Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that my Mac has been slowly grinding to a halt, overheating and basically not bringing me as much maccy joy as she used to.
After a little investigation, I discovered that (for some unknown reason) Dashboard was chewing up memory and processor power by the fistful. In fact, it was claiming a mighty 80% chunk of my 2.3 Ghz core 2 duo.
80% !?! Something had to be done.
After a little investigation I discovered that there was a way to completely disable my little used Dashboard. The Dashboard app is run as a process of the Dock, so it’s a two stage task to disable the pesky thing.
Paul Lloyd and I went to school together. We laughed and cried together. We shared chips from the same paper bag. But alas, he is not keen on the new design. I don’t know if we can weather this rift in our friendship. As an attempt to repair broken prides and clear the air I would like to publicly discuss the issues my friend Mr. Lloyd has with my design.
But first, a brief history.
As already mentioned, myself and Paul went to the same fine secondary education establishment. After a teary goodbye, we both left for our respective Universities - Paul choosing a course in Graphic Design and myself a stint in Multimedia Design. After completing our eduction (both with an Atilla) we moved into jobs, greasing our way up the ranks to reach the lofty heights of Lead Design at Ning and Interaction Designer at Glaxstar.
It should be mentioned at this point that whereas I have always had slightly more technical skill than Paul, he far outstrips me on the design front. That said, lets now move onto what he thought of the new design.
F*****G Stars!
Were the first words out of Paul’s mouth. Too many stars apparently. I gathered from this that Paul was less than impressed with the new design.
He then sent me an email, a design critique if you will, kindly enclosing a re-hashed version of the design that ‘he did on the train’. This gave me a basic overview of each area of my sins:
Typography
Colour
Use of space
Use of images
Those stars
Ok, time to get serious. I must admit to having my pride a little battered by Paul’s redesign, but he’s an awesome designer and a great friend. I just thought this would be funny - And a chance to put both designs out there. I’ve uploaded Paul’s Homepage and About Page to Flickr. Please feel free to take a look and rip either or both versions. Again, it’s over to you!
Not since January 4th 2006 has there been any update, new look or (if you will) face lift to my own little corner of the web. So it was about bloody time I put mouse to slightly grubby desktop and upgraded things a little.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending quiet moments with Fireworks and then Dreamweaver slaving away to bring you a pimped-up roobottom. I’ve chopped out the things that were rubbish or no-body used (most notably the subscribe via email thing) and added in some cool new ways to navigate around.
The Archives have received a complete re-code and now offer (I think) a great alternative to the standard Wordpress list by date feature. In-fact all of the code is sleeker, faster and more importantly ALL stored in it’s theme directory - where as before it was scattered all over the place.
I will endeavor to post some more technical details of what’s going on behind the scenes in the near future - and I may even release some of the Archive code as a plug in (if I get enough spare time).
Oh, and the flickr photo streams now work! Thanks to the brilliant work of Eightface.
Avast! The fine fellows at Talk Like a Pirate have put together a video on how to speak like a scurvy dog pirate to get you started.
Most notably tho, Flickr has gone all out in support by adding a new language option for the occasion, so go and check it out quick before yarrrr miss it!
The iTunes store is great, I love it! And that’s the problem. They have my credit card details and it’s way too easy for me to click the all to available ‘buy now’ button. And, to make matters worse, we now have TV shows in the UK store.
Oh crap, Ugly Betty is quite good, and I don’t watch TV so this seems like the perfect solution. Click, watch.. and then cower under the table when my Visa bill is delivered each month. They add more stuff all the time, why wont they let me rest?
And then, the final straw. They go and launch the iPod touch. How do Apple do that? Make you want their things? And with WiFi access to the store I’d be as dangerous as a granny with a chainsaw.
Somebody help. Surly there must be a support group for this kind of thing?
Last week I received a random e-mail from a lady calling herself “Yummy Mummy” that simply said…
I have written about you, I hope you like it. x.
So with trepidation, I clicked on the link. At this point, it’s worth pointing out that I don’t know this person, or had never had any contact with her before in my life. And yes, I’m aware how much you guys are going to take the p**s.
It took me a while to work out what the hell was going on here. Apparently this woman, writing under the pseudonym of Yummy Mummy writes about “Amelia” her 18 year old daughter and how she needs to basically be more wise in the way of men. It’s pretty weird stuff and morally questionable to say the least, but after a few emails to “Yummy” (staring with me asking ‘are you for real?’) I was assured that this wasn’t real, and was just to provoke interest in her blog. So needless to say, I don’t agree with what this woman is doing, but she has a much right to write what she thinks as the next guy.. um, gal. I saw absolutely no point in sending her a message judging her for her actions.
She was trying to get me to force “Yummy” to take my photo off her blog. She seems to have quite a lot of anger about Pimp My Daughter, which I guess I can understand. However she did rather go off on one about how she thought that all MEN (yes, capitals) just saw a joke in this.
But I did rather feel caught in the middle, forced to take sides on an issue that I’d never really considered before. And I suspect that far from farming her daughter out “Yummy” is actually just massively taking the p**s.
