Daniel Johnston played an amazing show at Neumos a few weeks ago and before the show my friends at Public Access Media had the pleasure of interviewing him. Check out the interview along with a sloo of other interviews on the Public Access Media site. Also, If you haven’t had a chance to see the documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” then go out and rent it so you and your mom can watch it together this Mothers Day.
This winter the Pacific Northwest received much more snow than usual and it’s still sticking around up in the Snoqualmie Pass mountains, so I thought I’d get in one more day before it was all over.
Apparently May 4th or “Quatro de Mayo” is a day of celebration up at Alpental (my mountain of choice) as when I arrived I’d seen things I hadn’t seen up there before.
It felt like the last day of high school up there… bands were playing, people drinking beer on the lifts, crazy costumes and costume contests. It was a great day for people watching, good riding and the weather was awesome too!
I saw a lot of great costumes up on the mountain like:
The Mexicans
Last year, I was able to see Luke Wroblewski’s presentation at An Event Apart in Chicago. His presentation is something I always think about when designing forms for the web.
I finally found the “Best Practices for Form Design” PDF he uses in many of his presentations! It’s packed with visual examples, heat maps, and simple explanations that make sense.
In website and server testing you will need to sometimes clear your DNS cache. This is the local table of hostnames and corresponding IP addresses. As you use your machine, addresses & DNS lookups are cached to speed up seek/load times. This is often ok, but sometimes you may need to clear/flush your cache if something has changed or updated and you still have the old lookup value cached. To do this, open Terminal and at the prompt type the command: lookupd -flushcache
If its successful it won’t error and will return you to a prompt. To test, go to the address you thought was cached and see if the lookup discovers the new IP address. I bet it will!
Pretty often at Squad we need to configure our machines for testing websites. Recently I ran into a scenario where I needed to edit my local hosts file because the DNS for a site in development had not been taken live yet. By editing my hosts file, I can trick my system into thinking the domain name resolves to an IP address, even though it really doesn’t. To do this, follow these steps.
Open your web browser and open the domain name you input into your hosts file. It should be pointed at the IP you entered. If it is not, you may need to flush your DNS. If you don’t know how to do that, I’m planning to write about that in a few days.
Remember to re-edit your hosts file once the real DNS has been taken live. You don’t want to be hitting the dev server in the future when the production site is really up! That can cause some very confusing troubleshooting. Believe me!
Recently I was trying to figure out where all my hard drive space had gone on my macbook. After a little digging around and some help from Brian I found the following command to be really helpful in terminal to figure this out.
du -hd 1
du means disk usage
h* means *human readable
d* means *depth (like layers deep)
1 means one layer of depth
We’d like to “officially” welcome Brandon Herbel and Van Peterson to The Squad!
Brandon Herbel left Omaha, Nebraska to design for Squad here in Seattle and we’re very happy to have him. I’ve known Brandon for quite some time now and it’s great to finally have an opportunity to work with him on some projects! He’s proven to be a great member of our team.
Van Peterson is leading the development of Glue and all things Ruby on Rails. Van has a TON of development and programming experience and we’re very excited to work with him on many of the upcoming projects here at Squad. He’s currently getting up to speed on everything Glue so expect to see some updates to Glue soon!
We’re lucky to have such talented people added to our small team. Send your love and and welcome them to our team!
A few weeks ago from the 6th floor of Squad’s luxury penthouse in the sky, I noticed from our window that the Dr Seuss billboard had been replaced with a frothy mug of espresso. It wasn’t till a week later the final additions were made to the billboard adding a McDonalds logo and “Now Serving Espresso” text. I swear I had seen this concept before but gave the thought little attention until a week later when I was moving our books and magazines into boxes. I noticed a National Geographic circa January 2005 with an article about caffeine with the image I had originally attempted to recollect. Needless to say, It was disappointing to see such a clever concept acquired, repackaged and dispensed by McDonalds… The worlds wealthiest most glutinous fast food giant.
Okay... Alright! It looks like I’ve found a Wii game that I’m excited about more than Mario Kart! It’s called “Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People” and its scheduled to be released in June 2008 on Nintendo’s WiiWare and for the PC.
I wrote about WiiWare nearly a year ago and haven’t heard much about it since but, I was glad to hear SBCG4AP was on the horizon. It looks like there will be five episodes for sale via digital distribution at about $9 each or $35 for all episodes. I can’t wait!
You can check out screen shots from the game and learn more at Telltale’s Strong Bad game page.
We’re finally moved into our new office and we decided to make the switch to fully wireless in our new place. We decided to go with Apple’s 1 terabyte Time Capsule for our wireless access point and for our data backup. So far it’s been working great!
We’re mostly mac users, so this seemed like an easy win for us to use for wireless access and to back up our data. You can’t do auto backups with Windows but access to the storage device hasn’t been a problem for our Windows users. The setup was super easy and the wi-fi range seems to be very good. We’re split up across a three story house, with the Time Capsule on the second floor, and we haven’t had any problems yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
It’s only our first day using it, so there is plenty of opportunities for good or bad things to happen, so I’ll keep you updated with how well it pans out. I still have to do my first Time Machine backup.
Earlier this week, I blogged about removing yourself from constant contact and how IMs & Emails can kill productivity. Well, lucikly I just came across a simple Mac application called Freedom which disables your internet connection for an amount of time you specify, up to three hours. This should help you set aside time to focus on getting things done!
Here is how it works:
The only easy way to re-enable your internet connection is to restart your computer.
I think this is a great way to commit yourself to some focused time, from the internet at least. Now if they could only make something like this for people. :) I’ll try this out and let you know how it works out for me.
You can download Freedom for free, thanks to Fred Stutzman!
I just discovered that Mario Kart Wii will be released on April 27th! Why did I not know about this sooner? Mario Kart has to be one of my favorite GameCube games, next to Mario Tennis, so I’m hoping for good things with Mario Kart Wii.
While doing some reading on Mario Kart on Wikipedia, I discovered there will be online racing for up to 12 players! Online play is a very exciting addition and something I really liked about Mario Strikers Charged (Soccer), even though I didn’t like the single player game that much. Also, it appears that you can steer your kart with the new Wii Wheel, a normal Wii-mote, a Wii-mote with a nun-chuck or a GameCube controller. The new Wii Wheel comes packaged with the game, but I’m not so sure how much I’ll like it… so its good to know that there are more familiar options available.
I guess this is also the first time that Mario Kart will have motorbikes in the game. Hideki Konno, producer, had suggested it for “Double Dash!!” but the idea was rejected. I’m interested to see how the bikes will differ from the karts while racing.
I can’t wait to get this game! You can Pre-order it on Amazon too!
Have you ever noticed that as soon as you unplug yourself from the world, turn off your Instant Messenger and close your email client that you actually get much more work done!?
It may feel like work when you have your email and IM on… but what are you really getting done? I’d bet not much. Isn’t it much more fun to kick ass on the real task at hand? Without unplugging myself, I have no idea how I’d find five straight hours to kick ass on store layouts for Epitaph, design a 37 page user interface or program some complex AJAX history tracking.
This idea really hit home while I was on “vacation” in Monterey, CA a few weeks ago. I had planned to work from the hotel all day and shortly after I started, the WiFi at the Hotel went down. So, I spent the rest of the day with an Apple tutorial teaching myself some basic Ruby on Rails. (I downloaded that tutorial to work on the plane.) This is something I probably couldn’t have completed with interruptions every 20 minutes or so. PLUS I learned a lot about Ruby on Rails and how much it kicks ass in only a few hours.
Ruby on Rails kicks ass so much that I’m definitely going to push to use it on many Squad projects in the future. So, I’m very happy I had a chance to be “unplugged” and its something I suggest we utilize to remove themselves from constant contact.
Be less available… get more done… kick more ass! What’s bad about that?
Has anyone else found this to be true or found similar experiences? Does anyone know of any related articles online to this type of work approach?
Brian drooled over hulu a few months back… and thanks to Josh Mauldin I discovered full episodes of The Office including some small featurettes. HECK & YES!
The Squad is getting prepared to move into our new home. Here’s a little preview of the second floor of the new Squad office.
More photos will be posted after our move in this weekend. We’re all very excited to move in. Only a few days left!
Taking photos on the iPhone can often be hit or miss. Most times photos look much better when viewed on the iPhone than on other devices. BUT! Sometimes the stars align (aka there is good lighting) and you come out with a nice photograph.
Here’s a collection of my favorite photos taken from my iPhone. Some are better than others but I like each one of these either personally or visually in some way.
Goodbye Spokane
One of my favorite podcasts to listen to while I’m working is This American Life. Every episode follows the same format. They pick a theme and then have several documentary styled stories on that theme.
On Thursday, May 1st the popular radio / TV show will be doing a live broadcast via satellite to hundreds of theaters across the country. During the live broadcast Ira will unveil brand-new stories from the upcoming season of the television show, perform a radio story, answer audience questions, and more!
My younger brother, Josh Dobson, has been working on a short film called Two Week Notice for a while now and it’s finally ready for your lookin’ balls!
If you’re 21 or older and in the Seattle area on Friday, April 25th you should come out to the FREE premiere party at Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater. They’ll also be featuring two other short films.
Our days at 1518 are numbered as we count down to our new office move. We’re going to be busy for the next few weeks with moving & projects! More updates on the move as things progress..
