I leave this AM to go to New York to meet with our technology vendor/collaborator for a major site we have in production. Meetings this Thursday and Friday, with fun on Saturday, coming back early Sunday afternoon. This is my first time back to NYC in about 5 years, so, I’m looking forward to it.

It’ll be great to finally meet the others involved on this project. We have a lot of ground to cover in regards to specifications with media distribution and status of assets they’ll need to have delivered, etc. but everything thus far with them has been awesome. It’s always nice to work on a project with a company that gets it and knows what they need, and how to ask for it. Inter-agency collaborations can get a bit dicey when one of the teams is far less savvy than the other one,¬† or if there is a mismatch of goals on a project, but we haven’t encountered anything like that, as of yet (Knock on Wood).

I’ll be looking to do something touristy on Saturday… I have yet to do Ellis island in the couple other times I have been to New York, maybe something like that is in order. I know I want to go to the Apple Store, and look arond Soho, of course… Get a bite of something good to eat, etc… Should be lots of fun. I’m hooking up with my buddy Max for the weekend, so things should be a bit crazy.

One of my absolute favorite games of all time is Smash Bros. Melee for the cube. The Wii Smash Bros. Brawl looks to be at least as good as the last one, with more characters, modes, items, maps, etc. The new site is up and being updated regularly.¬† Still no release date as far as I can tell… Hope it’s here for the fall/winter. I’ll need something to do once it’s too cold to ride my bike or go to the park with Sophia.

Warning: A Non-Geeky Post Follows…

A Three Day Weekend. Man, did I need it. Work has been very busy lately, so the ability to wind down for an extra day is much appreciated. A little lite blogging/surfing, locating some OmniGraffle Stencils to use for an upcoming project, and some work on a Drupal website I am doing for my city of West Peoria is about all that I have done using the computer.

Other than that, a ton of yard work and I bought a new grill. A really nice Stainless Steel one.¬† I’m chucking my old rusted out cheapy one and going to go to town for
the rest of the weeknd. Brats? Check. Burgers? Check. Pork Chops? Check. Steak? Check.

Sophia and I have been playing out in the wet grass here, because it’s be intermittenly raining all weekend, but we’re not letting it stop us from having some fun. Playing with a three year old is one of the most fun things on earth. Such imagination.

Hope all you other geeks out there are taking some time off to recharge a bit as well.

I had some issues last week with my MS Office install on my new MacBook Pro. My Entourage installation got completely hosed after running monolingual and accidentally removing some vital component that Entourage obviously needs. Finally, after an archive and install and a rollback to a slightly older database, I got things up and running again. I only lost a couple days of mail total in the fracas, so I’ll take that as a win. I now have a daily backup of a 3+GB mail database running instead of a weekly one, so i should be more protected in the future… It’ll be interesting to see how quickly I fill up 250GB Maxtor, though, that’s for sure.

But, as part of the archive and install and in part due to me trying to be more organized, I have CS3 apps that are just complaining all the time. Photoshop was missing something inside of “Scripting Additions” that I had to move over manually from my previous system install (For more info, check this thread at Adobe’s Community forum).

In addition to that little nag, I am constantly getting prompted by various CS3 apps that they need to be repaired because I moved them after installation… which I did, because I didn’t want 10+ folders starting with “Adobe…” in the root of my applications directory. I made an “Adobe” folder and tossed them all in there. Now, Photoshop, Bridge, Flash Video Encoder, and Device Central keep nagging me to repair them every time they launch… I ended up moving Photoshop and Bridge back out to the root applications directory to end the nag (I don’t use Device Central and the FLV encoder enough to warrant moving them) .

The strange thing is, is that some of the apps (Flash, Illustrator, Dreamweaver) can be repaired and the repairs actually stick. It seems from some bit of research at Adobe’s site, the general community stance is that:

1. You should just have your Adobe apps at the root of your application folder and use aliases or your dock for everything, not worrying about how your directories look.
2. You should not move, touch or disturb anything in or around your applications directory because you don’t need to.
3. If you want to move your apps, you’ll need to uninstall and and reinstall everything again, but why bother because that is dumb.
4. People that don’t like all their apps dumped in one folder are dumb, because they just are.

This just seems so “Windows-mindset-like” it boggles the mind. The whole “your computer directory structure is a black-box and shouldn’t be viewed by mere mortals” is one thing that has always annoyed me about Windows, and now it seems as though Adobe is pushing that Microsoft sort of disdain for their users on us Mac owners.

Not any of these cool Tees. I have 2.5 month old son and we have been digging for cool tees for him. Why? Because I like cool tees. I have a collection of rock tees that goes all the way back to an awesome G n’ R T-shirt from 87… And I think I found a perfect first rock T-shirt for him.

It’s at Trendy Tadpole. They have baby Bob Marley stuff and more. So cute.

Typically, when we deploy Flash video solutions at The Iona Group, we go with a pretty high framerate, because much of it is for kiosk, intranet or CD based deployments… sometimes a high bitrate solitary video goes up for a showcase piece, etc, but we don’t yet have a standard framerate, etc we are using… How many FPS are large scale experience sites deploying at? Is FPS 30 too much? Is 12 FPS too few.

I know the 70-80% of available bandwidth rule, and I have a good idea how to handle alternate video feeds based on data rate connections. I guess I’m just kind missing the final piece of qualitative knowledge to judge what to use for a smooth playback that still looks good.

And yes, I understand that bitrate is¬† the product of “(width * height * framerate) / compression ratio”.

Does anyone out there have an A-B comparison to check out? What’s Youtube or Google Video sending out? I’m guessing 12 FPS.

My friend’s Flash Lite App – DiggMob has made it to the top ten finalists for the Digg Api contest. Absolutely Brilliant! Congratulations on a job well done Brian!

read more | digg story

So, I did the archive and instal, and still no dice… I would think that my reinstall of the OS would have repaired whatever sort of damage I done to my Rosetta stuff using Monolingual, but no. MS Word, Excel,¬† Powerpoint all launch… Entourage will launch, but not using the identity I want to use – a 2.52GB database of 3-4 years worth of emails.

The database utility says that nothing is wrong with the database, it validates just fine… However, I tried using it on another Intel Mac I have and no dice. Tomorrow, I’m trying to load the identity on an old Power Mac G4 Tower, in the hopes that using a PowerPC based Mac will load the identity… A longshot, I know.

My choices after look to involve using EntourAid and just pulling all the emails out of it that I can… and then what? Use Entourage? I don’t feel so good about that. The thought of using VMWare just to check my email on Outlook seems kinda crazy, too… anyone out there doing this?

What’s the deal? Anyone out there using Entourage can shed some light on my situation?

What’s the chance of Office 2008 for the Mac going Community Technology Preview (aka Public Beta)? Just want to get this identity loaded and export my data.

Whimper.

I have been a Mac user for over a decade now. In that time I have had maybe 7 Macs. A 6400/180 Performa tower, a 7100/66 PowerMac, a Graphite iMac DVSE, a G4 Tower and now a MacBook at home and a MacBook Pro for work. In that time, I could probably count the time I have had to reinstall my OS because of problems on one hand (It’s been 4, I recall).
The most recent reinstall was due to the MX2004 software activation on a G4 Tower… I had upgraded the Machines’ hard drive, CPU, and video card all at once and the MX2004 suite simply didn’t know what to do, it thought it was on a different machine and so it silently failed launching again and again. After talking to numerous Macromedia support folks, I was issued hotfix after¬† hotfix, patch after patch. Nothing worked. Their recommendation… wipe the hard drive to zeros and reinstall everything. The OS, the apps, my drivers, etc. UGH! For an application.

Well, not quite as drastic as that one, but equally as frustrating, it looks like I will have to perform an Archive and Install in order to use the MS Office suite… My last post detailed how the entire suite was acting oddly (slow, unresponsive, etc.). I also mentioned that Entourage wasn’t launching. Well, now the entire suite is DOA.

All support posts I have seen aross newsgroups, forums etc point to the fact that because I used Monolingual to remove some “unused” fonts – (Cyrillic, Chinese, etc) I have damaged my system in a way that prohibits Office from working.

Bummer.

I guess I know what I am doing Monday.

Yes, I just got my first work Intel Mac – A MacBook Pro (I had a MacBook at home already – it’s pretty much a home photo and web browser/email machine), and got all my apps on it… including MS Office 2004. Wow, now, I wasn’t expecting super snappy performance, but holy cow. Opening the apps take forever and get this ‚Äì Entourage somehow got completely broken. Yes, won’t launch, just dies in the dock after two bounces. I’ll have to remove, reinstall, run all the updates so that my identity can be read by the app and then pray that my database isn’t corrupted. I know Office 2008 is in private beta, but man oh man, could they hurry up?

It’s bad enough, that now I open simple word docs in TextEdit and am seriously considering just temporarily moving to Google Docs and Spreadsheets until the new Universal Binary Office comes out. Since we recently set up a new Exchange server at work, too, I am considering trying to meld iCal and Apple mail into my workflow as opposed to using Entourage. I do hate that one database file of over 3GB is storing my last 4 years of correspondence, etc. I back the DB up nearly weekly, but even then, I have stacks of DVDs building up and it does take a few minutes of my time every work week. With Apple’s Mail and their Backup app, it’s all automated.

Ouch.

Anyone else out there experiencing such awful conditions imposed by Office on your Intel Mac?