Wyszdom

Sometimes web pages don’t behave as you’d expect. Usually this is bad, especially if it’s caused by advertising. I don’t like popups or interstitials. “Page peel” is an effect best left to someone’s first video editing project or the iPhone. I get frustrated when I hover over what looks like a link and it shows me an ad or thumbnail. I complain when I can’t find basic information, have trouble locating important information, or get confused by what looks like an expected element.

Sometimes, however, a surprise is welcome, even if it is an advertisement.

This online store from HEMA seems traditional enough at first glance, but study the design carefully and you’ll see what makes it just a little more lively than a typical product listing.

There are some creative “Get a Mac” ads which break through the boundaries of traditional banner advertising.

And most recently, Nintendo has had fun showing off the fun of Wii with a YouTube channel*.

*Disclaimer

A few months ago, I signed up for Transport, a service from Macminicolo.net, which allows you to back up to an Apple Time Capsule (which you own) located in a data center in Las Vegas.

My initial experience wasn’t that great. My initial backup failed, and since it takes so long to transfer a hard drive’s worth of data over the Internet, I gave up on it for a while, intending to troubleshoot on a free weekend. I think the failure may have had something to do with my 100 GB hard drive being nearly full. As far as I know, the initial backup needs to be completed all at once, so if it fails at any point, you have to start the transfer from the beginning.

After booking my trip to Vegas at the beginning of this week, I was reminded of the fact that I own a Time Capsule there, and it was about time I put it to use. So I tried it again, this time with my lighter load of about 70 gigs. It took some time (a couple of days), but the transfer did eventually finish. Now, everything seems to be working just fine. It’s connecting to the server automatically and backing up every hour. The backups are a lot slower than connecting directly to a drive via FireWire or USB, even if you’re not transferring much, but since it happens in the background, it’s not a big deal.

The Time Machine interface itself (which you use for restoring files) works over the network but is pretty slow. If I ever do need to use it, it would probably be a complete disk failure and in that case I’d just have the Time Capsule shipped to me.

I think the service is a neat idea, and it’s working fine for me now, but unfortunately with the speed of today’s Internet it’s not quite the solution I was hoping for. If you’re considering this for yourself, I’d suggest just using Time Machine with a local Time Capsule or other backup disk for your immediate backups, and keep an archive of your backup off-site (at your office, etc.), updated every week or month.

Two fun ways you can celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day:

1. Set your language preference in Google to Pirate.
2. Wear this shirt.

I think Beah will be happy to know that the “pirate guys” will be spending the day in Philly.

I remember years ago seeing an ad in an in-flight magazine for a service where you could fill out a form, mail it to a company, and then receive a custom font representing your handwriting.

Two things have changed:

1. You no longer have to mail it.
2. It’s free.

I learned about YourFonts.com from one of Matt’s recent tweets. Even though I printed out the form within minutes, I didn’t even retrieve it from my printer for several days. But last night, Mike emailed me with his own custom font. Well, if Mike had his own font, I had to have mine. I spent a good deal of time tonight filling out the template. I hardly ever write stuff on paper, so it was a real challenge. Being out of practice and writing letters in a grid reminded me of kindergarten. Adding to this feeling was the fact that it soon turned into an arts and crafts project, as when I messed up (the first character I messed up on was b), I fixed it by writing the new version on a different sheet of paper, cutting it out, and taping it to the template in the correct location. In kindergarten I actually used paste more than tape, but the nostalgia was there. Anyway, I completed the template, scanned, and uploaded. YourFonts.com then provided me with the Michael Wyszomierski font.

Speaking of kindergarten, you may notice that the character 5 in my font looks a little funny. You can see an example of it here if the font is showing in my blog titles. Mike noticed it within seconds of installing the font, and correctly identified that the 5 is, in fact, wearing a hat. You can find the reference in this old blog entry. (Yes, I remember everything that I blog about. Really. I wouldn’t lie about that.)

Continuing to speak (write) about kindergarten, is paste ever used outside of kindergarten classrooms? I’ve never encountered it since then. Even later in school I never saw paste. Older kids utilized glue sticks, Elmer’s Glue-All, hot glue, and rubber cement as their preferred adhesives. Did you ever cover the palm of your hand with Elmer’s, blow it dry, and then peel it off? Yeah, that was awesome. I remember in high school there was a group of students who used to write funny articles for the school paper. One was about eating glue. It was one of my favorites.

If you’re viewing this page in a browser supporting CSS @font-face rules, you probably see the title of my entry uses my custom handwriting font. I wanted to incorporate it into my site somewhere, and that’s where I currently have it. I initially tried using for the main text of each entry, but not for the headers and other navigational text. That mix of handwriting and machine type did not mix well. So, I tried using my handwriting for all of the text. While I did like the look of it, I realized that this just made everything harder to read since my handwriting isn’t very skimmable. So, I settled on using it for my titles, since on pages with multiple entries it actually enables skimmability by standing out and breaking up the type. If you find my use of the font too annoying, let me know and I might just bump it to my currently dull homepage.

If you think my choices about web design make no sense, you’re probably right. In 2004 I revised my homepage layout and colors and received these comments:

“I’m not a fan of your new look.”
“It seems to be a melange of different design philosophies.”
“Get a new color scheme.”
“It borders on blinding.”
“The new color scheme makes your page hard to ignore.”

I do plan on always utilizing the font somewhere on my site, since fonts really can become part of one’s identity. Just be happy I didn’t use Mike’s suggestion to “just use it everywhere.”

I’m not going to comment on Microsoft as a company, Bill and Jerry as people, or the ads as effective marketing, but I will say that I find the commercials entertaining so far. I appreciate them taking a risk.

Related quote from Seth Godin:

If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you’re going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

I’ve noticed that when I send a Twitter update with Twittelator on my iPhone, it often lists my message as occurring “-5 seconds ago.” If I refresh quickly, I come back to the present with “0 seconds ago,” and then proceed normally as the tweet falls into the past.

You won’t believe what I almost did tonight. Excited by a few products that are Windows-only, as well as the ability to update the firmware and have more fun with some of my gadgets, I decided tonight would be a good time to pick up a copy of Windows and run it with Boot Camp. Plus I would get to see what this Vista thing is all about.

But then I did about 30 seconds of research and learned that:

1. Vista has about 18 different versions.
2. They’re all expensive. 

Not something I feel like dealing with on the first day back from a long weekend. I may give in and buy Windows someday, but not tonight.

Jason suggested that I install Linux instead if I’m looking to play around with another OS. Some quick searches have suggested that the time I would have to invest into installing it would probably be even worse than the cost of Windows. I don’t want the OS to be something I have to think about, even if it would give me major geek cred.

I’m sticking with good old OS X for now. Not everything is compatible with Mac, but at least I’m comfortable with it.

I recently uninstalled Gallery, a free online photo organizer. When I launched my gallery, called “Imagery,” back in February, I explained that I was only doing this so I could host the photos on my own domain, and questioned whether this was worth the trouble when services like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums required much less work.

I did like having the photos hosted on my own domain, and I really appreciated the absolute control and customization options, but I never really added any photos after the initial launch. I also got lazy about upgrades and had to worry if that would lead to hacking. This is just my personal site, so I don’t want to invest a significant amount of my time into maintaining it. I may decide to give it another shot in the future, but for now I feel much better leaving the technical bits to the experts.

I still really like Flickr, and have put a lot of time into organizing my photos there, but my current photo sharing solution is my Picasa Web Albums gallery, offered by Google. I’m free to use whatever products I want, but I think that eating Google’s dogfood, even for personal stuff, is an important part of the development process and should help to improve the product’s experience for everyone. Plus, starting today, there are two killer features of Picasa that make it the right solution for me: Face recognition and synchronization.

Face recognition
I once tried to go through my iPhoto library and tag all of my thousands of photos based on who was in them. I’m glad I gave up on that, because now Google does most of the work.

Synchronization with a desktop client
One-way uploads from iPhoto are a nice start, but what if I later add more information about my photos on the web or on my desktop? Picasa Web Albums synchronizes with the (Windows-only) Picasa desktop client, and for that reason alone (okay, there’s another reason) I’m buying Windows tonight to take advantage of this.

Update: The Picasa team has a blog post about their latest offerings, including a couple of videos showing off the new features.

I have a nice HD camera from Sony. It’s an HDR-HC3. It’s not cheap. I’ve had Sony cameras before, and I’m used to my camera having a standard mic input. I expect to see an 1/8″ input (or better) on anything but the cheapest models. Well, here’s how the always proprietary Sony decided to ruin my experience:

The HDR-HC3 does not have a standard microphone input. It has an “Active Interface Shoe” (AIS), which is a type of input specific to Sony that allows the connection of accessories. So what are my microphone options when it comes to AIS? Well I have three: a shotgun-like “zoom” mic, which mixes with the internal mic based on zoom level, an omnidirectional “surround” mic, and a wireless Bluetooth mic. The Bluetooth mic sounds like a good idea, but take a look at it:

Image by Dai Haruki

Yes, that large thing that looks like a flash drive sitting next to the camera is the microphone. Sony expects people to wear this. I don’t know if they realized during development that a video camera accessory might be used with a video camera that is recording images of someone wearing the microphone. Because it is ugly.

At some point Sony must have realized that people might want more than three options for microphones, as they did actually come up with the VMC-K100, an AIS to 1/8″ mic input. Unfortunately, they discontinued the item, and I was unable to find any third-party alternatives. I did find accounts of some people that were so desperate for a solution, they bought one of the Sony mics and after some disassembling and soldering, created their own inputs. Not something I’m ready to get into.

After losing an eBay auction for one that went for over $120, I was finally able to find a retailer selling it using Google’s Product Search. The seller had pretty mixed reviews and a poor website, so I’ll hold off on naming it until my order is complete. Feel free to email me individually if you’re searching for this adapter and want to know where I found it.

Now all I need to do is wait for the adapter to arrive, and then go out and buy a non-ugly wireless lavalier mic.

I’ll leave you with a Google search tip, useful for when you’re searching for something specific like [ais] and you don’t want Google to try and help you out by returning variations like [ai]: Stick a + right before the word with no space in between. For example, [+ais mic adapter] (without the brackets) should help narrow down your results. Don’t worry about memorizing this tip, since you can always cheat.

Enough complaining; I’m off to go watch some meteors shower down upon the Earth.

Update: The seller, NextTronics, emailed me this morning to say that the item was not available. A company which collects someone’s billing information before revealing that the item is out of stock does not deserve to be in business. Now I have to scramble for another solution.

Here’s the thing about the Internet…

You think that you’re going to log out soon and be in bed in five minutes, because you are tired and want to get to work early tomorrow. Yet somehow, three hours later, you are still at the computer, watching instructional videos about how to do the moonwalk. And you don’t dance.