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115 entries strong. Thanks for reading!

• 0 Apple Wireless Keyboard Re-design

  It looks like Apple gave their wireless keyboard a redesign. I’m surprise their wasn’t a re-name. Maybe Apple Wireless iBox? lol. Someone is definitely getting fired for this. See full image here. Visit website here

  # posted about 7 hours ago

• 0 Bertrand is Legend

  I’m going to Nebraska to seal the deal with my fiancee. It will be absolutely epic.

  posted 3 days ago

• 0 Go Back to Your Markup Language

  So far my favorite comic this week. Eloquently shows the fanboy-ism of the Ruby community (and Rails even).

  # posted 3 days ago

• 0 Going Off the Grid

  For the next 2 months I’m turning my back on all my web-based social habits with the exception of feed reading, Twitter and some vital communication via Facebook. I’ll also be mobile text-ing occasionally.

  # posted 5 days ago

• 0 Management Style Matters

  It has been an amazing month with Headmix. The style and agility at which we work through out iterations is the best I’ve been apart of. But in this post I will talk about collaboration and being an employee.

  posted 7 days ago

• 0 Responding to a Rick Roll

  This is what you do when someone Rick Rolls you on Youtube. If you’ve never seen “The Ring”, you’ll never understand this how funny this is.

  # posted 7 days ago

• 2 Programming Evades My Understanding

  Had a light bulb this morning. Some of the reason I don’t grasp web programming is because I can’t consume the bigger picture as quickly or easily as I can CSS or HTML.

  posted 8 days ago

• 0 If Only Guys Were This Smart

  Women can be ridiculous, but you get the rare few that are seemingly preemptive with thought process. Ya know? The kind of girls that destroy the relationship before it even really starts. So glad my fiancee is the polar opposite of this illustration.

  # posted 9 days ago

• 0 Good Design is an Obligation

  As years past, I’m learning and living by the fact that good design is my obligation. Designing poorly means I’m escaping on my commitment and promise to deliver increasingly better design. Good design is a requirement, not a choice.

  # posted 9 days ago

• 0 Host Your Own Tumblr App

  Well, maybe it’s not that quite like that. But Chyrp is the new (PHP-based) blogging platform on the block offering some painfully simple features. Tried it a little bit and I was pretty impressed by the simple user interface and posting process. Could it be a Wordpress killer? lol.

  # posted 9 days ago

• 0 Being Smart About CSS Grids

  Ben and I have been actively discussing the benefit and usage of CSS grids. Grids aren’t always necessary everywhere.

  posted 9 days ago

• 0 Client From Hell.

  The sad thing is that this kind of pedantic client specification doesn’t just exist in the freelance world. We see the same kind of behavior in start-ups. I think it’s a global behavior epidemic. lol.

  # posted 10 days ago

• 0 Pwnage Until Natural Death

  Saw this come across the twitter-pipes. The basic make-up of male behavior shall never change. Pwn til’ we die, that’s the way to live! (hat tip, Jeff McNeil)

  # posted 10 days ago

• 0 Make a Decision or Leave

  I’m a pretty straightforward individual in terms of managing clients (at least most of the time). Hardly ever will I use sales techniques to get/keep clients.

  posted 11 days ago

• 0 Photoshopping On a Lappy Top

  Being that I’m pretty green to the whole mobile work-week warrior club house it’s been quite the experience trying to be productive in Photoshop on track-pad.

  posted 12 days ago

• 1 Good Design in Album Covers

  Back then (1950-70) people cared about good artistic design. Just look at the color usage and spacing between objects. Wonderful use of negative space.

  # posted 12 days ago

• 0 You Car Means Nothing to Me

  I’m a chronic public transportation user as so are many other commuters. 20 min drives didn’t seem like much before $4/gal. But now it just plain sucks.

  posted 14 days ago

• 0 Think Different, Rails Edition

  Cruising the web I’m finding a lot of changes in Rails “standards”. Developers are writing better code and just doing things better in general.

  posted 14 days ago

• 0 Working with Lighthouse

  After using Trac extensively for a few months, it was refreshing step into the courts of Lighthouse, a light to the touch ticket management tool.

  posted 16 days ago

• 0 My Weekend App: Problem

  I want to blog in several formats based on images, videos, twitter statuses, audio, etc. Yes, we have Tumblr, but I need a little more than just a title and a body. I need commenting and stuff as well. So there ya go and stay tuned!

  # posted 18 days ago

• 0 Facebook Ads: Girl or Guy?

  This image really caught me off-guard at first glance. It’s an ad from Facebook for American Apparel shorts. Kind of frightening.

  # posted 18 days ago

• 4 My Weekend App

  I feel empty on the weekends most times when it comes to web projects. So it’s time to start a little series called “My Weekend App”. I’ll build something and in the process I’ll talk about it.

  posted 19 days ago

• 0 Call of Duty 4 for Mac

  Aspyr is staging the release of Call of Duty 4 for Mac OS X for Q3 of this year, so mid July, maybe August? Gawd, I can’t wait for this thing to hit Mac. It performs pretty well under Windows XP Pro/Bootcamp with the lowest tier of Macbook Pros (at least that’s what Youtube says).

  # posted 19 days ago

• 0 My Current Desktop

  I wanted something that was actually artistic not just a gluing together of various clouds, planets and objects. Something truly geek.

  # posted 20 days ago

• 0 Why DSL Sucks

  Companies like Qwest and AT&T both suffer from the age old criticism of slowness and poor consistency in bandwidth. DSL isn’t slow, it’s the DNS servers that cause slowness.

  posted 20 days ago

• 5 Firebug 1.2 beta 3

  I was quite miffed to find that the Firebug website is down for what feels like indefinitely. Working on a new machine means I need the latest and obviously I couldn’t download it. But there was hope.

  posted 21 days ago

• 2 My First Public Wifi Experience

  I just arrived minutes ago at Taraccino Cafe on Hennepin off 2nd Street N.E. Today marks the first day as a public wifi user. I’m a geek and this excites me.

  posted 23 days ago

• 0 Development Environment, Done!

  Holy crap that took forever. The process was pretty painless needless to say. It was just a lot of waiting and curling urls. There seriously needs to be some best-of-breed installation recipes.

  # posted 23 days ago

• 0 $199 iPhone, Impressive

  iPhone is now 3g enabled, $199 and available in 70 countries. That is impressive. Makes spending the $234 on a Razor last year, really painful!

  # posted 24 days ago

• 0 I Don't Care About the iPhone

  I’m one of the few people who honestly doesn’t give a rat’s turds about the iPhone. Yet the past two years of major apple-related events have been completely ape turds over it. Sigh.

  # posted 24 days ago

• 0 Haml and Sass: The Verdict

  After building a somewhat full layout from the ground up with Haml and Sass, I must say the experience was rather fun and pleasant.

  posted 25 days ago

• 0 Media Reform? Probably Not

  Tonight I caught a quick look at the live stream of the National Conference for Media Reform. Everyone wants to change the media, but no one wants to do the work.

  posted 26 days ago

• 0 Nonsense, By Twitter

  “Also, finally met @tomelko and @schmelzenfreude! Missing lunch with them and @taylor, eating with @perfectporridge later. #ncmr” – Where has written communication taken us? Gawd.

  # posted 26 days ago

• 0 Diving Into Haml and Sass

  Today I dive head-first into the murky waters of Haml and Sass which are ruby template parsers for HTML and CSS and Rails. My only fear is that I’ll develop a dependency on them. We’ll see.

  # posted 26 days ago

• 2 Why I'm Voting for Obama

  If you don’t know me, I’m an African-American. Naturally one would think that my reasons for choosing Obama are blatantly obvious. Frankly, it’s not even close.

  posted 27 days ago

• 0 Portable Content and Bigsteepl

  As I sat in the bathroom looking at a blank sketch book, my mind began thinking about the infinite problem of cost for small churches. I realized that content management really isn’t the hardest part.

  posted 29 days ago

• 4 Working at Headmix

  Moments ago I accepted a job offer to work at Headmix. I’ll probably discuss what Headmix is about later, but for right now their website explains it better.

  posted 29 days ago

• 0 Best Decision Microsoft Has Made

  Microsoft is making hardware makers test their drivers on Windows 7 as a requirement for being Windows Vista certified. This is the kind of decision making I like to see from Microsoft.

  # posted 29 days ago

• 2 Design Without Photoshop

  In a recent blog post on 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise, Jason Fried talks about this concept of skipping photoshop in the design process. Personally I agree, it saves time and makes the process more interactive for developers and designers.

  posted 29 days ago

• 0 Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations

  There seems to be a lot of discussion around design methodologies. Digital Web Magazine has posted a wonderful article mostly have to do with IA and audience research. But it’s wonderful nonetheless.

  # posted 29 days ago

• 0 Obama Wins Democratic Nomination

  Senator Barrack Obama is the first black man in American history to become a nominee for the President of the United States. Do you have any idea the kind of impact this has on the history of this nation?

  posted 29 days ago

• 0 Twitter's Growth is the Problem

  Interesting article concerning Twitter and it’s growing infrastructure. Ruby is slower than Java or C. However, it goes on to talk about how Ruby on Rails is fine for what it does and how growth is a larger problem than choice of technology.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Google on the Command Line

  Love the command line? Well Goosh will certainly appeal to you. Basically its a command line console based on the Google Search API. Actually, pretty cool!

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Content Silos and Streaming

  Lately I’ve been reviewing the way I have things setup in terms of posting content via RadiantCMS. Very sloppy. Need a plan to make it cleaner and more efficient. Throw it all into a silo.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Design is a Problem

  Amy of Slash7 posted an article titled Design is not about solving problems. Frankly she is wrong. Design will always solve a problem whether you acknowledge the problem or not.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Wideband Pricing is Unacceptable

  Considering other countries are offering speeds similar to this so called “wideband” at comfortable consumer prices, I can’t say that I’m all about wideband right now. The pricing just will never work. Thanks to gas prices, we can’t afford it right now.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Keyboard Shortcut Skins for Mac

  If you desire to be a hardcore Photoshop user, this is probably the best purchase you can make. They’re about $30-40 in price and would be worth every penny. Get it!

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Email is Simple, and it Should Be

  A fellow colleague, Garrick Van Buren wrote a series about the broken state of email clients. I personally believe email is just fine as it is.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 CSS for Programmers: Part 1

  Oh yeah, I’m looking at you. Let’s put away your recursive methods and pristine screen-scraping skills and dig into some CSS. It’s for your own good.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 The Fight

  Geeky in so many ways!

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Farcry 2, In the Jungle

  I played the first Farcry quite a bit and to see the screenshots for Farcry 2 is mesmerizing. Seriously, that screenshot is all in-game. Drooool!

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Sex and the City

  Yeah, you read that correctly. Tonight my fiancee and I went to see Sex and the City. What can I possibly say?

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Why Designers Don't Get Programming

  After much tussling around with my website today, I realized something. Designers just don’t get programming. Designers deal mostly with singular objects that may have related parts. Programmers deal with a mess of unrelated and related pieces.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Recent Desktop

  This is currently my desktop image and I wanted an excuse to post an image now that I got attachment_fu working correctly.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Start-up Culture

  Lately I’ve been really interested in the start-up culture. Ya know?! Build an initial product, show investors, get 3 rounds of funding, profit and then sell the company for millions or something like that.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Real Innovation in Human Robotics

  I visit Digg every now and then, but today was a good day to visit. The link is a wired article about human robotics. Seriously inspiring. These are the true innovators of our time and I’m so proud to be of the generation that fluidly merges robotics and pure unadulterated brain power. Watch Ex Machina. Kind of the same concept.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Twitter Doesn't Need Paying Users

  Everyone seems to be chatting it up about Twitter’s business model and lack thereof. The general consensus is that users should pay a subscription, but that’s rather unwise.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 5 Mmmm .. Redesign

  You’d think that something simple would be so easy, but this design came with a number of pitfalls. I ironed most of them out. But at least its usable.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 1 Gas and the Economy

  I don’t blurb much about the economy or politics, but these gas prices are stirring some frustration in me and it must come out!

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Learn and Don't You Dare Stop

  I’m learning what it takes to learn something and never turn away from it. I’m hitting massive walls with basic concepts of programming. So much so that I’m just losing interest altogether.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Twitter is Down, Again.

  Okay, now this is starting to get quite annoying. They’re down every few days. And guess what? Every site that uses Twitter in a big way goes down with them as well! Gawd. Just not cool.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Inheritance in CSS

  What does inheritance mean aside from the “inherit” value for CSS definitions? Well actually it means that conflicts can happen more than you realize.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Twitter is Missing the Point

  Lately Twitter has been having a lot of down time and performance outages. It’s users and API customers are surprisingly sticking with Twitter even in the midst of instability.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 The Lonely Road of Freelance

  Lately I’ve been dealing hard with loneliness. Its something about being in your own home 8-12 hours a day by yourself that makes one want to start knocking off squirrels outside the complex. Sigh.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 CushyCMS - Definitely Best of Breed

  Its not a blog engine and can’t be manipulated as such. However, its great for those cases where the client just needs a 5 page website that needs to be updated a couple times a month. Even works with dynamically included files (ASP, PHP, ect…). If you’re a designer with an itch impress clients with a awesome easy CMS, try CushyCMS!

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Congratulations to Naomi and Shawn!

  I wish you both a happy marriage and I know you guys will make each other happy for years and years to come. Seriously. I’m so happy for you guys! I better get invited to the wedding (I promise to show up to this one).

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Rails and Django: Designer's Perspective

  Working in both Rails and Django I notice very similar patterns in work flow and philosophies. However that are a couple gleaming differences.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Today on Django: A Few Lessons Learned

  Today I processed my first html form. No full CRUD just yet, but I successfully added a record to the database with my own views and forms. The following is what I learned.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 That Second Website

  Most small churches could benefit from a website. However, most of them can’t afford a website. But they do need something. What is that something?

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Disqus: Great idea, poor flexibility

  I just spent the last hour futzing around with Disqus. Needless to say I didn’t get very far. Customizing the appearance is rather annoying as you can’t fullly overwrite the iframe’s embedded CSS definitions. Ah, well. Maybe the API is worth looking at.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Disqus is not for me

  For a while I’ve been wanting a way to enable comments for my blog. Unfortunately Radiant doesn’t offer any way to implement this easily. And the existing solutions (extensions) by other Radiant developers are out of date or non-functional. So I tried Disqus and it just didn’t impress me. Unfortunately I don’t need an entire social network behind my comments or blog. Sigh.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 GoPlan - 37s Basecamp Killer?

  Certainly it’s not a Basecamp Killer. But it gives the 37signals boys a run for their money. All the features are simple and well-designed has web-based group chat built right in.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Cullect - The Shareable Feed Reader

  This feed reader has been the breath and soul of my online reading habits. If you’ve grown tired of Google Reader bloat, then I highly suggest Cullect.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Django Problems and No Responsibility

  I’ve been searching tirelessly for a decent example of how to do user account management in Django. Needless to say I’ve come up nil. However I did find something.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Focusing and Being Happy

  The new goal of my career is to be focused and committed to one pursuit. Even though its been a challenging two years, I’m ready to focus and be apart of something consistent.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 In the Jungles of Django

  Recently I’d just finished implementing a user registration process (aside from the auto-generated admin). Needless to say I am stoked because I made it this far!

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Morning Epiphany & Bigsteepl

  I had a huge lightbulb this morning that transferred over from last night. Bigsteepl really isn’t for the full-blown custom solution crowd. As hard as I try to fit Bigsteepl into that model, it will not work.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Recruitment Outrage

  Lately my cup has been filling up with some good job/gig opportunities. However some of them suck before resumes are even thought about.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Learning Other Frameworks

  As a designer, I often trick myself into thinking that I’m locked down to a specific web framework just because I bought the books and read the tutorials. Today I set myself free. I want to learn web programming. So I’m going to learn it with Django and Python.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Plug-able Features in RadiantCMS

  This week Bigsteepl saw the implementation of decoupled feature development. Now I can force all active instances of Radiant to use one path for all of its existing and upcoming features.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Small is Better

  In this article Khoi Vinh talks about how large design companies produce poor designs. He mentions that design should be handled by a single designer as this allows the creative process a straight shot from brain to hands with little or no resistance. This reaches more levels than just design.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Signals from the Trench of Freelance

  In the past few months I’ve learned a lot about what it’s taking to be a full-time freelancer. Needless to say I’m on a wide road to burning out. Number one culprit? Passion.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Minnebar 08' Recap

  Minnebar was a wonderful experience especially for it being my first conference. Some great talks took place and it’d be great to see what people are doing in the mean time until next year. I’m really psyched as I’d love to give a talk on web standards for print designers. This seemed to be a recurring theme during all the design-related talks. Hmmm. We’ll see.

  # posted about 1 month ago

• 0 How to Install RadiantCMS on Webfaction

  A fellow colleague of mine wanted to know how I installed RadiantCMS on Webfaction. After installing Ruby, RubyGem and setting some paths in my home directory, installing RadiantCMS was a breeze.

  posted about 1 month ago

• 0 Bigsteepl Events and Staying Lean

  Small churches often have trouble managing events on their website. Bigsteepl makes this process easy. Keeping things lean and simple.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Meaningful Connections

  Just recently I’d come out of a little spat with a fellow Facebook user. It showed me a lot about human interaction and why meaningful connections are important.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Bigsteepl: Production and Support

  I’d recently given up a project that had a nice fiscal bounty and all the challenge you can ask for. But the deadline and scope just didn’t match up. Can an entire website be built and deployed in 14 days?

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Radiant 0.6.6 Benchmark On ModRails

  ModRails or otherwise known as Passenger has been getting a lot of press lately. However, someone was awesome enough to benchmark it using RadiantCMS as the ginny pig rails app while using ApacheBench as the testing platform. The results were more than positive.

  # posted 2 months ago

• 0 Carbonmade Needs an API

  Lately I’ve been really peeved about the amount re-creation that happens on the web. Simple API backends should be standard for any publicly consumed and marketed web application.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Repost: Before I went all mac

  Last year I was in between trees when it came to Mac or Windows. Boy have things changed since then. The following is a repost from a facebook note that I wrote last year.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Buying Houses and the American Dream

  The dream states that I must have 2.3 kids, a dog with 2 cars and a house in the suburbs. Life has to be more interesting than that, right?

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Inefficiency? No.

  Why must clients always revert to maniacal deadlines and specifications? Whatever happened to the culture that considered doing things right the first time a golden rule and the only rule? The result doesn’t have to be perfect.

  # posted 2 months ago

• 0 Designers and Non-commitment

  Andy Rutledge wrote this article on non-commitment in the design field. I couldn’t disagree more with his point of views.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Radiant 0.6.6 Chiseled is Out!

  The fine developers of RadiantCMS has finally released Radiant 0.6.6 Chiseled. The original release version was 0.6.5, but due to a few show stopping bugs, 0.6.6 was released a day after. Congrats to the Radiant core team.

  # posted 2 months ago

• 0 Scaling Down for Small Churches

  Let’s be real, small churches are cheap. How can anyone profit from a niche that is so frugal and stingy with their budgets?

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 MinneBar 08'

  Yes, its considered the (un)conference, but nevertheless this is the first conference that I’ve ever committed to attending. I’ll finally get to meet some twitter buddies as well. See you guys there!

  # posted 2 months ago

• 0 Bigsteepl Project

  For some time I’ve been working persistently on a project called Bigsteepl. In short, its a beautifully simple and succinct service based on RadiantCMS (a Ruby on Rails content management system).

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Persistent Connectivity

  We’re a wired culture, no doubts about it. But where is the line drawn between culture and inhumanity? Are our lives really suppose to be spent in front of screens? I don’t think so.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Recreating the Wheel? Well, Stop!

  Nothing on this planet angers me more than to see developers recreating the wheel. Sometimes I think the ego of web developers are way larger than that of most designers.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 On Building Web Products

  I don’t know about anyone else but I would love to put something in place that brings in a nice fat check every month. Call me lazy, but this to me is the American dream.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Working with Developers

  Being a web designer can have its highs, lows and boringly unimportant patches. Spice it by working with developers and getting to know a few programming languages.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Content Management for Designers

  The world of content management systems is chock full of wonderful tools for just about any situation you can think of, but not in the case of traditional websites.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 On Web Frameworks and Mack

  There are so many web application frameworks out there now. Its hard to distinguish which one will actually suit your needs.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Blog is coming together

  Its funny how simplicity automatically puts us in a state of complexity. Designing this blog I realize how much I dislike most blog designs.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Commenting? Yes? No?

  I am thinking about adding commenting functionality. Not sure if I should or not.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Tiny Pixel Goes Live! Finally!

  Where I talk about launching a website and the joys and perils of designing for yourself.

  posted 2 months ago

• 0 Small Churches and the Price of Web Development

  There are thousands of small churches who own websites that just aren’t effective, I explain why.

  posted 3 months ago

• 0 Ticket systems for designers

  Had a discussion with a colleague about the use of ticket systems by designers in a team environment. They’re wonderful but they aren’t very effective.

  posted 3 months ago