I backed up several iMovies to an external drive and reclaimed nearly half my disk space, allowing me to open Photoshop and edit some images, including a few we took of a baby sitting across the aisle from us on our flight back to Tucson. He was having a hard time with the pressure changes in the cabin during the flight, so I showed him a slide show using iPhoto. He was fascinated by the images on the laptop screen, and he stopped crying. He really grinned when we took his picture and showed it to him on the computer. So I emailed them to his dad this morning.
»plink« · November 27, 2002
Boston was great. We enjoyed catching up with friends, and making new ones at the conference. The history in the city is amazing, as is the art and architecture. We took over 600 digital photos, and I am literally out of space on the laptop’s hard drive. I am also looking into migrating this blog to Moveable Type, so updates will continue to be sporadic through the holiday weekend. In the mean time I've modified the CSS for this new design to enhance its usability in IE5/Mac and other browsers, I hope...
»plink« · November 26, 2002
Kelly Goto just showed us, in her words, a bored genius. Her name is Natalie Jeremijenko, and she has created some really fascinating art/technology projects at NYU. One of my favorites is The BullRide - which allows you to ride the Stock Market Crash of 1987...
»plink« · November 20, 2002
It’s been cold and rainy, but that hasn’t stopped us from enjoying the city. And the conference has been great so far as well. My session is tomorrow morning...
»plink« · November 18, 2002
We’re off to Boston to speak at Web Design World. Our nightly low temperatures are higher than the predicted highs in Boston this week. Wish us luck...
»plink« · November 15, 2002
Seems the latest P4’s contain something called “Hyperthreading”, along with their 3.06 GHz speed. All of this added together makes for a formidable foe for the latest and greatest Mac. How much faster are they. According to Digital Video Editing Magazine, up to twice as fast (why does that sound familiar?), and using real world benchmarks, too.
This makes the rumored OSX on Athlon (and other x86 processors, one would assume) something to consider. MHz may not matter, but the real world tests show that Apple has to do more than just cram more slow processors into their systems. A faster bus on the Mac would probably help so they could take advantage of their fast RAM (can you say “balanced architecture?” apparently Apple’s engineers can’t...). This is why I am waiting to see what the next generation processor is going to look like. I don’t really care where it comes from - Intel, AMD, IBM or Motorola - as long as it performs. I’m willing to pay more for a Mac (the Dell they tested was $1000 less than the Mac), but not for that kind of performance gap...
»plink« · November 14, 2002
Last week I was a guest speaker at a high school media class. I gave a talk about what it was like to be a web designer, the kinds of things I do and how I learned to do them. After four talks and seeing my ugly mug from this blog projected on the screen I realized that it was time to redesign. No need to thank me. I’ll just apologize now for staying with that design for as long as I did.
I had a few requirements that I kept in mind with this new layout. I wanted to change as little HTML as possible, only applying a new style sheet. The only change I have made to the HTML template is to change the name of the CSS file, and a slightly modified featured image size. Other than that, all the HTML is the same as before.
I also tired of the bright colors, and I wanted the featured image to stand out a bit more, which explains the gray pallette, and the background image(s) that will also change with the featured image. This means more work for me as each featured image also comes with three new background images. So, I’ll either leave those images up longer, or you’ll be seeing a new design here sooner than you might otherwise have seen.
Speaking of the background image(s), Since I began this blog, I’ve always had a fixed background image that showed through translucent areas containing the text. The first designs used a transparent GIF trick, and later versions (including this one) use Eric Meyer’s brilliant Complex Spiral technique that accomplishes the same thing, but much more elegantly and cleanly.
I used a lot of CSS2 to realize the current layout. So if you browse with something less than the latest and greatest, you’ll not see exactly what I do. But trust me, It looks great on my TiBook using Chimera...
»plink« · November 12, 2002
They said it couldn't be done. Some don't care that it can. Drew McLellan shows us how: a leaner, standards compliant method of embedding Flash movies into your web pages.
“No matter if your movie is made from beef, chicken, or pork, you still need to skewer it and dip it in the sauce to make it work. We call this the Satay Method.”
Flash Satay, at A List Apart...
»plink« · November 11, 2002
David Pogue gives his best shot at recommending them, but there just isn’t much worth recommending. Coursey concurs.
Why am I even blogging this?!?
»plink« · November 8, 2002
Despite conventional “wisdom” on the subject, Apple has managed to put a slot loading SuperDrive into their super thin PowerBooks. They’ve managed to cram 1GHz G4s and a new, faster Radeon 9000 mobile graphics chip into the Titanium shell as well. And they’ve upped the speed and graphics chips on the iBooks too, all while dropping prices by $200. Whodathunkit, an Apple laptop retailing for less than a grand...
»plink« · November 6, 2002
Actually it is Japanese for modifying, upgrading or remodelling. And it's being applied to the decorative work that many Japanese do to their computer cases. Wired has an interesting article about it, as well as some radical case mods happening in the west. I find it interesting that the Japanese tend to go for the artistic in their mods, whereas the US based mods appear to me as so much posturing...
»plink« · November 1, 2002
