kamakaze.org

So yesterday, 10/31/09 was my last day as an Apex 2000 employee. I thought it would be a sad day when I finally leave Apex, but I am actually very excited and relieved. Mind, it wasn’t my choice to leave, but I believe it is going to be a good thing for me. Luckily (?) Taryn got an internship and trasnferred from student teaching so now she is getting paid.

What this means is that I will have a few months to try and get my own projects working. Yes. I will finally be able to start building my own client list and project list. I have close to a dozen projects I’m wanting to work on that hold a lot of potential, and am excited that I am being pushed to work on these.

New month..new life…new hope

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except that i’ve been working…

Taryn started her student teaching and I have been at home playing stay-at-home dad. I take care of Caleb during the day, try and get some work done when he naps or get distracted by his toys long enough, and then, when Taryn gets home, I start working more. I’m not too crazy about the whole situation, but it’s what is needed right now, so I do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like hanging out with the little guy, but staying home and taking care of kids just isn’t for me. I miss the office and going to work. Maybe if I’d been able to get my own office together and actually had a place to retreat to it would be different. Maybe I’ll need to work on that once the next change happens (more on that later).

Taryn also did get a position teaching Kindergarten which is awesome. That means she will have some money coming in (finally) that will help out a lot.

Just wanted to get a post up so I can gripe at others for not posting.

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Google announced that the long rumored Chrome OS will be coming out later this year, with a version specifically for netbooks out next year .

At first glance, people are thinking yay! We’ll be able to get a netbook that boots up in a second or two, needs even less power consumption (much longer battery life) and doesn’t need much, if any, hard drive space (OS on PROM, persistent storage on flash chips). At first glance, I thought about that too, but then I realized something - PC vendors make money on the crapware they install on brand new PC’s. With a browser based OS, there isnt (shouldn’t) be any real local applications running, save the OS (browser).

This led me to a very scary place. Do you remember the AOL disks? Do you remember installing it up to get online and getting the AOL home page? Do you remember the big buttons and the cheery “Welcome!” followed by the iconic “You’ve got mail!“? Those are very powerful words.

In any case, my mind flashed to this place, but it wasn’t the 90’s, it was the 10’s. How would vendors monopolize when using a browser OS? A built-in unchangeable portal. Yes, portal. That old buzzword might be making a comeback. Popups and advertisements and, perhaps even a nice little greeting.

There’s more, though. Want to try a different OS? Good luck. What could you find to fit in the small footprint that such an OS would have, much less realizing there is no space for a hard drive, and the gig or two (at most) FLASH space really wouldn’t be enough to do anything serious.

I dunno. Even as an alternative to existing netbook OS’s, it seems overkill. Perhaps they’ll be looking more at the ktichen appliance market for something like this. I can’t see it making it in the consumer market, no matter how cheap the computers could be made and sold, and even with built-in 3g (4g?) connections. It would proabably be tied to AT&T for some unearthly reason.

That’s for another blog, though.

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I switched over to gmail exclusively about 3 weeks ago. I installed the offline gmail tool and got it checking all my (important) accounts (about 4 of them). I setup alternative e-mail address to send email as, and setup multiple inboxes to sort mail. I setup filters to apply labels, star, and archive as needed.

I had problem connecting one day, and was pleased I could at least access the e-mail I had downloaded.

So far, it has been quite a struggle for me to change. The concept of labels over folders baffles me for some reason, and I end up making a ton of labels at first then start slowing narrowing it down to what i need. I can see the benefit of the labels over folders, but i still like to know that I can click on a folder because I moved it there. Not having to remember where an e-mail could be stuffed, and just do a quick little search for the label takes a bit of getting used to.

I’m getting into the groove of things, and have been using it everyday for several business accounts. I think the experiment is a success and I will continue to use it.

for my next project - i’m going to be setting up a home media pc with either an old pc or laptop, or my old xbox. I’m hoping to provide more media content to my xbox 360.

Would be interesting for my xbox to be slave to the xbox 360.

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I know. Everyone is harping on them for all the remakes. This is a short list from this article of remakes in the works :

Footloose, Karate Kid, Conan the Barbarian, Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, Little Shop of Horrors, Masters of the Universe, Bright Lights Big City, They Live, Red Dawn, Top Gun, The Warriors, Robocop.

Now, there are a lot more being done (Neverending story is another), and the article mentioned above lists 20 movies that are not currently being planned for remakes (there are rumors of Rocky Horrot Picture show being remade, too). Go down the list and we can start our bets on when we might see these start popping up in the rumors.

Oh ya - don’t forget about the big news that Sean Penn is out of the Three Stooges movie, too. Yep. The Three Stooges.

is it too much to ask for something that has has at least a tiny bit of creativity in the concept? please?

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Seems Mountain Dew is focusing on the gamers market once again. Like they need any help there.

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Wow. this is an amazing value. I can’t wait until mine comes in the mail!

It appears to be real.

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This is a great list of tools for web developers. I was just talking about the font finder the other day.

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This site is pretty nice when you’re needing to learn or get ideas for UI.

From their site :

UI Pattern Factory is a mix of user interface design pattern library and UI gallery. It is a place to find user interface best practices, get design inspiration, and share design solutions with others. Our patterns are always fresh with tons of examples, and you can easily add more using Flickr.

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Last night I got the stuff to get my xbox hooked up to the internet as an early birthday / father’s day gift (as well as a super cool nifty laptop bag and lap desk) and, after I download the updates, installed the netflix app. I then proceeded to start watching movies in my queue. Very cool and works great. I wish it would show all the streamable movies in my queue, or, better yet, browse the entire library, but still, it worked very well and I am excited to have that feature. I’m going to be working on a media storage pc connecting to it to stream our music and other media. I am very excited about this new ability. Oh ya, and now we can buy games through it too.

One of the items I ran across was the Natal video. I loaded it up to show Taryn this interface and discovered that it was not the hyped unrealistic looking commercials i’ve seen everywhere , but the actual E3 on-stage demo of the product. It works. It seems to work very well. I can now see it augmenting their existing controllers in a way that would help immerse the gamer and offer more control of the character.

I can’t find a video of the actual E3 demo. If I can I’ll post it up here.

I was wondering why sony, during their motion sensitive controller demonstration, kept mentioning that they needed a controller because it didn’t feel right without it. Now we know. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s tech could work with the existing controller or really any shape or style of controller. That would be something, I’d think, because sony is right that some things just don’t feel right without a button.

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