Archive for the “Technology” Category

I’m still finding out cool stuff about my new iPhone. This morning, I discovered that the alarms are REALLY LOUD. I mean REALLY loud. Especially when compared with my former phone, the Wagon Queen Family Truckster (a.k.a. Windoze Mobile Sprint/HTC Mogul).

Even better, no more special adapter just to use headphones. Of course, the earbuds that come with the iPhone work…but they aren’t noise-cancelling, nor do they fit in my ears well enough to really generate the best sound, say, when I’m in a car. With the top down. And doors off. Nope. I need to score myself some noise-cancelling earbuds with built-in mic, preferably ones that block wind noise on the mic side. Read the rest of this entry »

Believe it or not (and I’m not sure I do, yet) I’m now the proud owner of a brand-new 32GB iPhone 3G s.

Pause with me for a nanosecond, whilst I let that sink in.

In one fell swoop, I can retire my Wagon Queen Family Truckster® (a.k.a.: “Windows Mobile/Sprint HTC Mogul”) crapalicious excuse for a cell phone. Being a card-carrying propellerhead, I’m still in the process of exploring what all my new phone can do (i.e.: jacking with all the configuration options, configuring ringtones, et cetera). It may be a couple of days before I’m ready to stop jacking with it, and allowing it to become the business tool I need. But I’ll enjoy working on it in the meantime. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate hackers.

If I were king of the world, morons that get their jollies by stealing passwords, infecting sites with malware, defacing sites, and any other kind of mischief, would get the death penalty. No appeals. No delays. We’d string ‘em up, preferably in public, with mandatory coverage by the networks. (Obviously, the networks are acquainted with mandatory programming – they cover every Obama presser, so they shouldn’t have a problem with a sensational, money-maker like a public execution.)

About a week ago, a client notified me that there was a problem with one of the sites I host for them. I assumed – at first – that the malicious JavaScript code that had been added to their index page without permission was an isolated incident.

Not so fast. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the iPhone 3GS for some time now, and I’ve been keeping up with the fanboy and rumor sites, trying to gleen any crumb of info to help make the wait bearable. After yesterday’s announcement, I’m still eagerly awaiting the ship date (and plan to buy one that day), but I can’t help but wonder what happened to some of the rumored features, specifically: Read the rest of this entry »

Totally Clueless

I’m a fan of social networking sites. I’m not big on Facebook and Twitter and MySpace – but I have a presence there, largely because they’ve each reached critical mass. They are useful for keeping track of old friends. That’s all well and good, but I’m far more interested in business-oriented sites. Keeping in touch with business contacts and former co-workers is a networker’s dream. It’s something that’s really useful, especially when you’re looking for a job, or seeking a way into a company to grab and account. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeep: The American Legend.

Let’s be honest. Chrysler is RIP. Today’s announcement that Chrysler has 30 days to make a deal with Fiat does nothing but forestall the inevitable. To get the Fiat deal done, creditors must allow Chrysler to default on loans. Why would they do that, if they simply force Chrysler into bankruptcy? After all, 10 cents on the dollar is better than nothing. So let’s assume that Chrysler is heading for that big Chapter 11 (or 7) in the sky. Now what?

I think it’s pretty safe to say that we won’t see anybody buy Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep lock, stock and pistons. Nope, the parts will be worth (marginally) more than the sum of the companies. Chrysler itself is worthless – the only two vehicles they have that are in anything close to what resembles demand are the Town & Country minivan and the 300 sedan. Neither is currently considered best-0f-breed. Chrysler can sink into the sunset with few tears from the great unwashed. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two things I hate regarding the realities of business. I hate having to stop work on a project before it’s complete. But I hate having to return to a “cold” project after being away from it for a period of time that’s long enough to make me forget everything about it.

I’ve been working on a video game project lately. It’s not rocket science, but like all projects that require coding, you get into a thousand different decisions and judgment calls that force you to have to go back and remember what you did, why you did it, and rethink your choices.

In a way, it’s more difficult to come back to a project and work on it again (even if you comment your code religiously). It’s kind of like how they say it’s more difficult to relocate down the street than it is to move across the country. Familiarity breeds contempt. Something like that.

I crack open the source code, and I have to spend an hour or so, reviewing what I did – and why I did it. And of course, if I’m adding something, odds are, I’m going to have to either hope I was prescient enough to write code that can be easily adaptable, or code that was designed for expansion.

In a way, it’s kind of an out-of-body (out-of-mind?) experience, akin to the concept used by SciFi writers, where the protagonist is thrown into an alternate universe, where things are almost the same as the way they are back home. But not quite.

No big point here, fans of reason. No solutions offered. No revelations revealed. Just observations. And a wish that it wasn’t so bloody hard for me to go back and edit old code. Sigh…

I love typography. Always have. From a very early age, I’ve been fascinated with letterforms. When I was in elementary school, I used to rubber-band two pencils together to create a crude way to draw Blackletter (a.k.a. “Old English”) lettering on posters. While other kids decorated their textbook’s book covers with drawings of muscle cars, military tanks or alien spacecraft, I decorated mine with words in a variety of typefaces. Blackletter, calligraphy, Cooper Black, Bodoni, Futura – you name it, and I experimented with it. As I grew into a career as a freelance artist, I discovered that typefaces could provide a subtext (no pun intended) to ad copy and headlines. The face I chose to design something had the power to communicate meaning, context, and even tell people how to think about the words on the printed page, before they’d even read them.

Waaaaay cool. Read the rest of this entry »

I hear that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, like many other once-proud newspapers, is up for sale. Even worse, if it’s not sold inside of 60 days, it will cease to exist in print (but might continue in a greatly scaled-back online form).

Sad. Very sad.

I was thinking the other day about how the newspaper biz has changed since I was a kid, throwing a paper route in Shreveport, Louisiana. It’s changed a lot – and not for the better. Of course, you could argue, and many do, that the Internet killed the Newspaper, just like it’s kill(ing) CDs and will soon kill DVDs. But if you’ve ever tried to get all your information from the web, you’ve probably seen that there’s something that you lose, when you ditch paper. So, I’m not convinced the problem with newspapers lies at the feet of the World Wide Web alone. No, I think it’s something(s) much deeper, and will, in fact, cause the destruction of an entire industry in no less significant a way than what happened to the dinosaurs. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently (four days ago, to be exact) updated the software this blog runs on, to the latest and greatest version – i.e., WordPress v.2.7. The upgrade was surprisingly easy to do, and by all appearances, went off without a hitch. Um…ALMOST without a hitch. Seems that one of the things that got trashed along the way was the settings for my Google Analytics code. Whoops.

I usually check my GA stats on a daily basis, just to see what’s going on. Check more often, and it will drive you nuts. Less frequently, and you stand to miss a trend…or a problem.

It had been four days since I’d checked my GA account. Color me “surprised” to learn that I’d (according to GA) gone from a significant readership to ZERO hits for the last four days. That’s like going from 60 to zero in, oh, about 0.0 seconds.

Once I saw the stats, I knew something was wrong. I dialed up the New! Improved! control panel, and found that my GA settings were pooched. No code – no tracking. No tracking – no results. No results – unhappy blogger.

I’ve restored the tracking code, and all should be right in my world.

But I’ll keep checking. As Joe Bob Briggs (Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas) says, “Without eternal vigilance, it can happen here.”