Level Orange

After buying a massive 65″ HDTV earlier this year, my first and foremost goal was to take some time and watch some movies on it. Really sit down and get that “theater” experience, right in my own home. Once I picked up a nifty little progressive-scan DVD player, let me tell you, I did so with great enthusiasm and dedication.

The next goal was to get a clear signal for television programming. I had managed to live with plain ol’ broadcast TV for a few years after giving up DirecTV back in 2002. It sufficed for the most part, but I knew watching a crappy VHF/UHF signal on a giant screen was just going to be painful–and a disgrace to the television itself.

I thought about cable, but only for a second. Having seen the quality of the local Time Warner programming and the prices they were charging for it, I knew that I’d have to go back to satellite, and I was fine with that. My first reaction was to fire up the DirecTV service again, but I had to take a look at DISH Network, simply because of the introductory package they offered. Free installation, free equipment (including DVR and HD upgrades), up to four rooms installed, and a discount on programming. How can you beat that?

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This is the first of a series of updates to some old typeface designs that I created years ago. If you have questions about these fonts, please contact me

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With Web 2.0 being all the rage lately (and already inspiring a backlash of sorts), I’ve been slow to really take the time to see what it’s all about. I know it was sparked by some small companies taking some new approaches to how the web works–the most notable being companies like Google, Flickr, del.icio.us and even 37Signals–but I also know there’s more to it than that.

It seems to be more of a movement than a technological advance, but the darling of the moment is AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript And XML. I know there’s some neat things AJAX can do in regards to the end user experience, and I also know that it’s been around for years, mostly under the guise of DHTML. And for that reason, I’m leery of taking advantage of it.

Until I found script.aculo.us, where Thomas Fuchs has compiled a number of recently developed scripts and techniques to handle the most common AJAX effects and functions into one downloadable and easy-to-use package. Seemed easy enough, so I took the bait and started playing around with it.

For starters, I wanted to rearrange my home page a bit, but wanted an easy way for visitors to find all of the information on the page without have to scroll around. So I wanted a button or link that would instantly send the user to the right part of the page (either top or bottom). Now, I’ve seen this done plenty of times, and have put together a couple of scripts to do it myself in the past, but I wanted to see if scriptaculous could do it for me. I looked through all of the functions, and there it was–”Effect.ScrollTo”. All I had to do was tell it which div to go to using the ID selectors and -presto!- there it is!

So now, maybe I’ll be able to implement some basic functions with relative ease, even though I don’t see any immediate need for anything else. Maybe it’s just about keeping up with what’s new, maybe it’s about needing to know what the future might hold, but I wanted to see what was up with all this AJAX business, even at a basic level.

What I don’t understand is all the rest of that fuss about Web 2.0.

So I was out setting up our Christmas lights the other night and when I was done, I went and grabbed the camera to take a couple of snapshots. After a while, I started getting into it and playing around with angles and close-ups and whatnot. Turns out I snagged a couple of good shots, in my opinion. And since the holidays are right around the corner, I figured I’d share one of ‘em with the world in the form of a desktop wallpaper. Enjoy!

1280×1024

1920×1280 widescreen

With the release of Firefox 1.5, I had only one thing keeping me from upgrading–the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension. Stuck at version 1.0.1, it wasn’t compatible with the new Firefox, and since I had come to depend on this extension to get my bookmarks back and forth between home and work, I figured I’d have to wait around for an update.

But I didn’t want to wait around, so I started looking into alternatives. I couldn’t find any extension that had the same features, but then I thought about services like del.icio.us and others. The problem I’ve always had with online services is that they’re online. And really, it’s not even that they’re online, but that they’re shared. I’d much rather have my online bookmarks on my own server, where I know they’ll be kept safe and sound.

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