I have these peanut-butter filled pretzel bites here on my desk, a big tub of them, and I’m not sure where they came from. Who brought these to the office? Is this part of an evil plan to expand my waist.

It’s interesting to see what print designers do when they are tasked with producing designs for the web. And perhaps I’m just over generalizing, but it seems like many of them have trouble keeping up with what is important in web design. Or any design for that matter. Just because you can collage stock photos that describe every keyword of the site in the header does not mean you should. And just because the site is vaguely related to technology or computers does not mean you should use that tight shot of the fingers on the keyboard, we’ve all see it before, many many times. Also, comic sans went out of style before it was ever in style. Just a few helpful tips.

The best part about this job so far is that one of our clients pays in boxers. Like the underwear. Yeah, two more pairs of nice synthetic mesh boxers for the Tim. I guess that’s the end of this quick update while a client video renders for the 20th time.

Just last night a conversation transpired between Becca, Megan, and I which precipitated a change in my cell-phone ringtone. We were watching the Olympic Games, and a question arose regarding the origin of the olympic theme song. This and this lead me to the knowledge that the modern olympic fanfare is a composition by none other than John Williams, the man responsible for scoring all of the Star Wars movies, as well as numerous other iconic American movies. So of course I was more than willing to find an mp3 of the fanfare and turn it into a ring-tone for my cell phone, which plays mp3 files which I transfer to it via bluetooth. So now, whenever I recieve a call, I get pumped up. Which might encourage me to answer the phone in a cheerful manner. At the very least I figured it would annoy my co-workers.

I was wrong. My phone rang and no-one around me in the office, all of them deep in their work, heard it or even seemed to react to it. So I stood up and played the audio file off my phone and watched them all. Not a single one of them even twitched an ear. While I was standing someone sneezed and multiple people said “bless you” or gazunheidt or something of that nature. So, the olympic fanfare blaring out in the still silence of the office does not register on anyones conciousness, but a sneeze is immediately, reflexively, brought to the fore-front of their attention.

Now, I don’t ever bless anyone that sneezes, I’ve never understood why that custom persists, I wasn’t ever taught/trained to do do this little ritual by my parents. So, I’m guessing I don’t even hear 90% of the sneezes around me. But something out of the ordinary like a random piece of the olympic theme is a little more likely to catch my attention, but I am very easily distracted. So, my question is what determines the nature of the sounds that intrude on our concious thoughts?

The obsession with Ajax powered hosted web applications is at a fever pitch right now. Companies are dropping copy-cat products left and right on any idea that seems to have the least bit of traction. You can follow all this insanity over at the Tech Crunch. Apperantly for every mediocre idea out there that promises to deliver some web 2.0 functionality, built with an Ajax UI, there is venture capital to be had.

Anyways, none of that really affects me personally. What I am concerned about is finding the best services available, usually free services that deliver exactly the functionality that I want with as little fuss as possible. So here is the straight dope on what I have found in online calendars.

The very first service I found was CalendarHub which was exactly what I wanted, and I was very impressed by it, with a couple minor caveats. It offers very powerful adding of events, my favorite feature is the attendee invitation method. You just put in their email address, they get an email to confirm or reject the invitation. They dont have to sign up for the service in order to send their response, but they can right then and there. If they do, you can of course see their own public or group calendars, because they are added to your group. It has RSS feeds, a bookmarklet, and a desktop client, and SMS or email notifications (all services offer that last thing). The one killer feature of Calendar Hub is the ability to subscribe to iCal calendars on any remote server. Most allow you to import, but Calendar Hub will keep it sync’d. Cool. The bad thing is that this service has a funky layout on the month view that auto resizes to make any column that has an event in it wider than the others. Not the way I would have layed it out. Also, the website badge, which you see in my sidebar is great, but not customizeable at all.

AirSet which is a slightly different beast. It offers the basic calendar functions that you expect, with a somewhat Ajaxy interface. Their calendar layout doesn’t suffer from the autosizing problem that Calendar Hub does. It public, private, and groups. Groups are where all the power is. This app is focused on group collaboration, which is really cool. You invite the people in your group, they share a calendar, you can see their own public calendar items also. Email collaboration is built into the interface for sending. It keeps track of contacts, events, and lists, which are multi-column task lists with some great columns of data built in. (Screenshot) Everything can be shared, or private or whatever you want it to be. The only bad thing I can say about it is that it didnt really fulful my expectations for a Web 2.0 application that should be leveraging the Ajax features we see elsewhere. You cannot drag events around the calendar, or resize your views. But it’s intense collaboration focus really doesn’t let you notice the shortcomings in the interface.

• Desktop Syncronization - it has all my outlook contacts and events that I get invited to, this allows me to stay in sync with the exchange server we use at work, it auto syncronizes every hour. So I get SMS notifications for events in my outlook calendar. Awesome.
• Skype Integration - Call contacts from your calendar or anywhere a contacts info appears.
• **Verizon mobile app - **A PIM app that runs on most modern verizon phones is available to see and edit your AirSet data from your phone in real time, which just turned your cell phone into an awesome PDA. Unfortunately, not mine, I have a Verizon phone but am dropping it because of lousy reception where I live. Hope they expand to other vendors soon.

Planzo had a decent interface, a little more advanced than most, and it allowed for the community and sharing features of the other services. It offers calendars, notebook, and to-do lists. These are adequate. The interface does seem a little cluttered at times. It has RSS feeds… thats about it. Oh, and it will notify you of events via AIM. Which is nice.

One last thing to mention is Kiko which fails in almost every way that these others excel. It has limited collaboration, only stores calendar data, and just doesn’t offer the features power users will need. The only thing is that it hits the interface right on! To create events you look at a week view by default and click and drag a box in a day to create a new event that starts and ends exactly where you want it. The events can be moved around just as easily. And despite some clunky UI graphical elements it provides the functionality you expect from a modern AJAX app. In fact the free/busy, attendee invite screen in Kiko is more useful and powerful than in any other project I have looked at. They really nailed all the functionality a user would need right there. It’s sad the rest of the service isn’t as robust.

The game of Risk is an interesting one. If I were ever to again play traditional Risk against my couterpart, Becca, I would most certainly loose very quickly. She has that game down, in the way someone has something down, and that thing will never rise again. She knows all the routes and dead-ends like the back of her hand. No matter if it’s one-on-one or a larger game I inevitable lose on the classic board. Now, Lord of the Rings risk is a different matter. By all rights Becca is still a better player than I, but she doesn’t know Middle Earth in the way that I do. My strategy is to hope that she makes sufficient mistakes that I can gain the advantage and hopefully crush her. It’s never happened before, especially not in a one-on-one game. And it still has not happened. I think we are in hour 9 of this game, which we started some time saturday. The board is evenly divided between us, north and south. I have a few territories advantage, and our number of battalions is pretty equal too. At this point I usually make the mistake of leading bold and daring raids deep into enemy territory. I cut large swaths out of her lands, and then pretty much leave my borders undefended and long strings of single battalion territories that she can use to hop right into my lands. I’m slowly learning to be patient and defend my resources where I have them. My wife is a stubborn opponent, but the scales are starting to shift in my favor. We shall see what the next several hours of game time bring. Surely one of us will be tasting the bitter medecine of defeat. Then we shall put away the board, patch up our wounds, and swear to never speak of Risk again. Then about 4 months later we get the itch to match swords in plastic miniature table-top battle, and the whole thing begins anew.

After stumbling across this article from digg, I decided it was time to do something about the pitiful water flow in my shower. The government shouldn’t be interfering in how much water I use to clean myself! Anyways, it was an opportunity to get out some of those new tools I got for christmas from the inlaws. I quickly disconnected and disassembled the showerhead in our bathroom and removed the little plastic flow constrictor which limits water flow to around 2 Gallons Per Minute. I didn’t do any tests to check the new flow rate of the shower head, but I was confident this was an improvement.

I fell asleep with dreams about blisteringly strong jets of water to wash away my morning stupor. Becca, who wakes up before me every morning to go to work, informed me that the shower was significantly more powerfull than before. But that our bath tub drain wasn’t up to the challenge of removing all that water. I wasn’t daunted though, it was probably just slight clogged or something.

What I didn’t anticipate though is that when I got into the shower that morning it would be as frigid as fresh melt off an Alaskan glacier. Apperantly at the higher flow rate Becca used up all the hot water in one shower! I guess I may have to undo my shower head hack.

Site upgraded to wordpress 2.0. The upgrade was painless, the only real reason I upgraded was because of the new import functions in this version. I can finally import all those posts that I kept sitting around in a Moveable Type export format, it only took 2 years for me to get around to importing these. So, if you look in the sidebar you will see archives of sillyness stretching back into the the nigh unimaginable past July of 2001, the date of the inception of this blog. I’ve probably never stuck with anything of my own volition this long in my life. The only problem is that March 2002 - January 2003 is missing. Nearly a year of blog posts is gone, including the end of my senior year in high-school and the first semester of my freshman year in college. It’s a pity I couldn’t find those somewhere. Ah well, we cant have everything.

Unrelated to any of that above, I thought I would mention that I have been reading CS Lewis lately, his space trilogy is very interesting, I’m currently starting the 3rd installment, That Hideous Strength. It’s very good, and I think CS Lewis throws more incomprehensible words at a reader than any other author. I hadn’t noticed it as much in the other volumes, but this one is nuts. It might be the odd mixture of British colloloquisms and french academic vocabulary that was probably much clearer to his contemporarys. It’s nearly impenetrable to me in some places.

Holy crap, how did this happen? Here’s the top 5 people on the service hours list over at the UNK Pikes website.

McArdle, Clint	5002
Peters, Cody	573
Keim, Rodney	352
Theiler, Travis	223
Weiss, Chris	120

I don’t even know how Clint got that many service hours, someone is going to have to tell me what happened there. But my past 2 roomates fall in at number 2 and 3 in the list, way to go. Travis “Tickled Pink” Theiler is in a solid number 4 and my good friend Chris Weiss, the only one of those guys who regularly visits this site (as far as I know) has found himself at number 5. What’s up with that anyways Chris? Couldn’t you do a little more that 120 hours of community service? I know your heart is big enough, I mean look at Clint, he spent the better part of a year 208 days, 24 hours a day doing community service! So, seriously 120 hours is really weak compared to that. I mean sure, if Chuck Norris or Charlton Heston were on there they would each have done 10,000 hours of service in one day. Charlton Heston because of his ability to travel at Relativistic Speeds to accomplish 2000 years of community service in only one normal year. And Chuck Norris because, well, he’s Chuck.I don’t even know where I am going with this anymore. But way to go everyone back in Kearney, I’m very impressed by everything you have done.

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You know it’s going to be a trying day when before you even get to work someone runs into your car at a stop light. I didn’t see him coming and apperantly he didn’t see me just sitting there at a stop in the middle of the road waiting for the light to change. I didn’t hit the person in front of me and of course his SUV was largely undamaged. But, the back end of my car is thoroughly crumpled. I hope there wasn’t anything too important in my trunk because it’s probably staying there for a while.

I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal, and I’m not injured, now I just wait for his insurance company to get back to me.

In other news, Mike Nyffeler’s blog of videos and pictures form New Zealand is doing more than twice as many visitors on average. Of course we are talking about the difference between 5/day and 12/day averages.

I started working on cleaning up the markup for the site last night. There is still a lot to do sadly. I’m not XHTML compliant yet, mainly because of the falbum plugin generating url’s with &’s in them. But whether I get this version of the site cleaned up, or I go ahead and redesign the whole dang thing, I’m very happy with what’s in the sidebar now. Thanks to some great Web2.0 applications you can see what pictures I’ve been taking and uploading to flickr, see what my last 5 bookmarks at del.icio.us were, and also find out what upcoming events are on my calendar at CalendarHub. So, yeah, that’s a lot of info about the ‘ol timbly without even having to read one of these rediculous posts.

Oh, and here’s what I’ve gotten for Christmas so far.

• Rolling luggage
• Big Bath Robe
• Slippers
• Travel Coffee Mug
• iTunes card
• Yoda
• Lots of Candy
• Gourmet Popcorn
• Bonus at Work

Going home in a couple days, I guess we’ll see what else santa has in store. Oh, and yes all my christmas shopping is done. I like buying things and Becca like wrapping things, we’re a great team. Actually Becca likes buying things too, so well… you know how it is.

I’m sitting here watching the loading screen on Battlefield 2, so I have some time to write. Another christmas is approaching and I am quite happy, I have a good gift picked out for my wife and I am anxious to see what Becca has gotten for me. Last year at this time I was very nervously thinking about how I was going to propose to her. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. It went very well. OK, so she said yes and that is all that is important, but still I feel like I did a classy job of pulling it off. Now, Rodney, my roomate at college for about a year and a half, is getting married himself, he’s a fool. Not for getting married… just because he is. :D

Now, this map is done loadig so I shall pause while I practice my skill with the grenade launcher in Karkand. Crap, never mind, the freaking server just disconnected on me. Well, I suppose I have a few more minutes. Anyways, the connection at work on the T1 is about 3 times faster than my Adelphia connection at home for playing games.

I found a couple cool tools last night, one is Writely and the other is Jot Spot Tracker. These are the online replacements for Word and Excel. Completely online, completely free. It seems that there are so many great free hosted services available out there right now. A person could really just keep all of their data and interaction online in this set of online applications that some are calling web 2.0. Which I know sounds just plain silly, these are merely new ways of solving old probelms, with emphasis on certain features for covenience that will shape user interaction standards for many years to come. Tagging is a buzz word, sometimes called labels, sometimes called categories, it’s really a simple method of organizing data by keywords. It’s the hype of complex javascript and server side interaction that attempts to make the user experience more seamless within a web browser. I like it, and think it’s important to my role as a web designer.

Of course, some people still think that div’s an css styling are new fangled methods of building web sites, that are unproven and unreliable. Dont even try to mention AJAX, or anything beyone Classic ASP.

Whoa, my mind wandered into geek territory again there. What I really was trying to say though is that there are a lot of cool developments in my career field right now. I wish I had more time to keep up with everything and pick up some of the skills that I’m seeing being utilized.

I’m actually starting to do some real design work at my job now, hopefully I can escape tech support soon. For the past couple of days I’ve been working with some video for a flash banner ad that we were putting together. Specificaly, I had to mask out a moving horse from a snowy wooded mountainside, and yes the camera did pan and pull just to make the task that much more difficult. It brought back many fond memories of long hours in the lab working with video for school. But I’m still confidant that I made the right decision to stick with the web instead of video. For my own sanity at least.

I have not written on this page as much since I have left school. I think my life is simply less busy in many ways, and when I am less busy I less feel the need to blog. Maybe because I am more bored. Actually, that’s not entirely true, the only time I feel bored is when Becca is not around, and that’s pretty much the only time I blog also.Mike’s Blog should prove to be interesting in the next few months if he can overcome the hurdle of keeping it up to date.

I think I severely dislike Wells Fargo, or more precisely I am greatly dissapointed by the service at my local branch. They have just been so frustrating. Becca and I went in after the wedding to get her name put on our account and have my mother’s name taken off. While we were in there we ordered new checks and applied for a new credit card. So we wait a couple weeks and hear nothing from anyone and recieve nothing in the mail. Becca and I call several times, never get to speak with the banker we had been working with, and never get a call back from anyone about any of this. Becca finally goes in one day about a month after the first time and re-orders the checks and has them resubmit the credit card application. Several weeks later the checks show up with my name and my mother’s name on them. The package they were shipped in was addressed to my name and Rebecca. Seriously freaking rediculous. I go back in there to deposit my paycheck and find out what their deal is. Of course, my mom’s name is still on the freaking account, the second credit card application was rejected because Becca was the primary name on it and she was unemployed at the time she applied.

So I tell them that Becca is employed give them all the vital stats and ask them to please remove my mother from the account, they say they will do this and call me with more information later that day. Oh, and we still havent talked the the banker who is never around now, the head teller is the one dealing with us at this point. So now it’s been a couple weeks again and all I have is a letter from Wells Fargo that makes very little sense according to what I was told, and frustration piling up because my wife doesn’t have checks she can use. I will probably go back in there for another round of abuse on Thursday. After that I may start looking for another bank, and some sort of formal complaint form.

I am starting to realize that these huge corporations have very little accountability and control so many aspects of our lives that it’s frightening to know how badly they can screw up our lives. So the list of companies I wont deal with may grow to include more than just Quest DSL and HP.

Too many subject in this post. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

Just in case you didn’t know, here’s the vital facts about Chuck Norris.Facts About Chuck Norris:1. The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.2. Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.3. Rather than being birthed like a normal child, Chuck Norris instead decided to punch his way out of his mother’s womb. Shortly thereafter he grew a beard.4. Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.5. Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.6. Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked someone so hard that his foot broke the speed of light, went back in time, and killed Amelia Earhart while she was flying over the Pacific Ocean.7. Chuck Norris doesn’t read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.8. If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can’t see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.9. Filming on location for Walker: Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris brought a stillborn baby lamb back to life by giving it a prolonged beard rub. Shortly after the farm animal sprang back to life and a crowd had gathered, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked the animal, breaking its neck, to remind the crew once more that Chuck giveth, and the good Chuck, he taketh away.10. When Chuck Norris sends in his taxes, he sends blank forms and includes only a picture of himself, crouched and ready to attack. Chuck Norris has not had to pay taxes ever.11. There are no disabled people. Only people who have met Chuck Norris.12. In the early 1980s, Chuck Norris took a ragtag team of lovable losers and turned them into the state football champions. During their victory celebrations, he walked up to the star quarterback and snapped his neck to teach the rest of the team a valuable lesson about the mortality of man.

Hey, so in case you are all wondering, Nebraska sometimes get’s blizzards. Let’s all remember to check the weather before traveling next time, ‘m kay. Becca and I were lucky enough to stay with the parents of some friends from college

Google Analytics is pretty cool, I said something about it previously. It’s Urchin, but re-released in the google family. I signed up for it the first day it was available for free, and started adding my websites to it as profiles. Well, the popularity of this service was a little more than Google expected, and they werent quite able to handle the high load of new traffic. So after a week they suspended new registrations and removed that ability to add new profiles if you already had an account. The only thing is the didnt actually remove the ability to add new profiles, all they did was comment out the link that you click to add those profiles.

So, the URL still works, you can add profiles to your heart’s content actually. Which I’m sure is a relief to some people. Thank goodness for lazy web developers! I wonder if they have an opening….

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