepoint books. That’s because Sitepoint occasionally runs ridiculous deals where you can buy their books dirt cheap.

One day I hope to have time to read some of these.

This is a good starting point for crystallizing what you want to achieve with your business and how you're going to go about doing it.

I wanted to pull in my tweets, photos and bookmarks and the old format just didn’t work the way I wanted it too. The tweets and links were the things that were updated the most frequently but they were far enough below the fold that my site looked like it was rarely, if ever, updated.

So I switched over to the default 2010 theme and added the feeds.

From here I’ll work on a new design for the site and, in the meantime, there will be fresh content populating the homepage every day.