Last weekend one of my uninterruptable power supplies started beeping. It stopped after a few hours, but I wondered if maybe I needed to replace the battery or something. (One of them is just 2 years old, the other is 7+ years old!)

Well, we just lost power, and they both seemed to hold up well for the few minutes of blackout. Whew… The home linux server now says: uptime 211 days, 13 hours, 57 minutes

Of course Emma was playing Animal Crossing and lost some data. Hmmm, maybe we need a UPS for the GameCube.

I’ve been playing around with Garageband quite a bit lately, and having a good time. I’ve started to look for other loops I can use, but the problem is, all the “free loops” I’m finding out there always say something like this:

All of our free Garageband loops are free for personal use.

And that’s it. I mean “Personal Use” doesn’t mean a lot to me. (I assume it means non-commercial, but is that just my assumption? Can I freely publish works I create with these “free” loops?) I want things laid out in terms I can easily understand, perhaps using the Creative Commons licenses. Is there a listing of Apple Loops somewhere that are available with CC licenses? So I can easily see what is attribution, or non-commercial, etc?

I’m looking for recommendations as to what video card to put into a new Mac Pro that will be used primarily for video editing.

So far I’m not finding any good info out there, but you know, maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. So if you do desktop video editing with a Mac, what video card do you use?

Phil Gerbyshak (the Make It Great! guy) sent me an invite to Joost.

Thanks Phil!

Sadly, Joost only runs on Intel-based Macs right now, so I couldn’t check it out.

That’s not great at all!

At BarCampMadison there were too many good sessions. Too many! It was often hard to choose what to take part in. I suppose that’s a good thing…?

Blake Hall’s session Drupal - Intro, Development, Bootstrap your site seemed way to short. Drupal is quite a system, and he expressed concern about what and how much to cover in just an hour. More Drupal! As I’ve mentioned, I’m interested in getting together a group of Drupal folks sometime this year, maybe as a DrupalCamp, in the Milwaukee(ish?) area. Depending on how many people we’d have, I think I may already have a space for it. (Of course we could use a sponsor or two!)

Christian Wilcox’s session Repurposing web data was another good one that could have gone longer. This could have expanded into a couple hours of working on code after the session. Of course, there was so much to do at BarCamp, it would have meant missing out on other things. :(

Again, perhaps holding some sort of mashpit fully separate from BarCamp may solve the problem of people wanting to flex their code muscles and expand on the ideas they have.

As usual, BarCamp’s help get the creative thoughts rolling, now it’s just a matter of applying them.

In recent times I’ve come to admit that Flash has it’s uses. I even use it on some sites (Yes, it’s true!) and may use it a bit more in the future…

But that doesn’t mean it’s still not a bad idea to use it as a critical element of your web site. Say, for the main navigation or something.

And while using swfobject.js is probably a good idea, you still need to remember that without Flash installed, or with Javascript disabled, your visitors (which are potential customers) may not see your main navigation. (They might, if you build it right, otherwise they may see “This text is replaced by the Flash movie” which isn’t very helpful.)

And don’t get me started on tables used for layout!

Usability remains important. To some people, it’s what they are selling to their customers.

Just a note for any one toting around an Apple laptop, be it an old iBook or a new MacBook: Get a video adapter!

More than a few times in the last year I’ve seen someone show up with an Apple laptop, and then look at the VGA connector on a projector, and have an “oh shit” moment where they realize things won’t plug into other things.

Even before my (pre-owned) iBook arrived, I had tracked down the needed VGA and s-video/composite video adapters on ebay. (I got both for under $20.)

I tend to carry my adapters around with me, and even offered one up at BarCampMadison to someone. Of course Apple in it’s infinite wisdom likes to change things each year, so my adapter didn’t work. (I ended up just letting the presenter use my iBook, though I warned him if it wasn’t interesting, I’d take my iBook and leave.)

For the modern folks, it looks like the Mini-DVI to VGA Adapter is pretty cheap, around $20. That should work for the MacBook and 12-inch PowerBook G4. If you have some other model, track down what adapter is used and order it today so you’re ready for the next user group meeting or BarCamp presentation.

Does TechCrunch matter to your customers?

That was one of the questions raised by Sean Johnson at BarCampMadison, where he gave a presentation titled "How To Burn Your Business Into The Ground - Lessons in Entrepreneurship"

I was reminded of this when I saw that TechCrunch just got a CEO. (Many people are asking “Why does a blog needs a CEO?”)

Sean’s point was that, as cool as TechCrunch is, at the end of the day, do your customers in the real world really care, or even know about TechCrunch? For most of us, we build things that are used by average people, not the select few digerati that are hip to the Web 2.0 lingo. There are tons of successful companies that have never been, and will probably never be profiled on TechCrunch, yet they do great work and make their customers happy. And that’s where the focus should be. Happy customers. Slashdot, Digg, TechCrunch, they all serve as these spotlights to shine on the latest online-thing that will give you brighter whites and cure what ails you, but it’s just a small percentage of a small percentage of people who pay attention to these things.

At the end of the day, do your customers, the ones paying the bills, really care if your company was profiled by some nerd news site?

Those crazy guys a Fireseed are trying to build a supercomputer. It’ll be called the Fireseed Streaming Supercomputer aka “FS3″

The FS3 project is a recently launched ad hoc tech project to design, build and program a GPU-cluster supercomputer, rather than the traditional CPU-cluster.

Join them at Bucketworks on Sunday March 18th, 2007 at 2:30PM if you wanna get involved…

Does Lightning have a Daylight Saving Time problem?

I don’t know when to go to the Apple Store! (18:00 is not equal to 5PM…)

Ah, I just checked for updates and a new version of Lightning was installed. Looks like they had a DST fix about a month ago. There’s also a Calendar blog which I might actually try to follow in the future.

It’s obvious that Twitter is cool, but honestly, it takes too much work. I mean, sure, I can try to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters, but why bother? That’s a lot of effort!

My new service will be named tw which is shorter than “Twitter” and has no uppercase letters, so you don’t even have to hit the shift key. And that “140 characters”? Forget it! We will be using two. Yes, two. Here are some examples.

• :)
• :(
• ;)
• :/
• :p

I think tw will be able to convey all human emotions with just two characters.

(If you’re interested in funding this thing, I’ll need about 2 million. Leave a comment.)

Recently I mentioned how the old Epson 777 was having some printing problems. Sadly, it’s only gotten worse.

The printer often doesn’t even print a page with ink on it, so it’s becoming somewhat useless. (It is fun to hear the loud grinding noise it makes, I really should record that!) My handwriting is terrible, and using a pen makes my hand hurt. (Who was it that said the “Pen is mightier!” anyway?) Do you know how hard it is for me to write things down because I can’t print them? And don’t get me started on maps! Sheesh, I have to hand draw maps while looking at the monitor. (If I don’t make it to tonight’s meeting, that’s why…)

I’m this close to getting a new printer. Actually, since I have about 6 unused ink cartridges, I really should just get another Epson 777.

This will be the first in a series of posts about BarCampMadison (now that it’s over.)

People who know me probably know about my skepticism/enthusiasm issues. I spend a lot of time worrying about how things will turn out, and the same time I get very excited about how they could turn out. I don’t know if this is wasted energy, or they balance each other out, but it’s how I am. That said, I think BarCampMadison was a great success. Could it have turned out better? Definitely! As for the numbers, I’ve heard estimates that we had 175 people participating throughout the event. We did not hit the 400-500 Ken had been hoping for. Honestly, I think this is a good thing. There were a bunch of people I wanted to talk to, but never got a chance. More people probably would have made this worse. Though maybe more free-time (as someone suggested) would have helped. More people also would have meant more sessions, and that would have meant missing more sessions that I wanted to participate in. Damn…

The good thing is, as we do these, we get better at them. We’ll take all the feedback, and do it better next time. I’m starting to wonder if we have too much going on at once. Perhaps there should only be 3 sessions going on at any one time. There were some scheduling issues again, but where it’s free-form and people come and go as they need to, that’s a tough one. I was there the entire time, so I could have done my session at 4AM if I wanted to.

I suppose in the long-run, it’s better to have too much interesting stuff going on at once instead of not enough. I think we succeeded in helping people teach, learn, and connect with others. I even ended up seeing people I haven’t seen in more than 10 years… Crazy!

I’m strongly considering trying to throw some smaller one-day *Camp events, like DesignCamp, MarCamp, and even DrupalCamp this year. If these sound interesting to you, let me know.

No, I haven’t forgotten about BarCampMadison, I have plenty to write about it, I’ve just been cranking on other projects. I’ll get to it, I promise…

If you’re looking to discuss what happened at BarCampMadison, feel free to join us for the Web414 Meeting on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 7:00 PM. We’ll be meeting at MSOE this time. Details at Web414.com…

Our devices are dumb. They are not very aware of each other, and they should be.

I was thinking about this after I got home from BarCampMadison, where we talked about storage solutions. The thing that really trigged it was that for about 3 minutes, I thought I lost my digital camera. While you freak out for a minute about losing an object, you also freak out (probably much worse) about losing the data.

What would be nice is a way for devices to talk to each other, and be able to sync and backup data without user intervention. So, I carry around a digital camera, a mobile phone, an iPod, and a laptop. What if the camera could easily communicate with the other devices and say “Hey, I have 30 new photos, who can store these for me?” The laptop might respond “I’m the primary device, I have all the digital photos, give them to me” and then some wireless magic (wifi, bluetooth) would be used to do the right thing.

No laptop present? Perhaps the iPod could say “I’ve got 10 gigs of free space, give me the photos, and I will give them to the master when I get in range and connect.” No iPod? The mobile phone could be the storage device. Meanwhile the phone is talking to the other devices and asking them to sync/backup the new data it has, “Hey iPod, store these new phone numbers I got in the last 4 hours.” And on and on…

The idea is really to spread your data far and wide. We talked about this a lot at BarCampMadison. The situation will only get worse as our digital lives create more and more bits we have to deal with. Those bits need to be saved, and synchornized, and backed up. Doesn’t it seem silly that I need to manually tell my computer to sync with my phone every morning? Shouldn’t they be smart enough to do that when they get in close range of each other? Yes, there can be conflicts in the data, but do all the easy stuff first, then ask me to resolve conflicts. Syncing the iPod is nice, but in the future I hope having to physically plug in a device to have that happen seems just silly. (Sure, today we have issues with wireless communication, large amounts of data, and battery life, but those are all problems we can solve.)

We have automated backup solutions for our regular computers, but these mobile devices we carry are getting more and more important, and holding more and more data, and we need to make sure we don’t just lose it all to the bit bucket.