Langester

Quite the morning today, spent about 5 hours trying to resolve database connectivity issues with our hosting provider. Through a series of seemingly unconnected events our shared web server networking layer got corrupted, not the databases! While working with the support manager he mention another site on our server was attacked this morning and they took the server network offline, but that couldn’t be the issue… with some persuasion he reboot the web server and viola everything is fine.

There are valuable lesson in there somewhere I suppose. 1) shared hosting is cheap for a reason, 2) always look where you least expect something FIRST and 3) Email or Forum only tech support only go so far, for really problems a live person (via phone or IM) is the only way to go.

For anyone interested in how our logo contest is doing: http://99designs.com/contests/6623.

That’s exactly what I’m going to be doing. We’re launching an new online service and we need a logo, but the kicker is we want to spend less than $500. Good luck, right? I had found a designer I liked and would have fallen within budget, but unfortunately he had a run of bad luck last week (broke his hand). Enter 99designs.com, for about $40 you can submit your requirements and run a contest up to a week long. You select the prize amount, the community can vote on their favorites, you can interact with the designs giving them feedback and suggestions, and you get final say in the winner. BTW: after you pay out the price copyright is transfered to you, bonus. After looking through the submission the designs are general good quality or better, more than adequate for what I want at this moment. Also it appears the average prize is $300 for a logo, beautiful! Of course there’s the chance nothing good can come out of it, but with most logo contests receiving 20+ submission I’m sure something usable will come our way.

I’m pumped, its a great idea! Perfect for the bootstrapper.

The Dr. Jane Goodall gave a lecture in Edmonton yesterday entitled Reason for Hope. Dr. Jane is top notch speaker, respects the audience, humorous, and its quite clear that she has not lost the “passion” (even after this 74 year got up at 4 am to fly to here only to be delayed, bumped, cancelled and have her luggage lost). A definite pleasure to listen to and I’m sure I could spend days and days listening to her insights, stores and varies awareness programs. She has that level of unquestionable respect and integrity that few people can attain, perhaps the Mother Theresa of chimpanzee and conservation.

The lecture topic was of course conservation, but her approach is opposite of most. For example Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth which is basically a hit you of the head kind of truth, wake-up call. Where this was more of a process of realization, understanding and empowerment that anyone of us can make an impact. This is my summarization of her message: This generation is not going to save the world, its the next and future generations that will. It is our responsibility to do what we can now to start the process of stabilization with our soon to be business leader, activists and politician and to educated our children so they can begin to repair. The opposite of think globally, act locally.

As excepted she shared her life story, how a little 4 year old english girl went from discovering how a hen lays eggs to Africa observing chimpanzees (the short answer is her mother). And a good many animal stories and in listening to them one can only conclude the only dumb animals are ourselves for being ignorant to think so in the first place.

If conservation is something your interested in I suggest the Dr Jane Goodall Institue as a place to start, especially if you have kids, they are very youth conscious. In fact my wife and I are Chimpanzee Gaudians for Petit Prince.

Today Apple brought their Aperture World Tour to town and its be a long time since the last time Apple stop here. David Morrow, Apple Canadian Photo Market Manager, gave did 3 hours presentation that was really 3 hour clinic of how to use Aperture to save those poorly executed photos. In fact I think there was only about 15 slides in the deck and that only took 5 minutes to blow through. My kind of presentation: talk the walk, walk the talk.

One of the things I liked in windows Photoshop was the Album but the speed of large library as not so great, importing was a bit of pain and revisions of photos always required new files to created. I used about 8% of PhotoShop Elements, to do corrections, cropping, healing and exporting. I also found photoshop pretty clunky to use and always felt like I was using a creative tools first rather than a corrective tool which is really what I needed.

Aperture is a corrective tool and the correction abilities are staggering. Since it was built with input with the top pro’s in the world it also have pretty darn good workflow. The import and selection process can be extremely fast with lots of nice goodies, like being able to batch set photo meta data on the way into Aperture. One of the best innovations is you never touch the original photos, but rather make a receipt on how to alter the photo which is only applied with you need to output the photo or view it. This means you always have access to the original without having to create files all over the place, and when you do make a duplicate its just another receipt. Aperture is really worth a look!

Perhaps the best thing is the price point, $199 CDN for a pro level product, fantastic. I’ll be picking up a soon, just as soon as my free trial expires

In this article Cory Bohon from TAUW talks about controlling your Mac with email?!? Wow! That’s just… well not good. Its a neat idea, but email is just so insecure. Granted someone would have to know your using these scripts but they can just mail bomb you with a huge subject line containing possible commands and combinations thereby exploiting the “Contains” command. Now I guess you could always check that the email is coming from you, but if they have your email address (which of course they do because their sending you an email) they can impersonate you in the “from” address and circumvent that protection. I wish the author had made the security implications clear, the only warning provided is be careful when test, presumable so you don’t restart your system before saving something important (which makes the mail bomb shutdown painful, notification, no chance to avert it).

(as describe by Apple)

Business week posted an interesting article on Apple’s design process as described by Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple at SXSW this year. The most interesting to me was paired design meetings, sort a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one to go crazy in and then one to follow up on the feasibility of the craziness. Not totally new, but what is “new” is these are regular meetings. Meeting outside of the box.

OK, maybe riding season is a couple of weeks away. Yesterday I pulled the Vespa out of the shed and did a mechanism inspection. Today I took it for a spin to get gas and drop off some materials for my wife. I need to seriously consider investing in some good riding gloves and a good turtle neck base layer. Its a bit nippy when your zipping along at 70 km/hr and its only 1 degree Celsius…

This evening I attended the Edmonton Journal Indoor Games help at the University of Alberta Butterdome (part of the Van Vliet Centre). My wife coach’s her elementary school running club and one of the coaches couldn’t make, so I help out (a little). What a great event for these kids (Grade 4-6), it was fun, competitive and very supportive atmosphere. All the coach were great, very supportive and proud regardless of their kids results. The parents where wildly supportive of their children and surprising of others! I remember a moment in one of the first girl’s 200 meter heat. 1st place had already finished 25 meters ahead with 2nd and 3rd coming for a photo finish, the crowd erupted into such a cheer while these two girls battled out the last 20 meters, it was just awesome. It just nice to seen an even where winning is the only thing happening. And I guess that’s what I remembered most 20 years ago when I ran in my final games: the exciting, the thrill and the support. I never finished first in any of my heats, but I still felt like a winner for having tried.

After nearly half a dozen years my local library has finally give their site a make over!  While it doesn’t valid its much easier to find thing and the catalogue search is blazing fast as compared to before.  And WiFi hotspot in the library, all you need is your library card, this is big thing for me.  All steps in the right direction which is to provide access to information to all.