Manlio Rules

via briehan.

Posted by mobile phone:
testing mobile post ability

(conclusion: fine as long as you don’t try to use images)

about two weeks ago, i had a workplace accident. I was turning the corner of the office, admittedly moving a little fast in hopes of catching the elevator before it left. In my zealousness, i rammed my right leg (”righty”) into the corner of the desk. thinking nothing of it, i continued on my pursuit of the elevator. mission successful.

the real tragedy came about 15 minutes later, when i took out my phone to see if anyone had called, and found that i had annihilated my LCD screen on my n95 phone. this was bad for a number of reasons, the foremost being that these phones are not cheap, and i had no insurance on it because i bought it on ebay. bad news.

After bitching about it for a few days, i decided to see if maybe there was a local sf place that would fix my phone. in my online search i found several tutorials describing how to replace the LCD. I looked over some of them, and it seemed pretty easy, just a matter of having the right tools.

I took my search to eBay, in hopes of finding an affordable replacement screen. I found a plethora of options, everywhere from $40 to $60, including different bonus features. i found a package for $45 that included the necessary torq screwdriver and a little plastic tool for popping off the casing. It shipped from Hong Kong, taking a week to arrive.

Today, when it arrived, i went to this post, found on the n95 user boards, followed the instructions, and in 10 minutes had a working n95 again.

the moral of the story is that i’m awesome at fixing things, when they are easy to fix and i have all the tools sitting in front of me.

friday. long week. random thoughts:

1. i don’t know much about the economy, but it doesn’t look like things are going to be THAT bad. just sayin. i have no basis for this opinion, however.

2. $4 gas? wow. but i guess they spend more in london. and everywhere else. still, the days of the sunday drive are quickly coming to a close. either that or we all need to get electric vehicles. i really like these.

3. having no desk in my apt is challenging. i may need to go buy a little folding mini desk so i can at least have a place to work occasionally. though i do that at the kitchen table sometimes, and it’s not so bad.

4. other than that, the apartment is working out pretty good, though it could use more heat.

5. delta airlines, i really think you should have given me a break on that flight rebooking given that i was going somewhere for a funeral and i told your Customer Service people that. i’m sure the $130 is lining your pockets, but i’ll never fly your airline again.

6. Jetblue, i feel the same way about you. except i probably will fly your airline again because at least it looks like your planes were built after 1975. And the DirectTV

7. maker faire this weekend. i’ll try to come back without a bunch of gadgets. actually, i’m not promising anything.

but this is an article i found on valleywag this morning that i thought was relevant to me

yahoo dumps green guzzler shuttles

Over almost 2 years, i rode the shuttles a fair amount, and let me assure you that being on a bus for 1.5+ hours at the end of a workday is pretty much the last thing anyone wants to do. Even after i got a working internet solution (n95 baby!), the last half hour stuck on 101 in traffic was the worst thing ever. except maybe for driving to San Jose at 4PM on a tuesday to make a 6PM class.

here’s the thing: people would complain about the shuttles even when they were working fine. “the shuttles don’t stop near my house”, “people are talking on the phone and i don’t like it”, “why can’t people put their seats forward so i can stretch my legs?”. and so on. after a year, i finally got fed up with taking Muni 30 minutes to get to a shuttle which then took me 1.5 hours, so i moved to get closer to the caltrain, leading to a year in that terrible apt in soma. questionable decision but maybe a net gain? i don’t know.

at the end of the day, there’s nothing that’s going to make a long commute in traffic “fun” (except being driven in a limo with a hot tub and champagne to drop one’s cell phone in). the best that can be done is to make it as painless as possible. sounds like the switch over to the other limo company went the wrong way. but hey, one could always just go live in Mountain View or San Jose. Being a cultured SF hipster requires sacrifice.

but maybe if the stock goes up as a result of cost cuts, everyone can buy 1.5 million dollar condos in SOMA and ride the caltrain.

As for me, i’ll continue to enjoy my job in downtown SF. where i make GAMES for CHILDREN. yes, i win.

Last weekend i finally got out of my “temporary” apartment situation in soma, after 11.5 months. so much for only staying a little bit of time. The new place is in Cow Hollow, making it slightly harder for me to get to work, but very easy on my new roommate who just moved here from Brooklyn and has no car.

some random thoughts on the whole affair:

The new place is objectively decent, but clearly it’s been awhile since i lived in a decent apt, because i think the place the ritz goddamned carlton.

of course, neither of us had enough furniture, so we went and let IKEA kill us with their affordable selections of decent quality. My credit card bill is not going to be happy with this. actually, i’m sure the bill will be ecstatic. i’m not going to be so happy about it. but who can resist a $59.99 bookshelf? not me.

our downstairs neighbors are 6 early 20-somethings. one of them told me in no uncertain terms that we were to be quiet when going up the stairs, because that was her room underneath. I believe she was also the one who banged on my ceiling to be quiet when i was building furniture last night. in her defense, it was midnight on a Wednesday. sorry!

the internet in the place is spotty. i was considering just doing leech-net, but it’s not going to be good enough. though i did finally get some use of my high speed modem in! yeah!

having a garage? priceless. actually it’s $250 a month. but soooo worth it, considering there is almost no street parking anywhere in the neighborhood.

this will be the first time in… maybe forever that i don’t have a specific “desk” (for working) in my apt. i’m not sure if that will be an issue or not. i usually don’t work from home too much now that i have a job in the city. i may have to go back to ikea for a small desk sometime in the future (curse you ikea!)

after all the horror stories i heard about the 30x to downtown, i was very pleasantly surprised. sure, there’s no seats to be had, but at least there’s some personal space standing room. when i used to take the 71L to van ness from the haight it was often so crowded that someone else’s shower selection that morning played a strong part in my morning.

I was having a strange issue today with Eclipse (on OSX). i am building a game and using the Tweener library as an extension. so, as is required, I put

import caurina.transitions.Tweener;

at the top of my class. However, every 2 or 3 times that i would compile (i use the flash cs3 ide as a compiler), i would get an error stating that my Tweener extensions could not be found. And when i would go back to my class, i would find that the above import statement had disappeared. As you can imagine, this was annoying.

I worked “through” it for a few hours, but finally decided that it was too annoying to just deal with. After a little trial and error, i found that the Actionscript prefs in Eclipse for that project needed to be updated with my external Actionscript folder, even though eclipse is not the compiler for that project. easy fix, strange problem.

I reinstalled Max/MSP on my new computer the other day, and opened it up to make a patch. i haven’t touched max since 2005, and as soon as i opened it up, i realized why that was. I have no idea what to do with it. Not that i don’t know how to use it, i still remember how to create a delay effect or spit midi notes all over the place. More like i don’t have any ideas for projects in which Max would be useful. I had the same problem with Processing a few months ago. i went through all the tutorials in the Reas/Fry book, but even after i was done, i couldn’t figure out what i would do with it that i wouldn’t just do in Flash.

the one thing i could do with Max is create VST plugins for my audio work in ableton. But right now i’m having enough fun messing with the attached plugins, so i’m not sure that’s necessary. I”m more interested in making a custom controller for my Ableton projects, which would be more of an Arduino project. And at the end of the day, i’ll probably just go to guitar center and buy something there, instead of burning myself with the soldering iron several times.

the point is, there are so many tools at my disposal, most of which i am fairly proficient with. but projects need to be about ideas more than tools. and most of the ideas I have (songwriting, design), don’t require anything more than an instrument or a piece of paper and some charcoal.

so how does one motivate to work with tools which would be helpful but for which they have no immediate need?

I saw that Adobe has released a new online photo service today, called Photoshop Express. Since i’ve been interested in finding a new way to edit my photos without having to buy photoshop, i thought maybe this was the perfect answer. I signed up for the beta and got an activation email quickly (which was notable because Adobe warned that they expected so much interest it may take up to an hour to receive the email).

Unfortunately, Photoshop Express is more of a flickr competitor than an Acorn or Pixelmator competitor. it allows you to upload your photos, edit them, and put them in a gallery where others can browse them. it also allows you to import your facebook, picasa, or photobucket images and do the same editing there.

the editing tools are interesting, as you would expect. all the standard level and retouching tools are there, and there’s an interesting method of applying effects in which you choose the effect you want, and photoshop Ex shows you 6 preview images which you can mouse over to see which ones would be the most appropriate.

I like this feature, it’s a good way of finding other options that I didnt’ have in mind when i started the editing process.

Overall i probably won’t use photoshop Express very much, i am fairly embedded in the flickr world, and nothing that photoshop ex seems to offer is above and beyond what flickr already gives me. but it’s a nice RIA and if you don’t have any of your stuff online, it’s definitely worth a look

I was reading the Adaptive Path blog tonight, and i ran across this program. California College of the Arts is offering an MBA in Design Strategy. The program is brand new and will start this fall with 30 students. It’s a mix of managerial economics, communications, and design studio classes. the studio classes seem to be more focused on innovation and product development than actual studio classes.

This is a fascinating program in my opinion. the low residency requirements, mix of economics and design courses, and focus on product development would make it a very appealing academic path for someone who wants to go into product design but also wants to have the business background. It seems like it’s a path to a senior product manager gig, or starting one’s own business. I would guess that marketing gigs would also be applicable after such a degree.

It becomes interesting to think about the future of business schools. this program doesn’t require the GMAT’s, but several schools have started to offer design related business hybrid programs, and i can only imagine the trend will continue, much like we’ve seen interactive media programs pop up all over in the last 10 years.

I wasn’t thinking about going back to school, but it would be interesting to find out a little more about this program.

but for now i think i’m going to take music lessons. and this summer, some variety of design class.