noinput.net | plug it in

Possibly the sweetest LOlcat evar?  Thx 4 ur linkz Tim.

I’ve been collecting some heat for a few now, you know the drill.  Hit me with your best shot.

Looks like I’m late for the popularity round on this photo, but I just came accross it and had to share. How awesome is this perspective.

BTW, for anyone else keeping score, today (monday) should be the day for the official v1.0 release of magento commerce. They’ve been talking about a March release for a while, it’s been sort of promised. I can’t wait to run the official installer.  Already have two projects to crank out on Magento in the works, possibly before the end of the week if I can manage.  Brady, you still up for helpin knock these out?

This was a good weekend.  Val had off, we watched a bunch of movies, and I’ve gotten a lot of work done sofar.  I also bit the bullet and ran the Wordpress 2.5 update, re-configured all my plugins and installed the gravatar system for blog comments, works pretty sweet too.  If you havn’t setup a gravatar yet, jump over and set one up here.  Super simple and just makes life easy for blog posting.  The new WP is fantastic, no problems yet, and the new admin is killer.

Eco-Safe PDF’s are sexyier than evar.

I spent some time working and finessing the render process and now we’re generating the best looking PDF’s we can based on popular demand.  Give it a shot! Convert this post and let me know what you think. By the way if you’re using IE you won’t see the link to download a PDF since I’m having issues with compatibilty and it’s stupid popup blocker rules. You can however send a PDF to yourself.

 

New Toy: Sigma 10-22mm f4-5.6 Wideangle Lens

I finally broke down and bought a wideangle, this new baby is sweet.  I wanted if for our trip to Mexico in a week, but really looking forward to using it for the China trip in a month and a half.  After reading reviews and reviews, debating over this or the Canon 10-20mm, I realize that since I still don’t have a full-frame DSLR, it’s really not worth spending the extra money for anything more.  One of these days when I can justify popping another few grand for another camera, I suppose I’ll figure it out then.  I’m hoping sometime this week if I have the time to do a little photowalk and snap a few shots.  I need to put some usage in my Flickr account again.

I should be launching 2 of my most recent projects this week, stay tuned and I’ll be posting all the fun stuff in the next few days. In the meantime, Die Hard just came on A&E HD.  I know where I’ll be for the next two hours.  Heh.

I’ve tried hard all my life to do as much as I can when promised. I’m no shining star and I realize I’ve made promises I’ve forgotten to keep or just got too busy, and for that I really feel bad about. Typically that comes with a followup promise and starts the cycle all over again. Even today I have 30+ things left on my immediate to-do list, and I’d love to get them all done before we leave for our cruise in less than a week and a half. But the real deal behind that is I know I can’t do it in the time I need to. For as long as I can remember I’ve tried to be that nice guy that helps out, offers favors, goes out of the way to put people before me. Maybe it’s the way I was raised, maybe its the Eagle Scout in me. Probably both. However when i think to how busy I’ve been over the years, the thing that keeps me going is not what I may be getting paid for it or how many websites I can knock out in a week for status.. but the gratification of accomplishment in knowing I did it myself.

I’ve gotten a lot done sofar in life, and mostly because I’ve had the fortune of keeping in good terms with people that have helped me where I need to be. Weather it be in a professional environment, or in casual, I’m proud of what I can hold to my name, and that’s something that will stay with me forever, even tho its shared with everyone’s favorite president. *heh. In any case, I was reading over a few blogs the other day and found this post on Seth’s Blog. Give this a quick read.

I gave a talk the other day, all about the unstoppable slow decline of interruption (traditional) media and the opportunities for rethinking how we communicate with people. At the end of the talk, someone came up and had very nice things to say about what he’d learned. The he leaned over and asked me to help him brainstorm about his brand’s upcoming ad campaign, because it was due to his boss on Friday.

Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.

Really well put, and as much as I’d be an idiot to disagree, the reality of the situation is no matter how much I shuffle priority, it’s my own fault for making priority in the first place.

I started my own business again this year for two primary reasons. To make some cash doing more programming, and to take photography. Sofar I’ve got one of those down (the programming part), however the only time I’ve picked up my camera since Christmas was to take a few shots at the Auto Club 500 race last month, and it was a chore, I couldn’t even get into it like I used to. Whats even better is I still havn’t downloaded the photos from my memory card. Hows that for priority?

What grinds my gears about priorities is this: photography means more to me than the web, hands down, so how do I put a half life on my money maker so I can do what I love best when it’s always second on my list. Can it be done without regret? Not unless it’s a priority.

So here’s a little something that I’m really happy to announce, the public launch of Eco-Safe.com. My man Jason Schultz pulled me in on this project to help him develop out a really hot system we could pioneer off of the concept to bring environmental responsibility to the web. This project on like everything I work on with him has sofar been a hit, and it’s a real treat to see such a great success in just a few days of going live. Tim did an amazing job on the widget and the site was designed by Dave. Always a honor to work with these guys.

The site has gone through many revisions and we decided that the best way to rock this idea is wide-open and free. Anyone can jump on the site, grab the code to install the Merit Badge on their site (like you may have seen on the sidebar here), and you have sustainable options. You can Email the page to yourself, Send yourself a PDF of the page, or download the page as a PDF. Nice and simple, and doesn’t cost you the price of paper and ink. Give it a try below, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how we managed to make it easier then printing to a PDF.

As of right now over 22K Merit Badges have been served up and in just a day and half over 200 people have chosen the Eco-Safe method of print 2.0 as I like to call it. Today a few big websites asked about installing the badge on their home. It’s taken off in the blogosphere as well, quite a few people have already put it on their blogs.. and thats just a couple.

I’ve also built a pretty extensive backend system for it that will soon offer a user to login, claim their domain, and show stats and reporting about which pages their users value enough to print 2.0 the pages. We figured this offers something you can’t even get with Google Analytics, and should be a big hit.

If you value things like this, I encourage you to install this badge on your site and embrace the fact that we need to all do what we can to protect the world we’re so badly abusing. I’m glad to say I was a part of this project, and looking forward to a lot more awesome ways of pushing the web to work for us in a new and unique way. Spread the word.

Digg this!

For my friends who know me, you know with as much as I love music, I have one goal I haven’t got to yet, and that’s to make it to Ibiza one day. For as long as I’ve had DSL, I’ve listened to Radio 1 and hoped to one day get to Europe. I’ve gotten close but it’s still one of those places I can’t wait to make it to in the world.

When I think about the perfect vacation, for me, witnessing something like this performace would constitute one more reason to die happy. I may sound crazy for saying that, but thats how much it means to me to make it there one day.

Last november Pete Tong had Steve Edwards do a live acoustic performance for his Essential Selection show that they did live on the beach for a “Sunset Moment”. I found the liveset late last year and finally tracked down a clip. Now, I’m really determined.

If you want the full clip, grab the liveset here: jump to 55minutes in.

• Pete Tong - The Essential Selection @ Cafe Mambo