Last week’s Refresh Columbia meetup was a lot of fun. We had nearly 30 people show up to hear 5 exciting lightning talks. I gave a presentation about how to stay connected to the web design community without drowning. Of course I added the disclaimer that I haven’t REALLY figured out that latter part. For those interested, here’s my slide deck:

It’s hot right now in Columbia, South Carolina. The recorded high this week was 100° and it’s only June! For web designers and developers though, something refreshing is on the way. I’m not talking about a rafting trip down the Saluda - though that does sound refreshing - I’m referring to a new community of individuals who aim to invigorate workers of the web industry in our city.

First and foremost, Refresh is a social group. No matter what you do for a living, it’s good to know people who do the same line of work. That type of interaction not only keeps people motivated, but it helps those people stay current with trends and best-practices. We plan to meet once a month to do just that.

Our hope is that Refresh will also become an educational hub. Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany “to create a new guild of craftsmen”. I believe we have an opportunity to do the same thing here in the South Carolina Midlands. Because the Web is a constantly evolving organism, there is often a gap between what is taught in universities and the skill-set required to excel in this field. By gathering local professionals to give presentations and share their expertise, we can all grow more knowledgeable and fill that educational gap.

Are you with me? Head over to the new Refresh Columbia website and let us know. We’re currently trying to gauge the initial interest and decide when and where to meet each month. For those of you who aren’t in South Carolina, I encourage you to check the Refreshing Cities website to see if there’s a refresh group where you live. If not, maybe you can get one started.

Amidst the flurry of depressingly divided, emotional articles about IE8 breaking the browser market with version targeting, it was nice to see some altruistic, informative, and just-plain-fun news in my RSS reads this week:

• Sam Brown announced that Sidepath is now FREE!
• Andy Budd began a not-to-be-missed series on Design Artefacts
• Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero released their creative Twitter app: Strawpoll

Of course, there was a lot of other great posts, podcasts and articles this week, but in trying to keep away from the M$ bashing and ensuing flame-wars, I found a few good laughs in the recent Photo Basement post: 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments. As I scrolled, laughed, pointed, scrolled and laughed again, I couldn’t help but think how similarly nerdy and awkward I was myself at that age and remembered a particular science fair project I did back in my junior high days.

The title of my experiment was What are the odds of extracting a blue M&M from a “Fun Size” bag of M&Ms? I originally wanted to do a project about BBS games, but this was a much hotter topic in 1995 as the blue M&M had just been introduced. Somehow, my piddly, bean counting project won the 1st place prize in the math category; this could be because there were only 3 math experiments that year. It was also very well received by my classmates; mostly because I let them eat the candies they helped me count. And of course it was ground-breaking statistical research! While I never published a paper on my findings, I remember that there were way more brown M&Ms than any other color, and I managed to find this flattering image in an old box of photos.

A few interesting things to note in the photo above.

• It took longer to staple all those empty bags to my board than it did to plug my numbers into Excel.
• I designed that masthead for the “School Zone” section of our local newspaper as part of a design competition the previous year.
• Yes, that’s a genuine Ironman Triathalon watch on my arm there.
• See the check on the ribbon? I apparently won some money for getting 1st place. I’m not sure, but I probably used that extra moola to buy a hackey sack or some sweet Airwalks.
• Über. Nerd.

So, there. I’ve shared with you a little glimpse into my childhood. Does anybody else have any embarrassing childhood pictures to post?

I believe it was Dustin Diaz who first introduced me to the Boagworld podcast back in early 2006. Since then, I’ve been enjoying the intelligent, witty, and entertaining banter between Paul Boag and his co-host Marcus Lillington about all things related to website design and development. Needless to say I was extremely excited when Paul invited me to talk about web design basics and “pimp my book” for the latest episode:
“107. Running to keep up”.

After listening to part of the show, Ames jokingly said “You sound so serious.” Despite my austere demeanor, I had a great time geeking up the air waves with my thoughts on layout, color, texture, typography, and imagery. The entire interview was really just a quick rundown of the key points in each chapter of the book, but it gave me an opportunity to bring up some resources and trends that have developed since the book came out.

Toward the end of the interview, Paul said
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is:

…a perfect book for a lot people that listen to this show if you are starting out in any form of design and don’t come from a design background.

I’m always happy to hear positive feedback like that about the book, especially from people like Paul who do so much to keep the masses up to date on the latest resources and trends in the industry.

Be sure to check out the show.

As I was perusing through my Google Reader Feeds today, I noticed and clicked on the “Trends” button for the first time. I wasn’t too surprised by the number of items read in the last 30 days, or the time of day that I read the most items, but when I clicked on the “Day of the Week” tab, I was blown away by what I saw:

I don’t check my feeds on Tuesdays?

When I thought about this for a second, I realized that this really is an accurate graph of my average week. I come in on Monday feeling detached, so I tend to catch up on everyones blogs and get reacquainted with my current projects, but I never feel like I’ve gotten enough work done on Monday. This usually leads to a self-imposed sense of urgency by the end of the day Monday, which in turn leads to a distractionless, work-focused Tuesday. By Wednesday I’m feeling confident that I can meet all of the necessary deadlines and try to catch back up with the outside world. Thursday brings the realization that I overcompensated on Wednesday so I buckle back down and get a reasonable amount of work done while still taking enough personal time to stay connected. In an ideal world, every day would go like Thursday. It’s the perfect balance between productivity and social awareness…but then comes Friday. Friday tends to be the day everybody want to go out for lunch, or walk to Starbucks, or hang out talking about weekend plans. It’s a fun day in the office, but somehow I manage to read just as many feeds on Friday as I do on Monday. You can just imagine what that does for my productivity.

So what about you? If you use Google Reader, what does your trends screen say about your average week. Discover any interesting patterns?

Even if you’re not on a Mac and therefore don’t use TextMate, you probably read about its little Halloween theme on other blogs and saw examples of it in flickr. I noticed the festive Jack-O-Lantern icon after the software update on October 30th, but it wasn’t until I opened a folder of files on the 31st that I noticed the cobwebs. I thought it was a fun little way to celebrate what I see as a harmless, American, pop-culture holiday.

While it was fun on Halloween, yesterday I was ready to get my familiar purple icon back and headed over to the Macromates blog to find out when that would happen. It was fun reading the comments about the Halloween theme but there were some mixed opinions about it. Apparently some people were really upset:

“…I found this offensive and promptly removed the theme. Please understand I do not think it is offensive because I am some fanatical weirdo. But the roots of Halloween are in animal and human sacrifices as well as rape in the name if Satan. This is not just something that happened hundreds of years ago, this happens today in abundance; in the U.S. Canada and UK. If you don’t believe me ask a Satanist or wiccan or do your own research. Many religions have an issue with the practice of Halloween including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Even many Atheists don’t like it because of the animal and human damage done every year in relation to this event. That said, it really wasn’t the above reasons that offended me most but it was the fact that it was just assumed that I accepted this holiday and wouldn’t get offended. I am sure you wouldn’t have a Chanukah or Nativity theme so you wouldn’t offend people. The Islamic holiday Ramadan happened recently but I never noticed TextMate having a green theme with a crescent moon. How disappointing.”

After reading through the comment thread I decided that I’d just be patient and wait for the next software update. I really didn’t want to get involved there. Well, this morning the update finally came. Here is the applicable lines from the release notes:

[2006-11-02: REVISION 1324] [REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock — ticket 945BEB5D

That made me laugh. While I think the folks at Macromates stepped on a few toes when they decided to force a somewhat taboo holiday on their supporters, I think they handled the criticism wisely. What do you think? Should internationally popular websites and software applications try to do things like this to entertain people, or should they be emotionless and humor free?

A few months ago, Amy told me this story about how her and some of her classmates were coming back from lunch and she saw this horrendously jacked up truck downtown. The owner was trying to get something out of the bed and when the tailgate was down the guys head was still below it. Well, a few days later the same truck started living at a house in our neighborhood. It has been a landmark, a modern marvel, and a South Carolina attraction for us to take our out-of-state visitors by when they visited. Well the truck now has a for sale sign. I thought I’d share a couple pics with all my friends who won’t be able to visit before it’s gone.

I’ve blurred out the phone number, but if anybody is actually interested in purchasing this monster, lemme know and I’ll send you the number. Please don’t contact me about this. It sold shortly after I posted this back in 2006…

…and from the back. Being a Christian myself, I personally thought the Jesus fish and Skull hitch cover was, umm, classy.

Ames is the most tech-savvy, frugal shopper I know. If something is on sale at a great price she will know about it. As part of her daily quest for righteous deals, she found a thread on one of her discount sites that said that the 777 code on dreamhost is back.

This is the code I signed up under when I switched to dreamhost last July that gave me my first year of their L1 (Crazy Domain Insane) plan for only $.77/month. That amounts to one year of hosting and a domain registration/transfer for only $9.24. I figured that was only a one time deal, but I checked it out, and apparently they’ve re-activated it:

All you have to do is:

• Go to the signup page.
• Click the “L1: Crazy Domain Insane (20GB disk, 1TB bw, $9.95/month)” radio button.
• Click the Automatically bill me “once a year. (No set up fee!)” radio button. (You can change this preference from your account once you’re signed up.)
• Choose your domain option and fill out your info.
• Enter 777 in the “Promo Code or email of who referred you” box.
• Check the I agree to Dreamhost’s TOS and Anti-Spam policies checkbox.
• Click “Continue to secure payment…”

As I’ve said before, I’m very happy with dreamhost as my hosting provider. Although their referral program is great incentive to send people their way, I recommend them regardless. You just can’t beat their price and feature set…and at only $9.24 for a whole year, you might as well do it just to register a silly domain like monkeysmakemehappy.com. Did I mention they have ruby on rails installed? Perhaps monkeysmakemehappy.com would be an app to keep track of all my imaginary monkey friends…or not - they like to roam free.

New Camera: Casio EX-Z750

After much deliberation and in-store camera testing, Ames and I decided on and ordered a Casio EX-Z750. Finally, our picture taking withdrawal is over and we have a replacement for our old and busted Kodak CX4300.

New Website: amesnjas.com

I had been thinking and talking about redesigning amesnjas.com for some time now, but after breaking the fragile home-brew php/mysql content management app the site was running on, I had no choice. It took quite a few late nights and some serious php/mysql tomfoolery, but the site is looking and functioning better than ever.

I just read this morning that the next Event Apart will be in Atlanta. That’s pretty darn close to where I live here in South Carolina. How close? Well I’ve employed the Google Maps API to show you:

I know this won’t be quite the same as making it to SXSW, but it will definitely be a lot more affordable. Hopefully the details will be announced soon.

Ames called me on Tuesday to ask if I had heard “the big news”. I think I surprised her when I said that I had heard of the Adobe/Macromedia merger the day before. Since I hadn’t ranted to her about it Monday night, she wanted to know what my opinon was. I’ve been kind of quiet about the whole thing because I half-heartedly agree with Greg Storey in that unless you’ve got a huge investment in Macromedia as a company, it’s not that big of a deal. On the other hand, Ames is right too. It is big news. In one $3.4 Billion swipe of a corporate credit card, one company owns most of the software that I use for work.

OK, so now I’m somewhat interested (not jamming my eyes back into their sockets interested - just interested). As long as I have the tools I need to do my job and they’re not going the jack the prices through the roof, I’m happy. The problem is that there is a lot of overlaps in the products of these two companies and it will be interesting to see which flagship products get the axe. Take Dreamweaver and GoLive for instance. Dreamweaver is the much more trendy/popular app, and I would only assume they would keep it. Aside from Flash, I think Dreamweaver was a key acquisition of this deal. Then there’s Freehand and Illustrator. These are both GREAT products, but if it’s Adobe’s call, I would think they’re going to snip Freehand right off the Studio MX package and banish it to never be upgraded causing it’s sales to dwindle till it dies a slow painful death in Adobe’s dark dungeon.

I guess that’s the thing that makes this merger so tragic to some people. It’s not a case like Google’s purchase of Blogger, where they are strategically putting themselves in a new market. These are two popular companies that have been expanding a thriving industry with their competition and now there is only one, and no competition to be found. I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see what the fallout will bring. In the mean time, be sure to check out John Gruber’s: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s “FAQ” Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia

I'm sorry to inform you all, but I will no longer be maintaining this blog or taking part in the web design community. An opportunity has come up that I simply cannot pass over. For all my life (or at least my sleepless college days) I've dreamed of one day becoming part of an elite group. It will take hours upon hours of training, hard work, and dedication, but I've just heard back from the local office and they say I've got what it takes.

Jason Beaird
Barista Extraordinaire^(tm)
http://icednonfatmilkextracaramelcaramelmacchiato.jasongraphix.com

Russ, Nathan, Ryan, and I were having a random conversation last week about music piracy and Russia’s Allofmp3.com loophole, which led to talk of other possible legal loopholes for MP3s. The conversation kept revolving around the idea that a number cannot be copyrighted, and that all digital files are exactly that - a number. So this led to the idea of creating a program that could convert the binary number of a music file into an image file. Distribution of these images would not be illegal, given that the explicit purpose of the files be for visual enjoyment. The implicit ability to convert these files back into audio files would therefore not be the liability of the distributor. Well, Russ took this conversation all too seriously:

This is a segment of an image that was no-doubt created from an mp3 of his. I’m not sure what song it is, or how he actually created it, but you can view this “song” in its entirety on his latest post: “A Lost Cause”.

Update:

I just noticed that this post has been getting a lot of traffic lately from people looking for the SxSE festival in Myrtle Beach, SC. Somehow it has bubbled to the top of Google’s index on the topic even though it was from last year and was about my inability to make it to the SxSW Interactive festival. Weird. To anybody I might have confused, I’m sorry. To exclude search results that are talking about SxSW, try searching for “sxse myrtle beach”. Hope that helps!

Continuing on with the old post…

I’ve known that it was coming. How could I not with all the buzz about it for the last few months? The truth is that I would love to be at South by Southwest (SXSW). In the past week alone the following people have posted about packing up and going down to Austin:

• Andy Budd
• Dan Cederholm
• Andy Clarke (Malarkey)
• Mike Davidson
• Jon Hicks
• Cameron Moll
• D. Keith Robinson (Asterisk)
• Richard Rutter (Clagnut)
• Jason Santa Maria
• Web-Graphics
• Digital Web Magazine

But like Jeff Croft, I won’t be there. There’s just too much up in the air right now. Financially, Amy and I are saving up for a move to a location we don’t even know yet. She’s in that weird holding pattern between graduation and hearing from PhD programs. We’re pretty confident that she will get accepted at the University of South Carolina in Columbie for the Fall, but we can’t start making plans till we get that letter/email. Which means we don’t know if we’re even going that direction, which means that I can’t start looking for employment, which means we can’t set any kind of budget, which means no major purchases for a little while, which means plane tickets to Texas.

There’s times when we (at least I) don’t think about the impact of all this, and just go about life as normal. But there are other times when you can cut the tension with a knife. One of the biggest issues is that our extension for living in on-campus married housing here at UF expires on April 18th. It would be nice if we could stay there in the same apartment until we’re leaving Florida, but if we can’t get another extension, the reality is that we’ll be putting our stuff in storage and finding a sublease - or moving home - or something.

Regardless of all the circumstances and uncertainty though, I stand behind my wife. As long as we’ve been together, it’s been her goal to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering and its my goal to encourage her to pursue that dream, but there’s not much I can do to encourage when we’re playing the waiting game. In the mean time, I’ll be praying for an acceptance letter from South Carolina - soon!

After several days of windy, rainy, tropical storm conditions, it's finally sunny outside. Yes, Frances has slowly meandered it's way out of the state that it has been trudging through for so long. Amy and I really wanted to drive down to Vero Beach where we both grew up and where both sets of our parents weathered the worst conditions of this massive hurricane. Fortunately everyone we've talked to down there is healthy and optimistic despite some house damage and an uncertain amount of time until power is restored. If we weren't worried about getting stuck down there, we proabably would have driven down on Sunday, but now it's looking like next weekend may be the best time to head down and help with repairs.

By the time she got to Gainesville, Frances was moving through a bit faster and was downgraded to a tropical storm, but still packed enough punch to tear out trees like this and knock out power to most Gainesville residents. I can hardly imagine what Vero Beach is looking like these days. My thoughts and prayers go out to all those who were affected by this storm.