A blog about life, the web, and drupal
Sorry guys no more texting while driving. It also looks like Dec 1. there will be no more smoking.
“The biggest change — a ban on smoking in most restaurants and bars in the state — will not take effect until Dec. 1.”
The Washington Post article explains everything else in detail.
Va., Md. Start to Implement Several New Laws Today – washingtonpost.com.
This is probably the funniest comic detailing the wretchedness of IE6 I’ve ever seen. As you know IE6 is the bane of every web designer and developer. Some people have just flat out stopped supporting it. And, it’s about time they did too. It’s 8 years old!! As a web community we need to start supporting HTML 5 and cSS 3 and look towards the future instead of supporting the past. If you’re still using IE6 at home you have no excuse. Please upgrade to IE8 or at least IE7.
Flickr Photo Download: IE6 denial message for Momentile.com.
This will most likely void your warranty but it’s pretty cool that it’s possible. Check out the link below:
I have Tethering and MMS on my iPhone — and Yes, I’m on AT&T – Aaron Krill.
Alek has done some amazing work since graduating from Pratt. Here’s his latest reel showing off his work:
I’ve decided it’s time to move away from the amateur world of point and shoot photography and take the leap into SLR. I’ll be very honest, I’m envious of a lot of bloggers out there who have amazing photo galleries with great collections to show off to their friends. I not only want to learn out of jealousy but it’s a general interest and hobby I can see myself getting into. Long gone are the days were I was satisfied with an overexposed photo from my old Canon SD600 Powershot.
Cameras
My first big decision is going to be which camera I want to get. I’m currently deciding between the Nikon D60 and the Canon Rebel xsi. They both fall within my budget range for an entry level dslr. I don’t need anything super expensive right off the bat in order to take excellent photos. If I was trying to make money off my photos I’d probably consider going for a Canon EOS 40D. From what I understand the Canon and the Nikon are fairly close in quality. The 2 megapixel difference isn’t too significant at the entry level. The biggest selling point for me is the fact that the Xsi has a bigger lcd viewing screen than the D60. The autofocus and stabilization features are also better than the Nikon. This is important for a photography newbie such as myself. I guess I could just buy a tripod and then it’s a non issue. I’m not an expert on any of this so if anyone has any input, please make some suggestions on a good camera. My budget is currently in the 500 to 700 dollar range.
Web Galleries
I know everyone loves to use Flickr and I completely agree that it’s a great platform to share photos. Personally, I’d prefer to host all the photos on my own site since I have the bandwidth to spare. There are three galleries that I’m considering using. They are, Gallery, ZenPhoto, and Lifebox. I hear Gallery is a great piece of software with tons of options and configurations but I think I’m going to be using Lifebox. It’s new and has a great interface. It supports,
I took that last bit from the website, but you can see why I’m leaning towards it.
Purpose
The reason I’m going to take up photography is that I want to express myself more artistically, find a new constructive hobby, and also provide myself an abundance of stock photography for my own web design and development. Plus, let’s be honest, taking really good photos is pretty awesome. I guess I should sign up for a photography class. Anyone know of some good classes in the DC area? I’d love to hear from some other photographers.
If you live in the DC area and you’re into web development and blogging, you’ve probably heard of TECH Cocktail. If you haven’t then let me enlighten you. According to their website,
“TECH cocktail, a community building startup founded in May 2006 by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, offers events and community-powered projects open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs & professionals interested in technology in under served technology communities.”
Viq and I at DC TECH Cocktail 5
Essentially it boils down to a happy hour of technophiles networking with each other over free drinks. It’s actually a really great opportunity if you’re even remotely related to the field. I went to TECH cocktail DC 5 recently, and it was held at the LeftBank in Adams Morgan. I met a whole slew of Web Developers, Designers, Photographers, Lawyers, even Venture Capitalists at the event. There were some pretty prominent people there including Brian Williams, the CEO of Viget Labs.
Hopefully TECH Cocktail comes back to DC because it was a great event. Hopefully some new faces will show up and continue the trend!
If you’re ever looking to optimize your page load times check out Google Page Speed. According to Google’s blog they’ve been using this for a while now and just recently decided to release it to the public.
Smaller web sites probably don’t have to worry as much about page load speed, especially low traffic sites. But if you’re running a high traffic site, page speed is extremely important. Sure you might only have 40kB on a page but if you get over a 1000 people a day that quickly becomes 40mB. You’d be hard pressed to find pages that are only 40kB these days anyways.
With that said, install the add on and have fun optimizing your web pages!
Check out the latest invention from Google, http://www.google.com/squared/. You can receive some pretty cool combinations from using this service. I’m not sure how to best describe it’s practical usage.
I typed in parrot fish and google got back to me with some pretty interesting results. First of all I never even knew there is an actual parrot fish, second I like how the third result is ethics, as if to say if you could genetically create a parrot fish, should you?
Have fun playing around with it. This could’ve been a useful tool in college.
I just discovered this lately and I’m not sure how long it’s been around but it’s a great way to kill a couple of minutes of your day. It’s called Google Image Labeler. It’s a great way to pick your brain and it also can pass the time smoothly. At face value it’s just a simple game that Google has provided for people, but really Google is improving their image search engine through your free information input. I have to say google is pretty ingenious at garnering free information from the masses.
Google keeps track of all your points for you and even has a daily score tracker and all time highest contributor score in case you care to know.
This memorial day weekend I went camping at Assategue Island with Ryan, Susan, and Ms. Yvonne. The weather was perfect over the weekend save for a few spots of rain on Sunday. It felt really good to be at the beach because it’s been so long. I prefer the east coast beaches to the west coast ones simply because the water is warmer, the beaches are sandier, and I have fonder memories of the Outer Banks from when I was a child.
Yvonne and I left for the beach Saturday morning and ended up arriving around 11am. The drive was pretty uneventful. I assumed there would be a lot of traffic with all the vacationers heading to Ocean City for the memorial day weekend. We left early enough that it wasn’t an issue. It could also be that during this recession people haven’t felt the need to leave town for vacation.
The pony that ate my bag of Kettle Chips
Assateague Island is known for its feral Chiconteague ponies. In fact, one of them was kind enough to eat my bag of Kettle Chips (Salt and Pepper). I caught a photo of one with my iPhone. I have a couple others which I will post once I get the time to upload them. There’s a great picture of Ryan and I standing next to the pony giving the camera a pair of thumbs up. Ryan if you read this, send me that photo.
Saturday consisted of burgers and dogs for lunch and for dinner we grilled up salmon, asparagus and potatoes. It was absolutely delicious. On Sunday we ate scrambled eggs, bacon and hasbrowns for breakfast. Lunch consisted of vegetables, fruit, turkey bacon avocado sandwiches and some chips. For dinner we had crab cakes stir fry and grilled shrimp. The food was glorious. I’ve never eaten so well on a camping trip.
There’s nothing better than sitting on a beach with a choice beverage, enjoying the sun with your good friends. All in all it was a great weekend.
Twitter