Category Archives: Miscellaneous

On being happy.

Reply

I was originally going to title this post “On following your passion,” but that wasn’t entirely correct. That’s because this post was inspired by a new blog I stumbled across, Study Hacks, written by Cal Newport. The post was “Can I Be Happy as an Investment Banker? The Difference Between Pursuing a Lifestyle and Following Your Passion.” I know. Long title, but it’s a good article.

The fact is that most of us do pursue a lifestyle rather than following our passions. I did it without even realizing it. Of course, my lifestyle choice was stability for my family. But along the way that also included a big house, two cars, big screen TVs, game systems, and all the usual trappings of a modern, 21st century American lifestyle. And I sought out jobs that afforded me those comforts.

I’ve always said that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But that might be a lie I’ve told myself for the last twenty years. That’s a hard truth, isn’t it? That you’ve been lying to yourself for two decades.

I love writing. And I love comedy. I enjoy design and, to a lesser extent, programming. I crave learning new things. It’s that craving that’s let me park my career in idle for the whole of my 30s because my jobs have required me to constantly learn new things. I’ve reached a point though where that’s just not enough anymore.

What does that mean? I don’t know. Addiction to a lifestyle is like any other addiction. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. That’s all this is. Me admitting that I have a problem. I don’t know what comes next.

Vice President Al Gore and Facebook’s Sean Parker sit down for a chat at SXSW

Reply

The topic was causes.

I was struck by how awkward of a public speaker Al Gore is, even now. His attempts to plug Current TV were clumsy enough to elicit a few groans from the crowd.

At the end, when Sean plugged Causes and prefaced it with “Now’s the portion of the session devoted to shameless plugs,” the VP redeemed himself with a joke. “Wait, there’s a portion devoted to shameless plugs?” (Try to imagine that in Al Gore’s voice.)

Note: those quotes are paraphrased. I was too busy trying to get the above photo to write down the exact quotes. I don’t know how photo journalists do it.

Billy Corgan doesn’t get it.

12

I didn’t go to the “SXSW Dual Conversation: The End of Business As Usual” panel, so I’m commenting on an article on Digital Savant written about the panel. It could be that I missed critical context or tone to the discussion that took place.

It sounds like Billy Corgan has accepted the changed landscape that the digital world and, perhaps more importantly, the fans have imposed on the music industry. He’s accepted it, but it sounds like he still doesn’t get it.

He said the solution to the problem (“problem” was not clearly defined, at least not in the Digital Savant article) was for the fans to support the music they like. Well, duh. But that’s not exactly the whole of it. He’s laying the music industry’s woes entirely at the feet of fans. Bullshit. Everybody had a hand in that pie. We already know how the music industry and, more specifically, the record labels / RIAA fucked things up. No need to rehash that. No, I want to point a finger at the artists themselves for a moment.

And not artists like Metallica who went after their own fans with cops and lawyers. Those douchebags are in the same bucket as the RIAA as far as I’m concerned. Though they did that with the same underlying motive that Billy Corgan alluded to in his SXSW conversation.

I’m pointing a finger at artists like Billy Corgan because what he’s upset about is not that he can’t make a damn good living as a musician, but that he has to work more to make less. And that’s kind of reasonable, unless we’re talking about millions of dollars, in which case, fuck you Billy Corgan. Or, put another way…

Oops, your sense of entitlement is showing.

Or, put a third way…

I think you just stepped on your dick.

Look. I’m sorry you can’t make MEGA millions anymore. I’m sorry that, as a performer, a good chunk of your income in the future will come from, well, performing. If you’re a smart performer, you’ll probably make another huge chunk of change from merchandise. But I get it. It’ll never replace the gold that used to rain down from the sky with each breath you took in the Before Time.

At the end of the day though, you’re going to be a lot happier if you get over that.

New (responsive) site design

Reply

New look for a new year (or a new SXSW). More importantly, a responsive look. Go ahead, resize your browser. Make it as big or as small as you want. The content will be sized to fit. Not bad eh?

The site runs on WordPress and I built a Twentyeleven child theme. The Twentyeleven framework did most of the heavy lifting on the responsiveness.

I had some fun with the typography. All open source or free. I’m using Lobster for the logo text, League Gothic for the main navigation, Ostrich Bold for the sidebar section titles, Museo Slab for titles, and Museo Sans for body copy. The design has only two images: the logo and the picture of me in the bottom left corner. I’m sure That’ll probably change, but not much.

Since this was launched in very little time and with very little sleep and during the distractions of SXSW, it wasn’t fully browser tested. It’s probably horribly broken in a dozen different ways. If you see something broken, please leave me a comment letting me know about it, because that is the path to good karma and enlightenment.

Thoughts on SXSW 2012 (So Far)

Reply

SXSW was wet, then hungover, then wet again.

I have to preface this post with the fact that I missed Friday because I stayed home with strep throat. I didn’t want to be patient 0 and ruin SXSW for God knows how many people. And, because I have strep, I’m on antibiotics, which means I can’t drink. I know most of you would still go to the parties, but I’m what people call a “social drunk,” sometimes known as a sober introvert. So even though I made it to Saturday, I went home after the last session to put my son to bed after watching an episode of Dr. Who with him (the Library episode with River Song).

There are some advantages to not going until Saturday. It took me less than 10 minutes to get my badge and my bag. I had an extra day to look over the schedules and bookmark interesting sessions. I wasn’t at all hung over Saturday morning. And… that’s about it.

I always run into local friends that I haven’t seen all year. I have just as many non-local friends in town, but I always have the hardest time finding any of them. Today it was Matt Fangman. He and I are both interested in storytelling this year. Luckily, there seems to be a lot of sessions devoted to that. Visual storytelling, storytelling for your brand/company/marketing campaign, actual storytelling, talks with storytellers, well, you get the drift.

I ended up looking at the wrong day and missed “Does Your Product Have a Plot.” If anyone went to that and sees this, please send me your notes! (A good nights sleep apparently wasn’t that great of an advantage.) Baratunde Thurston’s keynote “How to Read the World,” was good. I would summarize it if I could, but I can’t. You had to be there.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Not sure what I’m going to yet. I might start out with the Yoga though. It might just make me alert enough to look at the schedule for the right day.

Zombies vs T-Rex: Epic Battle

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.

My iPhone 4S purchasing odyssey

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.

Visualize your Web page in 3D with Tilt

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.

A free cup of coffee

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.

The Huffington Fold

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

Screenshot of the Huffington Post

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.

Behind on my reading.

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.

Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design

Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design

The Art & Science of CSS

The Art & Science of CSS

Create Stunning HTML Email

Create Stunning HTML Email

Don't Make Me Think

Don’t Make Me Think


Fancy Form Design

Fancy Form Design

JQuery Novice to Ninja

JQuery Novice to Ninja

365 AIGA Year in Design

365 AIGA Year in Design

Online Marketing Inside Out

Online Marketing Inside Out


Photography for the Web

Photography for the Web

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes

The PHP Anthology

The PHP Anthology

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design


The Principles of Project Management

The Principles of Project Management

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Design

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

Sexy Web Design

Sexy Web Design: Create Stunning Web Interfaces

Simply SQL

Simply SQL

Excuse the mess

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.

New Years Resolutions, 2011 Edition

  1. Project 365
    Post an image to Flickr every day for a year. I posted the rules for this resolution over the weekend.
  2. Get in shape
    I’m going to deliberately leave this one vague. In the past I’ve had goals to gain weight or add muscle, but I’ve never been so completely out of shape. Karina and I are starting yoga with our friend this week and we’ll go from there.
  3. Work/life balance
    Last year I had becoming a better project manager on my list of goals and I achieved that goal. This year I want to focus on managing my design team and cutting my hours back to 40 a week (while still getting everything done).
  4. Spend more time with my family
    This is the real reason for seeking a better work/life balance. I want quality time with my wife and I want to do more stuff with Ashton.
  5. Create personal projects
    Again, being vague. I don’t want to limit what I work on but I definitely want to do some interesting things outside of work this year to stretch myself creatively.
  6. Do some writing
    I’ll eventually sort out my blog and make it work for the kind of posting I want to do, but aside from that, I want to write some fiction. I’m not sure if I’m going to to do that during NaNoWriMo or not, but I think I’d like to try the Cory Doctorow 250 words a day plan before November.

That’s it. A short but open-ended list for the year. What are your resolutions?

Project 365, Take 2

New Year's Eve Fireworks

New Year's Eve Fireworks

This is my second attempt at a Project 365. I hear that’s normal. Rather than having to take and post a picture every single day for a year, which would not only be tedious but nearly impossible with work and family, my goals are more modest this time around.

I want to post something every day for a year.

It will usually be photos and they will usually be posted within a week of being shot, but I might also throw in sketches, wireframes, moodboards, design comps, etc.

The goal here is to be creative, hold myself to a publishing schedule and not otherwise limit myself.

The Future of Web Design (FOWD) in NYC, Part I

I’m taking notes from all my sessions and I’ll be posting those later and then updating them with links to presentations and such as I get them (and have time to post them).

It’s been very interesting meeting so many different people from all over the country and from across the pond. The biggest surprise so far has been running into so many non-technical people, from people running charitable organizations to traditional designers to marketers and businesspeople. I’ve only actually run into a handful of web designers or developers.

Lunch is almost over on day 1. More to come later.

Ping (and Apple) Want to Invade My Privacy

I wanted to check out Apple’s new social media thing, Ping, so I downloaded the new version of iTunes and installed it. I turned the service on and it brought me to an account setup screen that displayed my first and last name in form fields with the message:

The name you enter is also the name associated with your account’s billing information. Any previous reviews that you have written with a nickname will now display the name you list here instead of that nickname. To remove any reviews you have written from the iTunes Store, go to your account and click Manage Reviews.

Not only is it eroding your privacy and forcing you to use your real name for things you had previously done under a username/pseudonym, but it’s retroactively pinning your real name to things you had previously done under a username.

That’s not acceptable. Anybody who wrote a review did so with the understanding that their personal information was anonymous. In my case, the two are close enough that it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, but for a lot of other people it does.

And look, I get that Facebook uses real names and everybody wants to get on the Facebook bandwagon and, OMG, you could attach a much higher dollar value to my profile if you could associate it with me the person instead of me the random anonymous user. But you know what, fuck you. I’m not here to service your bottom line.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I probably won’t be using Ping.

p.s. This is my instant reaction. I reserve the right to calm down later but I doubt I’ll change my position. I’m just getting fed up with companies constantly trying to extract more and more of my information for their use.