Last CD Bought: Rob Thomas' new album

Song Playing Right Now: Nickel Back "Flat on the Floor"

Five songs I listen to a lot: Right now I have the nickel back album playing over and over again, but I heard a Linkin Park doing vocal on a Xecutioners song and I loved it. Can't find it to buy it as a download. "It's Going Down".

For a while now I have been wanting to try the VoIP service from Sub Rocket. I found their service named in an article on Clark Howard’s website. I called "Vongage" and everyone I spoke to did not have English as a first language. It was very frustrating because I wasn't asking your average questions. I had called BellSouth (my DSL and landline) and asked if I could get VoIP, they said yes, another company could indeed give my VoIP as long as BellSouth was allowed to piggyback on the phone number with the DSL line, but the trick is not to cut off my phone line with BellSouth at first, because it would then kill the DSL. So I would have to get the new service, confirm that they can piggyback, and then call BellSouth back and have them cancel the phone and use the new phone number from the VoIP service.

I don't completely understand it but I knew enough to explain it to Vonage. The people where idiots. Complete idiots.

So then I called SunRocket, and I got an AMERICAN!! OH OH!! YAY! And better yet you can pre-pay for the whole year ($200) and if within the first 30 days or so you don't like it, you can get a full refund. Like if for example 911 doesn't work. So the dude went and talked to his manager and came back and told me yes we could do it.

I haven’t actually tried yet. I still have to have an electrician come, get the air conditioner fixed, and have someone put pine straw down on our hill ($ CHA CHING) so we don't get yelled at by our neighbors.

So speaking of technology and our future; on my way home yesterday a song came on the radio. I can't for the life of me remember what it's called but it is in the end of the movie "Cruel Intentions" when Reece Witherspoon is driving in the guys car and has journal in the car with her right after he dies. Well I had an urge to watch that movie at that moment. So the first thought that entered my mind was, I wonder if I can just buy it online?

Yes this is a paradigm shift, it was actually my first thought. So I went online looking for the movie. With older movies I don't particularly care if it's a super high quality MPEG. So I did several searches in google, and the only thing I came up with was "Starz" on "Real".

So I get all signed up, 14 free days or something like that. I get to the website, get Real all downloaded (Jesse told me he was going to divorce me if I did it! hehe).

So I go to the website, and crap on me. It has 300 movies TOTAL. Yes, total. No Cruel Intentions, in fact very few old classics excluding Dead Poets Society. So I downloaded Freaky Friday out of desperation and then I watched it, and then canceled my service! One free movie and a lot of frustration later, I realize Hollywood hasn't got a clue.

I am rounding out the day with a good article in the current "Harvard Business Review" (7 Transformations of Leadership) and a wonderful cup of Earl Gray by Choice Organic Tea's. If you have never had any I highly reccomend them. I once wrote an email to them saying how impressed I was by their tea and the promptly sent me a sampler of their product line. I like to buy from this yahoo store because they suggest shipping ground, and to your work to help the enviroment!

I'm nearly done with Monte Cristo, I'm anxious for the end! It's been tempting to read my IA books this weekend, but I think it was time for a work free evening or two!

Friday night Jesse and I got all dolled up and went out for sushi (my favorite) and today so far I have watched the Bridget Jones 2 and Resident Evil 2. I have read a silly girly novel yesterday and today I am half way through the Count of Monte Cristo which is suprisingly the same as the movie (with a few small differences), atleast so far.

Jesse is in his office pounding away at the keyboard on his financial paper. My duty this weekend was to leave him alone so he could finish it. :) So for me this weekend is about sitting in bed and doing nothing (except maybe a bit of laundry).

"Fireworks will slowly disappear. Photoshop is Adobe's star, and the vector-orientation of Fireworks just doesn't mesh with Photoshop's workflow."

While it may not "mesh with Photoshop's workflow" it is an essential web tool. He also says; "If Adobe is the darling of art departments, Macromedia is the up-and-coming star of the IT set."

Up-and-coming? Um... I'm sorry but it has no competition. Where have you been the last 5 years?? Macromedia has been the one and ONLY top dog for multimedia designers and developers a like. Director had no competition, and when it did come (ehem flash) the company was competing with itself!! The only reason I ever even got heavy into Illustrator was for my typography class in school. I love Photoshop, don't get me wrong. But Photoshop was YEARS, and I mean YEARS behind with its ability for designing code driven sites. I was using Firework's slice'n'dice feature 5 years ago!

Fireworks and TopStyle are the only two tools I use on a daily basis. I really would cry if they merged it into PS. I would actually be completely happy with fireworks if its basic photo manipulation was a little bit better (levels...) but I would be very pissy if fireworks were merged into PS. At the worst, just open-source the damn thing so people can make install files for new OS updates..

Honestly Fireworks has been so good I haven’t even needed an upgrade. It does what it does, and it does it well. I know it's all speculation but I just have to put out my voice and say Viva La Fireworks!

In my mind Adobe is nearly non-existent (save PS) in the web world. I think Adobe should take on macromedia's model of being a part of the community, I think they should leave the product names alone, and continue to enhance on the features. Macromedia is WAY bigger in the web world then Adobe. It would be silly to mash up the whole macromedia line and re-brand it. It is in my mind, a hope that they won't re-invent the wheel and that's the purpose of the merger, to leverage.

After all, Wachovia was bought out, but most people didn't even realize it. They kept the Wachovia name, merged it a tad and kept going so as not to alienate customers. It was a smart move and it worked.

Anways yeah.. please don't mess with fireworks, and leave it's name alone! LONG LIVE FIREWORKS!!!!!

Rock Star Gallery is representing my fathers Fine Art Photography prints. The store owner, his wife and young son were really sweet. I also met their awsume framer and his signifigant other. They were just so nice! I got to speak to the guy who is a partner in the mutlimedia company that created the website for the store, he was there to film the whole event and he was also cool.

Mom and Dad, now married over 30 years!

Entry way to the store, my dads famouse Led Zepelin print.

All my dad's photo's on the walls

That's Jim Morrison in the middle top photo, and Paul McCartney (sp?) in the left middle, lots of other Lez Zepelin's hidden by the people.

More photo's along the temporary black wall

It was so neat seeing my fathers photos all up on the wall, and big, the way I always wanted to see them. My father's photo's are truley peices of art. He sold I think like 10 prints that night which was just amazing! I'm so proud of my dad! It's awsume that after all this time he's getting things going again, I hope he has many more shows like this one. We wound up going out to eat, just the three of us after the show and it was just really nice.

I treated myself to some pretty jewlery that rock stars wear.

It's going to involve this notebook from staples. Once I a test one I'll be able to see if I can silkscreen the front of it. It was very difficult to find a blank notebook! This one is called a "Chemistry Notebook" but i would just say it's an attractive notebook.

So then polymorphism I read a bit on and kind of got it but I would say I didn't totally grasp it but that's okay because it's the first time I ever read about it. Inheritance was pretty easy to grasp.

Next it has a "sink a battleship" type games it wasn't you to create. I was just totally turned off by the tutorial (if you can call it that). I didn't like it at all. So I ordered a book from Amazon and I'll write about it when i get it. There are also those other two Java books I posted about but they aren’t published yet which is frustrating. I think once I get through some tutorials and get to some real world coding, I'm going to make my own tutorials. Most of the ones I found online were a mess or extremely outdated.

I'm skipping ahead to the GUI chapter and hoping I can learn some stuff from that part.

For this situation we used the top 100 search keywords entered into a knowledge base type tool, the purpose was to come up with a "browsing" type navigation that would be optional to the keyword search. So to see how users group the content we wrote all the top searches on the cards. The hard thing about naming groups in web design is you want to keep the names relatively short, but most of the time people like to call a group of things a fairly long name.

Another thing that is hard is picking good Card Sorting candidates. It's really bad to get anyone inside the design group to do it because we are all biased web designers who think inside the standards that we know, sometimes this is not a good thing when your trying to think like a "user" and not a web designer. Also if your actually working on the project your going to have lots of biases towards the current or planned navigational groupings.

I was able to get two people in our group who are not on the project but I won't feel good about it until I get people who can give me less biased feedback.

I got some blank postcards from the craft store on the way home, and a few t-shirts. Jesse requested blue ink on the postcards, and I already had planned to have his t-shirts match his website.

Postcards

t-shirts

I'm fairly please considering it's my first time trying to print on cloth. I have lots of inprovments in mind for next time, the print was to dark near the bottom and it didn't burn the screen correctly, but it lends itself to a nice rustic feel, heh.

Update: I got Jesse to put it on, don't know if I can get him to wear it in public haha...

Here is the image I used to create the design from;

Tonight was the first time I actually tried using it. I was going to make some t-shirts for Jesse or a cool business card for his website for when we went to Australia, but he never got around to giving me the "content" ehem...

So tonight I tested it on a fun little geeky birthday card for him (His b-day is april 19th btw if your wondering, hehehe).

So here are the fruits of my labor;

I was extremly impressed by the prints. It was a horrible hand drawn sketching and it's amazing how much each print looks hand drawn but much better then my drawing (cleaner because of the inks). The original is the all black one, it's messed up because it got some ink on it. It was hand drawn with a pen the kit comes with.

In the bottom left of the photo is the printing mechanism, and the master is up agains the top of it. To the top right is the "lamp" thing which you use to expose and create the "master" from.

I purchased all of the supplies from Think Ink and was VERY happy with their customer service. It wasn't able to ship right away and so they actual waited a few days once they got it before it was mailed so it would arrive right when I got back from XMAS in VA and not sit outside in the cold on our front porch.

So being so pleased, I just ordered more bulbs and masters and some yellow cloth ink.

If you have ever wanted to make your own business cards and be in complete control of the design, this looks like it would be FAB. I have a project in mind for work that I think will be lots of fun, I'm all about the cloth printing kit!

I found a cool looking t-shirt website. I'll sleep on it while I come up with my plan!

What happned was the developers needed to be able to "disabled" input buttons, and when we had a static image it would have required creating disabled states of all the buttons… That would be a lot of work, and on top of that coding it on the developer’s side is just too much effort for the time allowed right now.

So I was all sad, but then a co-worker of mine, Shelley Kennon, found some awesome code that looks F-A-B in IE.

link so you can view the source

There is also an option to have a repeating background image within the button as well, but I won't go into that here.

Microsoft's Documentation - this is a great page detailing the filter code. It also shows how you can make a DIV with a filtered background.

I am really excited about this because we have a side navigation bar that has a slight gradient running behind it. I of course can't wait till Shelley comes in so I can tell her about using the filter in a div, even better you can place a div BEHIND it so if a person does not have IE you can just have a static colored background for Firefox etc.

So yeah, I was looking at Ben's book and saw it was on the "Amazon Early Adopter Product in Computers & Internet" list.

The top 25 books (accourding to purchase patterns) include 4 Java Books, 2 Cold Fusion, 2 PHP and one .NET book. It's an interesting representation of the popular technologies being learned and used by people today.

Two of the Java books look like a lot of fun. "Java After Hours : 10 Projects You'll Never Do at Work"

• Create graphics interactively on Web servers
• Send images to Web browsers
• Tinker with Java's Swing package to make it do seemingly impossible things
• Search websites and send e-mail from Java programs
• Use multithreading, Ant and more!

I love real world examples so I can't wait to see this book. Of course I'll want to see it before I buy it :)

"Code First : Java", this one has a great description;

• Introduce a useful, interesting class complete with screen shots or output example.
• Show the program's source code, annotated with descriptions.
• Describe in detail what the code is doing.

I hope once they are to print that it offers the look inside feature.