Ah lovely jury duty summons

Lovely just what I've been waiting for shows up in the mail today. My
favorite activity of sitting around waiting while totally screwing up
my schedule for next month.
No it couldn't be for my city where you'd just call to check the
night before if your needed the next day. Nope not that
but a full on county summons where you have to be there and twiddle
your thumbs for a week if you don't get impaneled.
Love it, now I'll need to readjust my schedule since I'm not a get up
and go person. I design best at night so getting there at 8am should
really screw me over since I'll usually sleep around 5-6am.
This should be interesting to say the least.

Sent from my iTouch

Chrome + Gears makes a Android

Your future online is offline.  Interesting take in the article, I just did some wordplay for the title. Be interesting to see if it takes hold but I'm still waiting for something in a 4x6 or 5x7 touch interface tablet format instead of a crappy phone device with or without crappy chiclet sized keys.  When that is available then we'll talk.

Well was too good to be true

Well spoke too soon yesterday about the iTouch upgrade being a-ok
firmware wise. Still crashes if you mail and use safari right away.

Oh well maybe next patch.

Sent from my iTouch

Good about time people wise up to the problems of DRM on software

Spore Backlash

Culture Buzz Spore fans are not happy with the game’s anti-piracy DRM, so they’ve taken their protest to Amazon.

About time people wake up to the so called anti-piracy cartels who try to tell people how and what should be installed on their own systems. Things like antivirus, anti-malware, or process explorers utilities also know as security programs are deemed bad programs by the hacks. Usually to install the crippling DRM schemes you need to shut them off, yes that's always best to do. Shut down your AV's, your firewalls so you get infected or turned into a botnode, don't worry about what is running on your system we know whats best for you. Now enjoy your treat and jump through the hoops to enjoy your legitimately purchased software. Remember use this serial number, verify it every 10 days and oh on top of it keep the cd/dvd in your drive to run it since we can't be certain the first 2 steps work.

I was going to buy the game but with the "copy protection" on it and all future EA titles I'm skipping it any any others. But it's really not about copy protection as legitimate users are the ones who get the shaft, it's all about your ability to resell the program once you bore of it. What happens if say 5-6 years down the line you decide to reinstall the software and had used up your limit of installs? Wait EA is out of business, somehow, then what do you do? Unlike how I can go back and install Sims without a problem still or any of the other old software I own without incident.

I've been using computers for 20 years and there is no way I'd disable any security software even while running a hardware firewall with always on connections nowadays. Seriously just because some "security" company foists a protection scheme onto software publishers legitimate users are just expected to rollover because a mechanism is faulty by design? A Steam or MMO type of login is a better alternative than to have various hidden files and callhome routines unknowningly installed onto your system.

Stunned! No safari crash on my touch

So I decided to do the firmware upgrade on release day this time
around for the hell of it. Cleared everything that was available as a
playlist and let it back my 100 some notes and misc data on here,my
Touch, up and upgrade. Smooth without a hitch ad usual. Finally fired
up safari and was stunned, no crash on even a simple site so I'll
leave it be for now.
Too bad iTunes 8 is sluggish as now it would be my first upgrade
without a complaint.

Sent from my iTouch

New touch and nano impressions

Umm no. I like the original Touch/phone styling far more than this one. Volume buttons on the side just throws the whole thing off and the full steel cover/back bleed around just screams tacky. And the nano well said it from leaks before but looks like a crushed up used up toilet paper roll. The prior gen design was far better size wise to carry the tag of nano, you know to be smaller?
Of course they slimmed the touch also as it was bad enough it is the redhaired step child, just try to find a decent covered case for it, now they changed the dimensions. Just be cheaper to get a replacement now I suppose.
Battery time increased? Suuuuure and I have a bridge for sale too.

PR/Marketing on the Apple store needs to copy check a bit more. Of course the Red Nano is a Apple exclusive. I know I know they are aiming for Apple Store Exclusive but still how they wrote it sounds like yeah we're the only ones with a Apple Nano.

And as always will someone buy him some new clothes already?

Mindwipe Or I love looking at a blank screen

Uggghh.... I hate when I get like this every so often, I'll just sit and stare at a blank screen since I can't come up with anything to design.   Realized the last real thing I did was almost two months ago now as I shifted gears to work on some other things at the time.  Now for the first time in those two months I can't even come up with a simple image to start from which usually will take me many many layers into a completed one at some point.  

My problem is I don't approach it from a illustration or painting viewpoint, I'll just start on something and when I see that right point I'll work it from there.  I do treat it like painting though, I never do the same process or design type twice since quite frankly I don't know how I end up with the last designed image anyways.  I can look back at the last image I did two months ago and go ok how did I do this?  I'll see something at somepoint and go done and walk away from it.  

I could always go back to some previously started images that at the time I couldn't come up with anything to see if I can see anything now.  Figures this hits on a late saturday early sunday night after I already had been to a Borders earlier today.  If it hit sooner I could have thumbed through some art or design books/magazines instead of just going to pick up a language book to try and learn one.  

Oh well..

GooChrome First Impressions

Well went and grabbed it when I got home tonight after dinner and working out.  Like it so far but can't stand the blue look of it too much default winXP install look and I nuked that right away after a reinstall.  Problably can go look but haven't noticed or found any UI tweaks to be done yet.  But really haven't gone looking at the files in it's dir yet.  

Pages load smooth and liked that it pulled my Firefox hotbar and such in as is instead of rearranging them.

For now though I'll just use it to hit my own sites as I have FF in lockdown mode compared to this a nice new open building as it were.  It just needs more to be my fulltime browser things like a firebug, noscript, flashgot, a and a more robust web developer plugin. 

Since it's a webkit backend I probably won't need to bother with Safari anymore to check coding for it.

It like Safari suffers from the not hiding the interface when you goto fullscreen also, would be nice if those tweaks were added like FireFox does.

So I buy a new battery and clean up my old SLR.

So I pulled my old SLR out the other day and noticed I still had some film left in it but the battery was dead so couldn't get to. Finally got around to buying a new battery yesterday after the previous day when I stopped but somehow everything lined up as to the only one in the whole store was already opened up. Seriously one dam 2cr5 in the whole store and it was already opened up, nice. So waited another day and tried another store later on at night after running some errands so couldn't use it until today. Popped it in everything functioned so went about and cleaned the lenses and body as it sat for probably 4 years. Still had some frames left on the roll of film so that was pretty much why I bought the battery to atleast get that out and developed.

I head outside to take some closeup macro shots of flowers just to blow the frames off on. Boy I'll tell you I had forgotten how easy it was to take pictures since it's such a basic skill compared to creating a digital painting or 3d model. Seriously a photo is of something that is just there at that moment, otherwise if your physically or digitally painting, sculpting, modeling, designing something it's so much more involved.

May as well delve deeper into that by saying look at it this way a artist gets one chance with a piece of paper, parchment, canvas, fabric, metal, rock, clay, glass , etc to make something right? There are usually 12-36+ frames of film in rolls, talking 35mm ones. Whats that tell you? Oh you can screw up 11-35 times as long as 1 is alright. What are the others shots then gold stars for effort?

So here I framed the few shots of decent flowers around and blew the shots off. Clicked to shoot the last one and listened as it ratcheted as it respooled back into the cassette and popped it out.

Ah but wait that was too easy as everything lately it piles on. At that point I noticed it was a roll of B&W film so pretty much all the shots of nice vibrant flowers were wasted on it. Oh well not even sure any will develop so no loss.