We’ll see how the weather holds up, but the plan right now is for Becca and I to hit the trail at the Goosecreek trailhead saturday morning and make a roughly 20 mile loop through the Lost Creek Wilderness. It might take us 3 days to do the whole thing, we’re planning on 2 nights anyways. It’s going to be cold, but I think we can handle it, I’m sure there will be some good stories when we come back.
Becca had spent the night with a good friend Sunday night, and had taken our car with her. Instead of doubling our drive times too and from and just making a mess of schedules, I decided to ride my (our) bike to work Monday. I checked it out before she left on Sunday, just to make sure everything was working, and got things tightened up. So I ride in the 4.5 miles to work sucking down car fumes while pedaling madly uphill for a big part of the ride. When I got to work I felt like I might throw up, but by the end of the day I decided that I had actually enjoyed the ride quite a bit and felt like I could do it again on the way home, and probably for several days each week.
Unfortunately about halfway home last night the pedal on the bike just started wobbling and eventually fell out. The pedal had stripped right out of the arm on my gear wheel thing. The really annoying part is that this bike is relatively new, sure it’s at least 3 years old but it’s been ridden probably less than 2 dozen times, and it’s a Gary Fisher mountain bike. People speak of that brand like it’s awesome, but I guess there’s no guarantee that crappy parts might not be attached to an otherwise nice bike.
Anyways, it will be a couple days before I get it fixed, which might totally sink the motivation I otherwise felt for this endeavor. We’ll see if I can ever stick with the biking to work idea. It seems like a great idea, less gas money, better health, less juggling of our one car.
It’s called FriendFeed. And it lets you track and publish all of the information about what I’ve been up to on the various social enabled web service I’m a member of. Most of what you’ll see on here is links to things I’ve rated on StumbleUpon, bookmarked on del.cio.us, and song’s I’ve “loved” on last.fm. But occasionally there will be new photos from Picasa(google) web albums, or books on goodreads or movies added to our Flickr queue. You never know what might be there. It’s kind of like this running social log of what I’ve been reading and what I’m interested in. It doesn’t really sound that interesting to me. But I could see some sort of interesting infovis document being created from this. Perhaps something along the lines of a personal “annual report” ala Feltron. I hope no-one really cares that much about the details of what I do online, but it’s interesting to see it all in one place.
Also, yes since I mentioned photos, there is a new album of photos from our trip to Bishop’s Castle up. It’s absolutely astounding that one man could build all of this.
Tonight I built a simple little alcohol stove. The ultralight backpackers seem to all love these things and they are very simple to make. Basically you take two bottoms of a pop-can and slide them together, and you punch or drill some holes into the ridge along one side and punch a slightly larger fill hole in the top but in the center of the depression.
The assembled canister is about 1.5 inches tall with about 20-30 little pin holes around the top to act as jets. The theory behind these things is that you fill the little canister up with about 1 ounce of alcohol fuel, the red bottles of HEET work, as well as many other types of alcohol products. You don’t store the fuel in there, but rather in a seperate small bottle, and fill the stove as needed.You dribble a little alcohol under the can after it’s filled. Then cover the fill hole with something like a quarter. Then light the alcohol on the ground and it will heat up the can and the fuel inside the can. Once the alcohol starts to heat up it will produce copious amounts of vapor and the vapor has to escape out of the many little jets in the top of the canister. This vapor is of course ignited by the priming flames from the alcohol that was spilled on the ground. After the priming fire goes out the jets stay lit because the flames from the jets continue to heat up the alcohol inside the canister enough to maintain the evaporation rate needed.
One ounce of alcohol burns up in about 10 minutes. Here on a nice warm night down at 6,000 feet the thing worked like a charm and was able to boil 2 cups of water in our camp cook-pot in less than 5 minutes. The aluminum reflector base and windscreen that came with our MSR Whisperlite Intl’ should work great with this little stove too. One other thing that needed to be added was a pot stand, I fashioned a rough tripod out of a coat hanger, but it seems to be getting pretty soft and warping from the heat of the stove. We’ll see. This project is ridiculously cheap, and the only thing that costs money is the alcohol. And some types of alcohol can be used as an antiseptic as well as fuel on the trail, so that’s a plus, and it costs relatively little compared to many cooking solutions.
My plan is to take this along as a secondary stove on our next trip and see if it performs in real world conditions. I have my doubts, since the pressurized canister stoves like the MSR Superfly don’t work at all up at 10-11k feet in the evening temperatures. We’ll see if the rediculously light alcohol stove is really a viable replacement for my white-gas burning flame thrower that I have come to love.
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Buzzword is a pretty neat word processor. Superior to Google Docs and Zoho, from what I can see. It's visually much more appealing and it's built on Flex. So that's pretty neat. Also, the typography is cool.
I read Halo: The fall of Reach as well as Halo: First Strike a few weeks ago. I went back and replayed the first Halo game inbetween those books to make the story fit in, my intention was to then go on and play Halo 2. All I had at the time was a PC, so I got a copy of Halo 2 for the PC and tried to play through the first person campaign to get the next chapters in the story. Unfortunately Halo 2 was unplayable on the PC. It was atrocious, simply terrible. There was no support for widescreen resolutions. Movement was slow like I was moving through peanut butter at sub-zero temperatures. The aiming reticle wasn't even centered in the screen! It was incredibly un-fun to play. I don't know what Microsoft/Bungie did to that game when they ported it to the PC but they did an awful job of it, I cannot believe anybody would have actually payed money for that game. So I abandoned the game after the first chapter/level which is when it demands you activate the game with Microsoft. I tried to read up on the story line of Halo 2 online to get an idea of what I was missing.
Last weekend I recieved an XBOX 360 from Becca for Christmas (score!) and a copy of Halo 3. I started up Halo 3 and started playing. I realized that the sluggishness and difficulty with aiming that I experienced on the PC version of Halo 2 was probably and attempt to hobble PC users to bring them down to the level of console gamers. I still don't understand what happened to the aiming reticle, but whatever. Playing with the XBOX 360 controller I was eventually able to get used to playing a first person shooter with those feeble and imprecise input methods, and started really having fun. I wonder if HALO 2 might actually be fun if you play it on a console, but I don't know if I'll bother going back now.
Anyways, the story of HALO was really quite compelling. Right up the very end.
SPOILER ALERT
What the crap was up with how they killed Master Chief? So was the explosion somehow able to kill him in the hanger, but not able to reach all the way up the Arbiter in the cockpit? I don't get it. He escaped... but he didn't?
I am a designer and I love web-design, but I'm lucky enough to get some opportunities to do development also. I've dabbled a little in Javascript, PHP, and ASP web development. I've been exposed to a pretty decent amount of ActionScript programming through various Flash projects over the years. My only programming classes were 2 semesters of 100 level Java my freshman year of college, 4 years ago.
I'm telling you all of this so you know where I'm coming from, and why perhaps my workflow is shaped the way it is. This is simply what seems to be working for me, there are certainly better ways to do anything.
I am only on my 3rd Flex 2 Rich Internet Application (RIA) now, so I'm a newb, but here's my process.
First things first, Design! Yes, get some of the homepage design pinned down, first. Colors, shapes, textures, size of the page, target audience, simplicity of interaction. These are the things to consider before starting a Flex project. Flex is a very visual environment, I think it's important to mock up the entire application in photoshop before starting anything else. The client gets a chance to see their final product first, they can give their approval for the look and feel and give very insightful feedback on the functionality of the application if they get to see the app right off the bat.
So after a couple design revisions (or just one) you should have a PSD that looks like a flex application. I keep Flex open when I'm doing the design comp to check on what controls are available and what they look like.
After design is approved, start working on your data, this time I created an Entity Relationship Diagram to get a good feel for how the database was going to be structured, and ultimately what data objects I'll need to be working with in my Flex app. Bring a developer in on this for their knowledge of normalizing databases, etc if you can. The client got to see this diagram also and again we refined the structure of the application in important ways based on their feedback.
OK, next is to get started in Flex Builder. If the crappy Eclipse IDE will launch and run, good for you! You Win! Seriously though, the next step is to layout the interface in Flex, put all the controls, canvases, accordions, and tile lists you will need in place. Export graphics from the PSD to embed as skins for the various UI controls. Test the interface with no code to make sure the basic functionality of the UI components is all there first. I do as much as possible in an external style sheet for my Flex App now, very handy to keep the MXML file somewhat clean. Also, create any custom component that you know you will need (custom item renderer's etc.).
Next, once the interface in your Flex app looks just like the photoshop mockup minus the data, start setting up your data. I use XML for all the data input, the developers create ASP pages to generate XML files from the database. But first I need to create a flat XML file locally that matches up the Entity Relationship Diagram that I created earlier. Fill in all the data from an imaginary data set, create the images you might need to refer to, make up a full featured XML data structure to keep locally.
Now I create an external .as file to store all of the code for my project, I know theres some stuff you can do with custom classes and true OOP but I just put it all together in one big actionscript document per mxml file. I import any components that I'm pretty sure I'll need, set up a couple local objects to store my current data. Create the HTTPService objects for getting my XML data into the application. And start creating empty functions. Set arguments and return types if you know them, most of mine have one or no arguments and return type :void. Create a function for all of the buttons in your UI, create a function that is reusable if you can. public function deleteItem(itemID:string):void {} is usually better than creating 50 of these: public function deleteMySpecificItem():void {}.
I don't worry about actually writing the code into the functions yet, I just create a bunch of empty functions and put one or two lines of comments into the function to describe what I will do there.
Now it's time to make your data go into the correct places of the interface. Make the data show up where it's supposed to and how it's supposed to.
Then worry about functionality and writing the code that allows you to move the data around inside the application and interact with the UI elements.
Finally creat all the HTTPService request to write the data back out to server side scripts that will update the database.
Those last two steps take the longest and are the most tedious. But seeing it all come together is so awesome. Testing, bug squashing, and more testing is not very fun either, but still very satisfying when done.
So, I just thought I would share how I've been doing my Flex development. I don't know who will read this, but I hope it can help someone who is just getting started.
I love being a designer but sometimes you just have to shake your head and sigh at the common requests that clients have. This video effectively pokes fun at what clients think they really want. It's funny because we all know someone who likes this stuff.
NBC "Video Rewind" sucks. We missed 10 minutes of the office on TV last night, so tonight we went to nbc.com to watch those first 10 minutes. Was it to much to hope for that their online episodes were as easy to watch as ABC's? Apparently, yes. NBC is completely incapable of delivering video online. It would have been much easier to download it over bit-torrent. Also, the little bit of the video that did load was at the wrong aspect ratio. Widescreen squeezed into a 4:3 player. Weak. Commercials load and play just fine, they are even larger than the video provided for the actual show. In fact I've sat here writing this while waiting for NBC's crappy video player to buffer, of course I have no idea if it is buffering, because there is no busy indication or loading bar.
And I would try to submit a complaint to NBC, but that is entirely impossible. I've looked before, all you can find online is a general survey form that offers no field for comments or questions. So, they want to prevent you from watching their shows on their website through their new video player, and you can't let them know when it doesn't work. So here I am... here we are... fun.
Oh, and yes, I'm on windows, and I tried both IE and Fire Fox. Same problems in both.
May I submit for your perusal, a proposal to institute a new internationall observed holiday?
Today I cleaned up the contents of my iPod, an activity that should have been completed a long time ago. My MP3 collection stretches back at least 7 years, and this is my second ipod. I almost never used the shuffle feature of the iPod anymore because of the annoying need to skip through three tracks everytime one song that I enjoy listening to ended.
I primarily use my iPod as background noise while I'm working, but needing to skip repeat songs and songs you hate (why did I have 4 copies of the Jeopardy theme song?!?!) can really break a persons flow. When I find music, I usually use the artists menu, but this doesn't work when everyon mispells artist names all the time. This is a common problem with songs you get from P2P networks, especially with the songs I got from older ones like Kazaa and Napster. Remember kids, buying music ensures higher bitrates and accurate ID3 tags!
So I spent a little time viewing all the songs that just had filenames with no artist info in iTunes and applying the right artist info, or deleting songs I have always hated. Also, going through the entire library sorted by artist alphabetically shows where artist were named inconsistently. Red Hot Chili Peppers was spelled 8 different ways, and I think Guns 'n Roses came close to that as well. It's much easier to find music now on my iPod.
So, please tell your friends, the second Friday in October every year is International iPod Cleanup Day.
