The kids are out trick-or-treating so I’m sitting on the porch, enjoying the evening and posting our pictures while I hand out candy. It’s unusually warm this Halloween in Oklahoma — even at 7pm it is almost 70º outside. Usually we have to bundle up the kids because it is so windy and cold; often it’s in the 40º’s for trick-or-treating. But enough of that, here are the pics (you can click any of them to see a larger picture):
“Hi, I’m a Mac.”
First up: my costume. I normally don’t dress up for Halloween, but after my coworker, Justin Boeckman told me what he was going to do I could not resist. Mostly because, if you know me you know this is not at all out of character. Justin totally carried this one, perfectly imitating John Hodgman’s PC character from the Apple commercials.
Costumes
Next up: pictures of the kids’ costumes. In the photos are Grace, Brett, Brett’s friend Brayson, and Grace’s friends Ashley, Allee, and Alyssa.
Puppies
And not to be left out, Holly dressed up the dogs and took them on the first leg of the evening.
Pumpkins
Finally, we have the pumpkins. Grace used a pretty cool set of Mr. Potato Head style pieces to decorate hers. No mess!. Brett went with traditional carving for his best Jack-o-lantern yet. And me, I tried a new technique I’ve been curious about. Instead of just cutting holes, I carved the meat of the pumpkin for a more sculptural feel. It didn’t come out quite as nicely as I might have wanted, but I learned a lot for next year, and it was good enough to win the pumpkin contest at work!
I’ve seen so many of Jason Fried’s talks at this point, that I think I could do a pretty good job of filling in for him if he ever gets sick before an event. But I keep watching as the talk evolves and new nuggets of thought are revealed.
Jason’s ideas about business are fresh and almost too obvious (as I believe the best ideas are). His thoughts about how to run a business, productivity, and creativity are often at the front of my mind as I work and refine my own work/life balance.
Google Mail’s web interface has tons of great features missing from even older and more established desktop mail applications. One of my favorites is the way it handles email attachments. Clicking “View all attachments” will do just that opening them in a new browser tab all together rather than downloading them to your computer and relying on the user to both find and open the images. This option is only visible when the attachments are images. Smart!
Similarly, with non-viewable attachments (such as the ZIP archives in my example) GMail offers a “Download all attachments” link. This packages all of the files into a single ZIP archive and downloads them all at once. What is more, GMail manages to intelligently name the new ZIP file based on its contents. Really smart!
I loved the tilt-shift effect when it was making the rounds on photos awhile back, but the effect is even more stunning in video. Still I can’t help but love the irony that move makers have probably spent millions of dollars and hours trying to make special effects miniatures NOT look small only to have this come along and make real footage look fake.
Sometimes the very best ideas are so natural they don’t seem like ideas at all. That is, they seem so obvious, that it makes you wonder why the idea hasn’t always existed or how we got so far away from it. Such is the case with this laptop, the HP Pavilion dv6929wm Entertainment Notebook PC which ships and sits on retail shelves inside a laptop bag. Not a cardboard box, tons of styrofoam, baggies, and twist-ties, but actually the computer and all of its accessories are inside a laptop bag designed for the dual purpose. And the bag is made of recycled materials, too.
The product was created by HP as an answer to Walmart’s design challenge, challenge which asked electronics manufacturers to produce a product that would reduce environmental impact. HP’s solution won the top prize in reducing 97% of the typical waste from laptop packaging. It really is a shame that more products don’t ship in similar “packages”. How many things, especially electronics, do we buy and then buy a bag, cover, or other protection for? I’d love to see this trickle into other products. When did we become a nation that needs everything we buy to hermetically sealed?
Javascript and AJAX-style effects are everywhere on the web, but thanks to a new batch of easy-to-use libraries, sophisticated animation effects can be used by designers with no programming or Flash needed. Tailored to the accomplished designer with limited programming skills, this session intends to practically show how to tap into the power of “write less, do more” Javascript libraries. This is a practical, how-to session that will benefit a wide-range of designers.
It’s something I’ve wanted to present for awhile now. Many designers have jumped into XHTML and CSS but think that they need to be a “programmer” to use JavaScript. Many of these libraries are very accessible and even geared toward designers who lack programming skills. The session will focus on showing designers how easy it is to incorporate sophisticated visual effects into their website designs.
I’ve not previously attended Tulsa TechFest but I’m looking forward to the event. Hope to see some of you there.
First up: my costume. I normally don’t dress up for Halloween, but after my coworker, Justin Boeckman told me what he was going to do I could not resist. Mostly because, if you know me you know this is not at all out of character. Justin totally carried this one, perfectly imitating John Hodgman’s PC character from the Apple commercials.
