Sometimes, I find myself writing comments on others’ blog posts, but never submitting them…

First off, I would like to say that for the most part, I absolutely love Gmail. It is by far the best web-based e-mail client I have ever used, but that doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely perfect. Here are the two biggest complaints I have.

Last night, Josh, Joy, and I went to a Nonpoint concert in Traverse City. The concert started at 8:00, but we didn’t actually get there until almost 9:00 (which is fine by me, I wasn’t interested in the opening bands). After waiting through two bands, we finally got to see Nonpoint. And let me tell you, it was well worth the wait.

I was designing a wedding invitation for a client that came into the shop today – we sat down and pulled all of her information together, sorting out what needed to go on the invitations and such. Anyway, after I was looking at all of the information she had written down, something caught my eye. She had phone numbers written like this:

• (xxx) xxx-xxxx
• 1(8xx) xxx-xxxx
• 1(8xx) xxx-xxxx
• (xxx) xxx-xxxx

Now, why-oh-why would you only include the country code with toll-free numbers?

The funny thing is that I’ve seen this numerous times before. People, in the general sense, seem to want to add that 1 before an 800 number, but do not find it necessary before any other telephone number.

Why does this happen? I blame infomercials. Just call 1-800-xxx-xxxx, that’s 1-800-xxx-xxxx, and don’t forget to call 1-800-xxx-xxxx!

It’s amazing what people will believe these days:

As I was using my computer today, I was greeted with a weird error:

How does that even make sense? After manually forcing a backup to start, I was back underway; but nonetheless, that shouldn’t ever happen, should it?

With all the flooding, thunder and lightning, brief tornadoes, and some slight hail, Mason and Manistee counties are in somewhat of a wreck. Oddly enough, the actual CIty of Ludington Suffered a large amount of damage.

I walked into Starbucks this morning, mostly because I actually left early for work and had some time, to get a morning pick-me-up. As soon as I walk in, the girl sees me and says: “Single Tall Mocha Light Frappacino?”

Wow. I didn’t think I went there that often – maybe once every two weeks. At least she remembered me.

After setting up mod_rails (a.k.a. Passenger) in Mac OS X, I had a brilliant thought. If I’m going to have to update the Apache configuration every time I add a new site, why not just create a TextMate Project?

Just a quick blurb: I was looking for some drink recipes, and came across this site: theBar.com. Not only is it filled with great content (tons of recipes, all of which are searchable by a numerous amount of characteristics), but the user experience was great.

In my spare time (the little that I have), I have been gradually learning Cocoa and Objective-C. So far, it’s been a great experience. I’ve already started one project, and I’m working on another: iNeed.

I never really noticed this until recently, but when you have multiple tabs open in Safari that share similar titles, Safari automatically selects the most relevant part of the title to display.

For example, if you were to open several articles from this site, the titles would be something like brandon martinez: blog – It Really Is the Simple Things or brandon martinez: blog – Safari’s Tab Titles. Safari will automatically remove the brandon martinez: blog - so that the tabs would read It Really Is the Simple Things and Safari’s Tab Titles.

However, I have noticed that it isn’t 100% accurate. Results such as martinez: blog -[article name] aren’t uncommon, but either way, it’s a cool concept.

As I said in the last post, sometimes it’s the simplest things that get me. For example, comment posting hasn’t worked on my site in a while (which in a way is a great thing, considering the amount of comment spam I get). I tried looking everywhere to get comment posting to work again; and yet, I was not able to.

Warning: Nerdy story alert!

A few days ago, I was trying to connect to my wireless Airport Extreme network with my iPod touch, and for whatever reason, the iPod could not find the network. Actually, it could find it, but I had to be right next to the router (and even then it only showed one bar of signal strength). After a little bit of digging, I solved the problem.

On your iPod, go to Settings, General, Reset, Reset Network Settings. Another thing I did, just for good measure, was erasing Safari’s cache. Sometimes it’s the simplest things that get me.

I hope this helps you.

I’ve been learning Cocoa and Objective-C over the past week, and it’s coming along great. I already have the basics for the Objective-C language down (actually, it’s nice because it’s a lot like C and Ruby combined, as far as theory), and I’m learning the frameworks for Cocoa.

As of now, I’m diving straight into Core Data and the NSXML libraries, building an application that integrates with my web site. It’s only taken me about 4 to 5 hours of development time, and already I have learned how to remotely connect to a REST web service, consume the data, and inject it into a Core Data application.

For those of your that don’t know what RSS is, maybe it’s time for you to find out!

I’m a huge supporter of REST: I think it’s a great to take full advantage of a protocol, especially HTTP, to communicate. However, even though I personally have embraced REST, I can’t seem to find anyone to back me up on it.

I love the idea of change, especially when it comes to government. If we get stuck into one method, especially a method that doesn’t work, we’ll continue to repeat our mistakes and end up in a place that we don’t want to be.

For one of my classes, and eventually my own personal use, I am setting up a RADIUS server. Being that this is my first time ever really working with RADIUS, it’s quite a challenge.

I’ve been working on this new design for the web site and I’m testing it on different browsers, which are on different computers. Well today, I happened to test it in Firefox 2 on a Windows XP machine, and was very disappointed. The type looked terrible!

After a few minutes, I finally figured out what was going on. The machine didn’t have ClearType turned on! This is rather disappointing, since ClearType provides a much needed boost in terms of font-rendering on screen. I have no idea why Windows XP wouldn’t have this turned on by default, but Microsoft has an article up on how to do it.

Over at Veerle’s blog, she has written a nice article about a similar situation.

I’ve been trying to figure out this crazy problem I’ve been having with HP ProCurve 2900 and 3500 switches. As of now, I keep getting Major Errors: “High Collision or Drop Rate (formerly overbandwidth) Action taken: Warning Issued.”

UPDATE

Apparently, this isn’t that big of a deal, and is to be expected. This can happen from old network cables, old NICs, or a few other problems. Then only time you should be concerned is when it slows down your network (noticeably).

I was listening to some music that Josh and I have been working on, when I remembered that a few years ago we had setup a PureVolume page. I logged in and added a couple of songs (very rough demos), and decided that we could use that as our front for the band. Hopefully, we’ll begin recording some stuff this weekend, and will update that whenever we have something to update it with. I’ll post here to let you all know, too. Feel free to check it out: http://www.purevolume.com/lostinsanity.

Alright, if you haven’t heard of Skitch, the you need to (Mac-Users Only, Please). It’s an awesome way to take screenshots, make notes, and then share them with the world. Check out their web site (http://plasq.com/skitch), and watch the video at the bottom. It’s a great way to see all that it can do.

I’ve only been able to touch lightly on the power it has, but I’m really enjoying it. And the good news is, I have one invite to give away. So if you’d like an invite, just leave a comment on this post, with the e-mail address you want it sent to.

I just updated this web site today, upgrading both Ruby on Rails (to version 1.2.6), as well as upgrading Capistrano (from version 1.0 to 2.1). On my development machine (my iMac), everything went great. However, uploading stuff to the server was a major pain. I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out why Capistrano kept failing. Come to find out, it was one line of code. Eck! I hate when that happens.

For those of you running Mac OS X 10.5 and Lightroom (or any one running Lightroom at that matter), the 1.3 update is available. After installing and playing with it, I noticed that Lightroom is a lot snappier; there is nearly zero lag when scrolling (even through a few thousand photos). Also, Adobe fixed the print module, which wasn’t working under Leopard. Thanks Adobe!

I’ve been using Gmail’s new IMAP feature a lot lately, and I am totally loving it. This setup, by far, is far better than using POP3. I am able to organize my e-mail both in Apple Mail and the Gmail web interface, and they reflect each other. However, I one major gripe.

Well, who knew: I’m going to see Coheed & Cambria next Thursday in Detroit (November 1^st). Awesome! After they put out an amazing album, I get to see them play it live; I’m so excited. I’ve seen them once in concert, and I had a great time; this time, however, I have a general admission ticket – can we say “hello front row!”?

Yesterday I pre-ordered Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and I should have it next Friday (which is great, considering that is the day it will be available for purchase from Apple Stores). I’m very excited about this, and I’ve been preparing by buying a 500GB external hard drive ($139.99, Iomega, from the Apple Store) to back up all of my files, then I’ll wipe my hard drive and start fresh with Leopard. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

I’ve been listening to Coheed & Cambria’s newest album, Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow, and I am very impressed. This is their most mature album to date, with amazing music and production. I would recommend almost anyone to buy this CD when it comes out next week.e

Overall Rating: 10/10

Yesterday, I picked up a brand-new pair of Keen’s Austin shoes, and after wearing them for just over a day, I’m glad I did. They are the most comfortable shoe I have every worn, extremely light, and walk extremely well. If you are looking to get a great pair of shoes, for both work and play, I would 100% recommend buying a pair of Keens.

If any of you have been on a large, business-style Windows Network, then you’ve probably used Active Directory. Active Directory is Microsoft’s implementation of LDAP, a system for allowing users to login on multiple machines based on a single login.

This is a quickie: did you know that you can move a window that is not in focus, and without bringing it in focus, by holding down the command key when you click and drag? I just learned this today, and I think I will end up using it a lot :)

With the popularity of the Internet, and the increasing number of American households that will be getting a high speed connection, how will we use this service to benefit and simplify our lives?

I recently enrolled into a few online classes – I needed the credits, and one of the classes was only offered online. After spending a few weeks with them, I have decided that they are the perfect solution for educating the world (at least the US).

Over the past few days, I’ve had the absolute pleasure to work with Apple’s latest version of Logic Pro, studio version 8. Let me tell you, even with the few hours I’ve spent with it everyday, I know this product is absolutely amazing. Before Logic Pro 8, I was using Logic Express 7.2, which is also a great product, but I feel that 8 is leaps and bounds beyond 7.2.

If any of you know me and my computing habits, you know I’m all about using the keyboard over the mouse. Well, I learned a new shortcut by accident. Command+Down Arrow. It opens files (normally I just use Command+O). Also, one most people don’t know is Command+Up, which moves you up a level in the finder.

SPAM has just gotten out of hand these days.

I was cleaning out my Gmail account today (deleting newsletters and the like from sites I used to subscribe to), and I decided to empty my SPAM. Guess what happened 30 seconds later. Another new SPAM message popped in there; do you realize how annoying that is? It’s like cleaning your house, walking back to where you started and it’s a mess again! That is just ridiculous.

I work for a small business in my county, and I really enjoy it. There are so many benefits that you get from working for one, it’s just a great experience overall.

Over at Rails Envy, they have an absolutely perfect guide to using page caching in rails. In fact, this site is running off of what I learned there. However, I did run into one problem (kind of a major problem).

I recently posted on a caching update for RESTful Rails, and thought I would write another helpful tip for people dealing with page caching. This applies to anyone using Ruby on Rails for development, even if it doesn’t follow the REST principles.

This is a follow up to past articles, as a general suggestion, you should go over those before you read this one.

Finally! After looking through some rails source code, I figured out how to do conditional page caching. It’s actually pretty simple.

Once again, Apple has saved my sorry butt. I tend to have bad luck every once and again, especially with technology: if I buy something new, normally I seem to get the one defective product in the entire bunch; I always have to take back my original and get another one (which always works amazingly after). Well, once again, it has happened.

Sometimes, I hate myself…

One of my bands (Lost in Sanity) is playing at a wedding this weekend, along with a couple of other bands. Well, after talking with the groom (who is running the audio setup), I ran into a few technical problems. Firstly, he wants two channels, and not stereo – one of them needs to be an instrument line and the other vocals. Also, we won’t have any monitors because we’ll be running 100% digital (meaning Electric Drums and PODs Galore). Well, I needed to figure something out.

If you have ever looked into creating your own weblog, online photo gallery, or any other of the virtually-endless-amount of online apps, you may have run into a problem: which do you choose? Or possibly, should I make my own?

So, I just did a search for my name on Google the other day (which I do once in a while), and the search came up with my web site as the fifth results. Now, given the fact that the search was performed without quotes (thus ANDing the search phrase, and not looking for the exact phrase), this is really good. I also did a search for something related to one of my blog posts, gcal to ical fix applescript, and I’m the third results. You may not seem to impressed, but given the fact my site is relatively new and has not been out there long enough to gain that much Google merit, I needed to investigate the issue. This is what I came up with.

Many of us have had this problem: we buy a new computer (or a new anything for that matter) and something goes wrong with it within the first couple of months (our fault or not). Then we have to get on the phone and make calls to the company to see if our warranty covers it, and to see how much a replacement part would cost, and so on and so on. Well, for once, I had a decent experience.

As many of you don’t know, I happen to be a huge Mac supporter. Actually, many of you may find that to be backwards for me – but let me explain.

All through high school and college, we have been forced to write term-papers, book reports, and other forms of student-forced literature. Each piece would require hours of research, revision, and my least favorite, citing. Citing was such a pain! You would have to keep track of everything, and I mean absolutely everything, everything that you used, touched, or even looked at, to throw into your Works Cited. It was just such a long tedious process, it would get tiring very fast. To make matters worse, there were two different styles (technically there are more, but I’m talking about the main two) you could write your paper and citations in, depending, of course, on what the teacher preferred: MLA and APA.

Sometimes when you are updating your Ruby on Rails application, you find that you need to add a field to one of your models. Doing so is really easy (as long as you use migrations, which you should be doing!).

I just picked up an HP Photosmart A610 printer today, and I must say, I’m quite impressed. The quality of the pictures easily rivals that of the local photo-developers (read: Walmart), and the setup wasn’t too bad. The product itself doesn’t require a computer, but of course, I prefer using one with it (I have more control over the photo color, making edits, and etc – although, the Photosmart does have some built in editing features and a small LCD to do them on).