Things’ll be a bit quiet around here this weekend.

At work, I am a staff advisor for a student-run music the school puts on each year, and this is that weekend. So I’m out making sure the students are thinking of everything, handling any emergencies, taking photos, filming stuff… pretty much everything.

One cool this is that I have some of the students twittering for us during the festival and then a bunch of that content is being pulled into the website, agapefest.com. It’s been fun. You should check it out.

So anyway, I’ll be occupied by that this weekend. Talk to you all on Sunday for sure.

Anyone else notice the idiotic Mac v. PC flame wars going on again? I don’t want to add to it–in fact, I didn’t even want to pay notice to it at all. But people are dumb and I’m tired of them being so.

Disclaimer: I’m a Mac user. But I’m sure you knew that.

I must say though, Windows 7 is looking mighty nice. I’m excited to play with the next release candidate. But will it make me switch back to a Windows PC? Probably not. I’ve chosen my plight in life and I’m much more content now, using OS X on my MacBook Pro, than I ever was using a PC.

Windows Desktop with BlackBox circa 2003

In high school and first three years of college I was a total PC guy. I built computers quite often, went down the computer fair in Pomona, CA, overclocked… all of it. Even dual booted Linux a few times, trying to get used to Slackware and Dropline. I did a lot of open source, used various shells (I loved blackbox for a while), blah blah blah. I was a PC nerd.

But I always liked Macs. Junior year of high school was my first significant introduction with the platform. I had a video editing internship at the local megachurch and we used a Media-100 editing rig with a PowerMac. At school, in computer graphics class, we had the first and second series of iMacs to do editing, photoshopping, etc. on. And I loved them. In fact, the more I used those Macs, the more I liked them. Especially after OS X released.

When I worked at a camp we did our video editing on a PowerMac as well, in Final Cut Pro 2 (horrible software!). So I used the tool fit for the jobs. I built my desktop PCs, but after working at our college’s IT Helpdesk on so many Dell laptops I quickly decided that I wouldn’t by a name-brand Windows-based laptop. Too many problems with them. But I’ve had minimal problems with my Macs.

So the point: Stop Hating! It’s a computer. Just because someone has a different preference than you doesn’t make it bad. Macs are not inherently better than PCs or vice versa. Macs are better for me and the way I use a computer in the same way the Windows PCs are better for some programmers. Design-wise, Apples locked that objectively. But if you don’t care about design or UI, it doesn’t matter.

This isn’t 1997. The flame wars are done. No matter how much Microsoft or Apple are trying to make you believe they aren’t, the simple fact is that it doesn’t matter. You buy and use what you buy and use, and you are not obligated to justify it.

It’s no secret that I’m addicted to social media, or that my favourite outlet is Twitter.

Why? So many people I (or my friends) come into contact with don’t get it. They say Twitter is stupid. Given, most of them haven’t checked out the service. But while they’re making fun of Twitter, they’re off spending hours on end on Facebook or MySpace. You know, the old social media. (Strange we have old New Media already, yes?)

But Twitter is the anti-Facebook. On Facebook you’re bombarded with photos, fan suggestions, ‘Become a Zombie’ requests, snowballs, and God knows what else that is hiding in the depths of their app schemas. Last week it was suggested I become a fan of curly fries. Really? Curly fries?

Facebook pushes and pushes at you. It’s become rampant with advertising, idiot chain-letter memes and even our parents! There’s so much noise that in order to pay attention to anything you have to dig. It takes a lot of work to set privacy levels and filter down what’s smacking you in the face into the things that matter to you in your ‘mini-feed’. That noise decreases a lot of the social interaction that the service had in its early days. Facebook has turned from being person oriented to being feature oriented.

In contrast, Twitter doesn’t have any of that crap. No apps, no ads (at the moment), no groups, no nothing. It’s simple person to person communication and it leaves group interaction up to the user. And that’s why it’s a success. That is why it’s making headlines. That is why I can ask a question and less than two minutes later have solutions from 10 of my followers. And more often than not those followers become friends. Twitter brings a level of personal interaction to the “evil digital communication” channels that we haven’t seen since email was first introduced.

One Higher Education colleague astutely observed that Twitter is redefining what a coworker is. It’s so true. People I’ve met only once, and in some cases never, help me everyday to solve problems or refine ideas. This one-on-one interaction is what makes the service great.

Of course there are the businesses out there that don’t abide by this rule. They post stupid anonymous advertisements or they simply import links from their site’s feed. They attempt to behave like old media on new media and wonder why it’s not helping. To them I say YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

The companies that are making a difference are the ones that have REAL PEOPLE manning their Twitter streams. Companies like Starbucks and Paste Magazine do it right. Even Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country, has improved its customer service by having a real person behind a company-branded Twitter account to answer real customer questions.

That’s what people seem to crave in social media–a conversation. Not games and noise and a false face. That’s all a distraction from what social media should be: Social.

Super stoked about this one…

I’ve been working on a blog design for my friend Wix for awhile. He came to me in January, I think, and asked about getting a site designed and built for him.

The beauty was that he wasn’t in a rush and so I was able to work on this among all the other projects and sites and work I was doing. I felt kind of bad because it took awhile, but he’s been travelling a lot too…

Anyway, long story short. We hit it kind of hard this last week and have pushed it out for release today!

The overall design style for me is a bit different than what I’m used to. I took it as sort mid-90s + New Wave + Grunge and did a bunch of vector art and half-tone sort of things.

In any case, I’m happy to have it finished and live! Head over whatisawix.com and check it out! Let me (and him) know what you think.

I saw this on Gizmodo tonight and had to go watch them. Absolutely brilliant.

Check out their YouTube Channel »

Yeah, that last post. Forget it.

I totally forgot about WordPress’ XML-RPC features and that I could use a service (like PixelPipe) to update it. I looked into using this new service called Posterous – but it was too restrictive in having to verify emails to be able to post that I had to abandon it. Doesn’t work so well when I have 6+ people needing to use the service to update the blog and Twitter.

But PixelPipe offers a common email upload and will update everything including YouTube. So. Awesome. That’s the plan. I’ll have to do some testing (and I think LunarPages breaks the XML-RPC capabilities… I can’t get it to work on this or any blog on my server) to see what the formatting is like, but I think this will be a better solution.

Pretty close to being done. I think I’ll end up putting it live on Wednesday of next week, when we start going out to the fairgrounds to hammer fence posts and do preliminary festival setup.

[sneak peak]

I tried to make it look more Twitter-y, I guess. That wasn’t really intentional, but it’s the direction it took. I’m using a plugin called Fresh From FriendFeed and Twitter which is a ridiculously long name. The author doesn’t give enough options in the backend, so I had to modify some of the PHP for this one project. It’s a little sad. I wish I could’ve just left it, but it was so convoluted.

Basically, the plugin monitors your twitter feed and imports your latest tweet and creates a post out of it. Cool right? Well, the instructions in the backend are a little hard to understand. I’m all for making language in your posts/docs sound cool, relaxed and comfortable (see how I write on agapefest.com), but not when you lose clarity of meaning. I’d like the settings to say things like: “Import each Tweet as a post. (We’ll refresh to keep you current.)” and “Import your tweets once a week/day/month” instead of the craziness he has in the backend.

One of the cool things about the plugin is that it automagically parses media from Twitpic and YouTube (and others) and creates the embed code while inserting it into your new post. Well, it would be cool if the images were given any classes whatsoever. Or if the layout had any classes whatsoever. Really. No classes. Metadata is there for the alt attributes… but not one class. So custom styling is a no-go without poking around in the plugin code and adding your own for each item. Annoying.

Also, every post title begins with “Fresh From {Service Name}” and you can’t change it in the graphical config. Once again, you have to poke around in the plugin code. Oh, and on top of that, by default it adds a filter to redirect all of your meta links (including permalink in headers) to the service URI. That means “leave a comment” takes you out to Twitter to leave a reply. And there’s not option to turn it off. It’s a cool idea, and definitely useful in some cases. But a on/off option would be killer.

So, I’ve had a few annoyances, but had no other recourse short of learning PHP to a degree where I could write my own plugin. Not conceivable for me at the moment, though it’s on my list. That, or the time will come when Twitter is ubiquitous and I won’t have to deal with so many visitors not having an account.

Apart from all the headaches, I’m pretty excited about this little experiment next week. Hopefully the plugin will refresh quick enough to keep things going (documentation doesn’t exist. No FAQ. Just a FriendFeed room that you, again, have to search through to find what you need — if it’s there at all). Otherwise I really may have to write my own plugin. Maybe I will for next year anyway.

Well, not entirely new. This week I’ll be working on converting AgapeFest.com into a quick micro-blog for festival week.

What does that mean? It means I’ve got all of my staff that have iPhones, picture messaging or Flip cameras set to take photos and post them to Twitter/Twitpic. Then AgapeFest.com will pull each of those in and create a post about them. If I had been thinking, I could’ve used this as an opportunity to learn how and then write my own WordPress plugin for it. Maybe later.

In any case, I think this is going to be super fun. By the way, does anyone know of a Twitpic-like service that does video instead? Like if I had my Flip out there, little 30 sec to 1-minute videos would be awesome. I’d better buy some batteries…