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Finding Refreshment

Me iPhone'ing in Williamsburg

I think it’s safe to say that I’m not really what you would call a normal person. I feel most refreshed when I have new projects and new work to do. Sure, I like vacations and trips as much as anyone else, but at my core, I am energized the most by things happening.

A few people have asked why I joined RecoVend as creative director on top of my full-time job, grad school, and work with Dept. 3. It’s a lot, no doubt, and during this first push to get RecoVend.com looking nice, I had a lot of late nights coding, and early morning finishing schoolwork. But I think what it comes down to is that I needed something that excites me.

The vision that Kyle and Jason have put together for the service is pretty visionary, and though in its current infancy RecoVend isn’t full-featured and perhaps not yet revolutionary, where we’re going certainly is. We were already pushed on to the next round of the BetaSpring weighing, and we’re working hard to push substantial updates out quickly.

How Refreshment Helps

I had a tough week before this Thanksgiving break. Just a lot of stuff going on on top of the RecoVend push. But the late nights/early mornings didn’t make me upset or frustrated or bored even. Actually the opposite – those days made me feel more energized mentally to get in and push through what I had to do at work so I could get back to finishing up RecoVend.

This semester has also marked the last real classes I have to take at The New School for my MA and next semester will be spent on my thesis and what is involved around that. Working on RecoVend makes me feel all the more urgent to get done what I need to this semester (which is pretty substantial).

Constant change, constant goals, persistent deadlines. All of these motivate me. Loose ideas, constant spur-of-the-moment demands, lack of vision, and disrespect do not. I want to work on great things, make progress, and change the ways people think and work. I want to make a difference on a large scale. I want to see results and have the time and resources to do things right.

These things drive me. Finding new opportunities to do these sorts of things is refreshing. And so, even though I am tired now, I feel completely accomplished. I sleep well at night (when I get to sleep) and, for the most part, thing seem to be looking up.

I’m excited to see what these next few months bring.

Fresh New Servers

Dept 3

For the past two years this site has been hosted at Dreamhost. Over the past 8 months or so this has been horrible. The worst thing ever in some ways. Apparently the three active WordPress sites I had running at Dreamhost were killing my shared hosting account. This meant the sites would 404 A LOT. I took the appropriate actions that Dreamhost recommended. I cached the hell out of the site, really cut down on plugins used, optimized my JS and CSS… still, no change. I even started using Cloudflare (awesome by the way) to cache and serve my site from their pseudo-CDN.

First Pedal Build: Victory

pedal board

This month I found a new obsession.

Some good friends of mine from college have been building custom guitar effects pedals for years, so I sought out their help and started on my own project.

About a month ago I was playing bass at church and during communion the band got up on stage. I was tuning up and the battery on the tuner died. And the mute on the pedal died. A loud tuning note went through my amp and the house speakers, kind of being a distraction to everyone who wasn’t on stage.

So yeah, first things first, I guess I could’ve just gotten a power supply for the pedal – which I did… and a new tuner pedal that isn’t owned by the church. But what I really wanted to do was build an A/B tuner mute switch.

A/B tuner mute switch

 

So I ordered some parts and got a schematic recommendation and this week I built it. And now I’m hooked. Next up, I’m building an overdrive pedal with Russian transistors. Just waiting for them to get here from Ukraine.

Such a fun project.

Thanks to @ianrmcdermott and @matthewgood for their help and direction.

 

Getting XBMC Onto a Foxconn nT330i

XBMC Compatible Remote Control

Originally posted on 08 April, 2010.

Note: This tutorial should also work for the Viewsonic VOT 132 and KCS NanoBox 2030 – as they’re all the same thing.

Last week Newegg had an incredible deal on a Foxconn NetBox nT330i Atom-based mini-computer. We are looking to get rid of our satellite TV, so I jumped on the deal. Everything arrived on Friday and I started putting the thing together. There is a great discussion about using this computer over at AVForums.com, but there really isn’t a step-by-step guide anywhere. So I’ve documented the whole process here.

The packages arrived!Have some food on HandMoral Support

back from #heweb10

HighEdWeb

photo by HighEdWeb on Flickr

Wow. What a week. I got back from the HighEdWeb conference on Wednesday night. It was a blast. Great group of people–amazing to see some old friends and to finally meet a few newer ones face to face.

I wrote up a post over A Not-So-Commonplace Book about my thoughts, and I’m not going to reiterate any of that here. Except there’s one point I want to emphasize. The #heweb community is fantastic. When I finally make the leap out of HighEdWeb and into academia or graphic design or something else, these people are what I am going to miss the most.

Some strange stories, a lot of fun, and some thought inducing lectures. Excited for where I am taking the next year.

So, so glad I got to hang out with people like @billyadams, @KarlynM, @mikepetroff, @lougan, @MalloryWood, @lanejoplin, @kylejames, @fienen, @NikkiMK, @nickdenardis, @radiofreegeorgy, etc., etc., etc. Hope to see you all soon.

Custom Taxonomy Queries

On a recent project with Department Three I needed to use a Custom Post Type and Custom Taxonomies to organize some of the content. So, the taxonomy was Directors and the custom post type was Videos.

From those I needed to use the taxonomy page to query videos for that specific director. I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but wasn’t quite.

Link post_thumbnail in WordPress

code

Scenario:
You’re using the built-in post thumbnail feature in WordPress. That’s all well and good, but you’d really like it to link to the originally uploaded image for a lightbox or something else.

How do you do it?

I’m not the best at PHP syntax, so if there’s a smarter/cleaner way, please let me know!

First we need to use the get_post_thumbnail_id() function like this:

<?php $thumbID = get_post_thumbnail_id(); ?>

This sets the variable $thumbID to the id of your post thumbnail.

Next, we want to build the URI for your link:

<a href="<?php echo wp_get_attachment_url($thumbID); ?>">

Now, there’s probably a cleaner way to do this, but again, I’m not all that awesome at syntax. But basically you’re using the wp_get_attachment_url(); function in conjunction with your post thumbnail’s id to get the original image src.

Easy.

Thanks to @cgrymala over at HTMLCenter for this tip.

The future

iPad!

I feel like we might just live in the future now. My iPad came today. I am blogging from it in my browser. In WordPress. On a touch based keyboard.

If that’s not the future I don’t know what is. At this moment I don’t really care that much about flying cars. This is pretty slick.

Though I will probably use my Bluetooth keyboard more for these long range typing escapades.

One small thing to note. Doesn’t look I can use the WYSIWYG editor in mobile safari. Bummer.

Google Wave Disappointment

Yes, I know it’s probably too early to be talking about this, seeing at Wave is still in its preview. But I’m a little bit disappointed in it. This is probably just because the web app isn’t feature complete. Still, at this point I can’t see myself using it as broadly as it was represented in the announcement video.

For one, it’s just confusing to keep track of who is writing/changing what when you have multiple people working on the same wave. It’s also tough even to reply to other wavelets that are sitting there. Some of the UI still seems really rough and not at all intuitive. Maybe they’re working on this.

But I think that that is my biggest issue with it. It’s so confusing to work in that I just get turned off to it. At least in IM you know who is talking when. In Google Docs you can save and edit – though the changes by other people don’t display in realtime. I guess the collaborative part of it is the point. It’s a realtime wiki, basically. And I suppose that’s okay. But it certainly doesn’t feel ready for all of the other tasks it was suggested for when Google premiered it.

Oh well.

I’ve still got a few Wave nominations. Anyone want one? First come, first served. (You can also tweet @joelgoodman)

Recent Releases

Wow. It’s already been a busy week.

We released the new Athletics site at work that I have been developing for the last few months. That was Monday. I have gotten far fewer comments than I expected. And no news is good news as far as I’m concerned. Overall I’m pretty happy with it. Everything at work just seems to overwhelm me right now, so it’s good to have a major project out of the way. Check it out if you want: http://www.gcpanthers.com

I did a project for Randall a couple week ago. I’m only going to say this: I coded the design as a WordPress template in about 2.5 hours.

I’ve got a few projects on deck now (freelance speaking). One of those is a new WP template for a friend from back home. It’s a fun project. And I feel kind of bad because it’s not going to take that long to code, I just haven’t had much time the last few weeks what with work and preparing for my class. But it’s coming in the next couple of weeks. She’s got a really great blog and I’m excited to be a part of getting this design out for her. Check out tea@elevensies »

I start my first bout with teaching college students on Monday evening. I’m really excited about it, but have a bunch of work to do. I need to put together a better keynote presentation and finish up the first assessment for them. I need to get a feel for what they already know about web design. So I’m going to “test” them the first evening. They’ll get points just for taking the assessment, no matter what they know or don’t know. So hopefully the students will forgive me for a test during the first class.

If you’re interested, I could still use help creating questions for that initial test. Check out my previous post and leave the question you think I should ask.

Scratch That. New Plan.

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.

Home Networking

I got a NAS!

My D-Link DNS-321 came yesterday and is running well. Although… I haven’t put any data on it. I’ve sort of been messing with fun plugs and features and stuff.

The greatest benefit to this NAS is the Linux kernel underneath. That lets me add whatever features I want (within reason and skillset anyway). So I’m busy setting up Bonjour (for our Macs), Firefly (for iTunes sharing), and a bunch of other things.

I need to brush up on my Linux commands… because I am way out of practice when it comes to working in a terminal. But it’s going okay. I’m gettin’ there.

Photos of the NAS to come, I hope. If you’ve got tips for working with the DNS-321/323 PLEASE let me know in the comments or with the Contact link at the top. I’d appreciate any help I can get.

Hope you’re having a good week!

Social Media & the Real World: There’s No Difference

Conversing with people over social media is no different than conversing with someone on the phone, or through a letter. I don’t understand why people still think there’s a disconnect between the internet and outside world. Is this the 90s?

I think that William Gibson touched on this in his book Spook Country. One of the running themes is that there’s this second layer on top of our physical world, that always exists even if it isn’t always seen. The premise is that these two layers are merging to a point where there is no longer a difference between what is physically there and what is virtually projected.

But past that, we shouldn’t even think in this layer analogy. The people we interact with online are flesh and blood persons with thoughts and feelings and opinions regardless of the medium we choose to interact through.

There’s a lot of questioning and attacking from certain circles, right alongside the curiosity and exploration and excitement those of us in love with social media are generating. Many of my HigherEd web colleagues have been talking about the recent media explosion over Twitter.

@bradjward tweeted:

So mainstream media is talking about Twitter a lot. Good? Bad? Why? Seeing mixed reactions from the crowd.

@jesskry tweeted:

Im sick of the media trash talk about Twitter’s ‘What are you doing’ icebreaker. We’re doing much more than that people. Much more.

People aren’t just hanging out on Twitter, shunning real life. Twitter is real life in that we are communicating on any number of personal, professional and other topics that pertain to how we live.

Just this past week I’ve had help in choosing a new chair for my desk at home, thoughts on web design projects, invitations to visit friends in other cities, and have stayed up on world events.

I think that is what scares traditional media. They can’t control when people get their news anymore. They are at the mercy of rapid-fire communication and at a loss on how to adapt and use it. But it’s not so much about strategy as it is about embracing changes in the communication landscape.

There is definitely a huge paradigm shift happening and like history has demonstrated, those not embracing the inevitable end-result will lose out and probably be bitter about it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand it–a lack of understanding does not equal *bad*.

New tech will always scare the established old-fogey power — look at what’s going on with Hulu and Boxee — but the traditional, physical world will eventually meld with the digital, electronic world and we’ll see that there really is no difference anymore. And those of us who keep pushing will see things get better and better.