Category: General

I just figured out why Alias is so popular.

Netflix raised some 82.5 million yesterday [NYT subscription required]. Hope they give some of it back to the subscribers that have been with them since 1999. (thanks Dave)

I’ve been using Netscape 7.0 PR1 at work on the Mac lately, and I must say that i’m in love with the tabbed browsing.

Ordered a 256MB RAM chip for the new iBook today from Ramjet. Great retailer — Aaron’s always a pleasure to buy from, and the price was like $40 less than CompUSA’s price, and I know the quality will be better.

Josh sent me a link to this article by Joshua Allen at webmonkey. It’s a fun look at all the different ways to set up a weblog. If you’re interested, read on… otherwise, don’t ask me how I built this site 😉 BTW, Josh updated Janicek.com to use php-nuke today, the same stuff that we use for englers.org. look for me to add the RSS feed to a sidebar next week hopefully…

Also, Doc posted a link to Open-Source Fight Flares At Pentagon: Microsoft Lobbies Hard Against Free Software. When will Microsoft die, or will they at all? Heh… M$ called open-source software “Un-American” — since when is getting stuff for free and selling it to someone for a profit not completely American? Also, this long story at Business 2.0 talks about how people are competing with Microsoft (there are some nuggets in here for all of us) [thanks Cam]

Lastly, I think all I need for the house now is an iToilet, and we’ll be set.

I need some 250×250 house banners for work, so that I can fill a section of the website that we’ll be launching soon. I’d ideally like to have advertising from our paying advertisers, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to get any creatives done quickly enough, so, I spent about 30 minutes or so playing with some stock art I have and came up with these…

I’ve also decided the jpeg’s just don’t look good when I make them using Fireworks, but I’ll try them tomorrow with Photoshop if I get the chance.

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Client: Bestfares.com

Goal: Fill house inventory with creative that drives people to buy a membership, by telling them not to miss the next “Coast to Coast Supersale”.

specs:

Filesize: 15K Max

Looping: 3 times max

size: 250×250 pixels

Creative Executions: 4

Image name: bf_ss_1_250x250.jpg

Image name: bf_ss_2_250x250.jpg

Image name: bf_ss_3_250x250.jpg

Image name: bf_ss_4_250x250.gif

notes: this gif file is created to show the difference between it and the jpg with the same name.

Image name: bf_ss_4_250x250.jpg

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Client: Lavender Hill Suites

Goal: Drive people to investigate the property and eventually book a room.

specs:

Filesize: 15K Max

Looping: 3 times max

size: 250×250 pixels

Creative Executions: 1

Image name: lh250x250_1.jpg

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Client: African Tourism Department (fictional)

Goal: Peak the interest of the casual web browser that might be looking for a trip that’s just a little bit different.

specs:

Filesize: 15K Max

Looping: 3 times max

size: 250×250 pixels

Creative Executions: 1

Image name: africa_250x250.jpg

Yesterday was Cinco de Mayo, did anyone celebrate it?

Did you know why why you were celebrating?

If not, read here… I thought it was the celebration of Mexican Independance, but I was wrong… great article over at Kuro5hin, short and explanatory.

In today’s economy, sometimes Draconian, its nice to have a job, much less one that’s half enjoyable…

Anyone remember the Transformers? It seems that Hasbro is toying with the idea of re-releasing the original set of Transformer toys… now that’d be cool. To once again own Megatron or Soundwave.

Apple’s now released the eMac, which is totally cool looking, has the right specs, and right up my price tag (or my mom’s for that matter… hmmm that’s an idea)

And, its 7:50 pm and I’m still at work tonight trying to get stuff done… there just aren’t enough hours in the day sometimes.

So, it’s Thursday, March 7th, and I’ve taken the day off…

Why? You might ask…

The honest answer is “because I was sort of forced to.” You see… the company that I work at has this vacation policy that says I can’t hold over vacation from year to year. I asked about it for two months before I was given a good answer. That answer was “John, you can’t hold over your vacation to next year, but because of your National Guard commitment, [and the fact that we’re going to make you take unpaid leave for those two weeks] we’ll try to work it out so that you can hold some of it over…”

I didn’t get anything in writing though, which is what I asked for, and I still don’t know what day the company’s “floating holiday” is this year, even though the President/CEO was supposed to announce it before the beginning of the year…. whatever…

But the bottom line is that we’re really busy at work, and I should probably be there. They’re hurting me by making me take the vacation right now, as well as hurting themselves…

Moral of the story: It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and I’ve had three beers – wish it wasn’t so cold outside… I’d have gone fishing…

I came across this quote today, and it seems so cliche, yet so pertinent to so many of the things I come across daily. I thought I’d share it with you:

“By failing to plan, you’re planning to fail.”
— unknown

just plan a little and your life will be more enjoyable… and this can be very pervasive… when you see some success in one area, you can apply those lessons to other areas… i wish more people that I interacted with planned a little more…

not really news, but rather something to help me fill out this website. I updated dubmiller.com this weekend. It has a few new features (the most annoying one being a pop-up window) and we can now give Dub some great geographic reports of who and when people are visiting his website. It’s pretty neat to learn all of this new technology, and be able to apply it to something that can help a friend.

Last night, I downloaded PHP-Nuke 5.4, the software that you’re looking at. I’m looking for something that Christine and I can use to catalog our lives, for ourselves, and for others. I want this endeavor to be something that we can look back on in 20 years, to see where we’ve been, and since we’re both at a computer all day for the most part, I figured “why not share it with people?”.

So, here goes. We’ll see if it works, and we’ll go from here. Enjoy, and if you find bugs, please email me about it.

update I’ve since upgraded this site to WordPress, so that’s what you’re looking at now.