holding steady.™

the folks at bernos make awesome t-shirts.

i really like afro-centric stuff. and, well, t-shirts, i like t-shirts a lot. and i have a profound love for the nation of ethiopia. berno t-shirts bring all of these loves together. i don’t usually plug products on this blog (that’s what i use whining in stereo for) but i’m somewhat inspired here. rather than blather on about how amazing they are, i’ll just include some photos of some of their sold-out designs (appparently more are coming this month).

[i’m sure part of my appreciation comes from my belief that ethiopians are the most beautiful people on earth…probably has something to do with that.]

one of the members of the company (and i suppose one of the models for their t-shirts) is an amateur photographer…who takes some pretty bad-ass photos. such as…

first of all, i love the name. destroy labs, sounds like something a team of alien scientists cooked up to save or, you know, destroy the planet.

secondly, this thing is more enjoyable to use than flickr. between this and photonic (how i upload photos, details on why this is cool here and here), i rarely even visit the flickr website anymore. the adobe air app phenomenon is getting me excited, because the idea of little apps that do specialized tasks is what i perceive as the future of the web. gone are the days where everything needed to be done through your bookmarks when you open up safari/firefox. i can go entire days now without EVER opening my browser. if you think about it, iphone apps follow the same path…widget-like efficiency that saves time, energy and battery life.

enough with the brouh-hah. this app is clean, crisp, uses one of my absolute favorite color combinations, and takes what i consider to be a novel approach to showing pictures. opening up an individual shot gives you almost all of an item’s info, and i even really enjoy browsing through my own photos.

currently, my only complaint is an inability to see set information/tags on the item info page. maybe there should be a way to browse one’s sets/collections, and to see what groups a photo belongs to.

i have an iphone. don’t be appalled.

i have gone through what feels like thirty (but has probably been closer to seven) different cases. each of them suffered from some fundamental lack, as far as i have been concerned. the portfolio-style holster from incase meant that it wasn’t protected when i took it out the case to, you know, use it. i had the griffin cork case, which was nice, but it made the phone too bulky to fit in my pocket, took on the color of my pants and jitzed around with my hearing ability.

finally, someone has gotten it right.

incase recently introduced the slider case, and i have been looking forward to it. it’s not so thick that it bulks up a truly splendidly thin phone, but it also offers real protection. it doesn’t block any of the ports, nor the side or top buttons. but the real genius of this is in the functionality. i plug my phone into the dock that came with my bluetooth headset every day. and i never have to take the case off. that’s because the slider comes with a detachable bottom section that conforms to the angle at which the iphone sits in the dock. that means you get hard case protection without giving up the comfort of using the dock to charge and sync your iphone. i love this thing.

sadly, i don’t use flickr all that often. however, i have recently acquired a pro account, so it has occurred to me to use it more actively.

so, i am trying out this new app called photonic. it’s been showing up in my mac-related RSS feeds for about a week. ergo, i gave it a little looksie. the demo is supposed to last until march 20 (UPDATE: i bought it. because it rocks (especially for uploads).

i like the interface, very leopard (sidebar with the finder/itunes drop down menus). it allows for browsing of my sets and photostream, as well as the browsing of all streams. there is also in that same sidebar an allowance for the viewing of my favorites, contacts and groups, which is totally awesome. as some sort of bonus, it also includes a section on photos uploaded in the past couple of days. i’m tired of typing the word “also.”

the uploading portion allows for a group of photos to be recognized by the program, and you can upload them all, or the selected photos (arguably those which you have finished tagging, description-ing, title-ing, assigning to a set/group pool, and establishing prefs with regards to visibility, type and safety).

one of the best features that i’m noticing is an instant ability to favorite-star a photo ( a cute little button in the bottom-left corner.

so. yeah i like it. hopefully this will make me use my flickr account that much more.

ok, i have been a hard-core aperture user for about six months. ever since i bought my camera, and really, even before then, i had every intention of using the program. the second i could get it into my grubby little hands, i did. i have been fairly content with it. until yesterday. i got ahold of adobe lightroom, mostly because i just wanted to play with it. i’m a pretty big fan of everything else they do (nothing in my life would be correct without dreamweaver and fireworks), so i figured i might as well give the damn thing a shot. i sorta now wish i hadn’t. i wish this program weren’t faster than aperture. i wish that it didn’t have the same nondestructive capability. i wish it weren’t sexier looking. i also with that it supported .pngs. eventually, i hope to write a review of some software. reading the work of shawn blanc has inspired me a tad bit. (it’s also making me want to do a little redesign…)

so. i typically take notes in microsoft word, using the notebook layout.

this WAS something that i looked forward to when i finally switched to the mac. i thought the idea of taking notes, with an option for voice recording seemed really intuitive. and i’d never had much complaint with microsoft word (although the new format is something that STILL baffles me).

so, at the beginning of the semester, i created six notebook documents for each of my six classes. the first test came on the first day, three classes in a row, back to back. no problems, all was well. i thought that i was in for a really productive method of note-taking. the following week, i decided that i would test out voice-recording in one of my monday class that runs an hour and fifteen minutes. i had previously used it when i was in student government at UM, for senate meetings that drug on for usually about an hour. the program got buggy withing thirty minutes of my recording, and there were dramatic slugs in my performace. and before we even get into that, my machine is in pretty good condition. when i tried to end the recording, before i lost all my notes, there was a three minute lag and then i had to restart the program so i could finish my note-taking. the part of the lecture that had recorded had summarily disappeared.

the next day, i had one of my two once-a-week three hour classes for the first time, history of photography. i typed up my notes as usual, very little out of the ordinary. the next time i opened up microsoft word, actually the next ten times, my notes from that class also opened up. apparently there was an error. i really don’t know.

and then yesterday happened. i was typing notes in my international terrorism class. and then i hit the enter key and the tab key. and nothing. fucking. happened. eventually, it got its act together. but later, in my congressional representation class last night, i looked up and noticed that tabs and indents and bullets that had been created with the tab and enter keys were suddenly invisible. oh, they were there when i clicked the cursor on the line. but as i began typing again further down the page, they disappeared again.

i’m done. i quit this shit. i’ve already moved most of my word processing needs to pages, and the few times i have opened powerpoint presentations, i’ve done so in keynote. numbers is a pretty slick replacement for excel (see my review). basically, the only reason im keeping this shit on my computer is because of that unsure factor, where you just never know if you’ll need a program. also known as why i have 97 programs on my computer. tonight, i plan to convert ALL my current notes to omnioutliner pro. i’ll let you know how that works out.

i’m in the middle of a study-session for the lsat, which I’m taking in a few weeks (september 29, to be exact), so i simply haven’t had the time i’ve wanted for the site. as an fyi, i’m working on the building of the main part of the site, which is basically an exploration of my political interests. those two things, plus i’m trying to find the end of a term paper i started writing, oh, six or seven (at this point, nine) months ago. now, so that i feel less bad about myself, here is a ported review of a book i read a few weeks ago, “a dirty job” by christopher moore. i’m going to take down a lot of old posts from my other blog and replace them with things that i hope are more interesting. so far, the idea is storylines based on freaky dreams that i’ve had.

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(originally written monday july 23, 2007 @ 01:17 hours)

So, yesterday, my inner voracious reader got a good workout while i was waiting to get my hair done at the beauty salon. The basic premise of the novel: an ordinary “Beta Male” loses his wife and is left with a newborn baby. Then he discovers that he is a “Death Merchant,” thanks to the guidance of a man who wears mint green suits. With the help of his lesbian sister, insane Chinese and Russian widow neighbors and his off-the-wall employees (a goth chef and online-dating-obsessed ex-cop), he raises his daughter while basically managing to keep the whole “I collect dead people’s souls” thing to himself. I mean, sure, there’s a whole creepy shadow-minions-talking-to-you-from-the-sewers thing that good ol’ Charlie Asher (the protagonist) has to deal with, but all in all, he maintains a relatively even-keel as he’s faced with the end of the world and the possible overthrow of all humanity by, well, Hell.

This book was maniacally comical. I judge a good novel to have humorous content when I find myself laughing so hard that I genuflect. I doubled over about forty times while sitting in the waiting area. And THAT was just based on the first hundred pages or so. Trust me, the last three hundred pages are even more hysterical, I just wasn’t in a position to bend, given that there was a squat Dominican woman attacking my head. Pick this one up, it’s totally worth it.

Oh Apple. You do so like to enthrall us.

So, whatever. I got ahold of iWork ‘08 last week, and last night had the first opportunity to use it for any length of time. The following are things that I observed:

-Pretty intuitive program design. Things are where they should be (for the most part) and it’s easy enough to find them.

-As a longtime user of MS Excel, it was pretty easy to get on the horse. There’s some nice continuity of flow between the two programs,.

-First big issue: couldn’t find cell formatting, and then I found it in the inspector. Took me a minute to figure it out, but once I did, I suppose it just makes sense for that to be there.

-Drag and drop of cells (I wonder if this feature can be turned off. Not that I don’t appreciate the ease, but I feel like that’s something I’ll do by accident a lot).

-I don’t know how fond I am of the chart section. This is my first time using a chart on the Mac at all, and I suppose I am just more used to the location of options in Excel (scale, etc.). Figuring it out is simple enough, but there is a limit on how many “steps” you can have on the scale.

-All things considered…the graphs are pretty.

-I like the little inset drawer on the left to keep track of various sheets in the given document.

-I can certainly appreciate the variety of styles and templates.

All in all, the program has the same adaptable ease-of-use that I have come to expect from Mac programs, although at times Numbers doesn’t have the same feel as other Apple programs, with my experience being mostly with Aperture, Keynote, and some iLife stuff. I like it, and I’ll probably stop using Excel altogether, just because this feels less stodgy than Excel.