Author Archives: bill

New Site Layout

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If you haven’t noticed, my site has a new, fresh look to it. Not being a CSS designer by trade, this is something I have struggled with for a bit. I’ve always wanted a nice, clean site, but haven’t really had the skills to do it on my own. Having seen a few sites that I sites that I admire and poking around some How To articles on using CSS and DIV elements to lay out a site, I think I’ve figured it out. The site colors haven’t changed much, but the layout has. I’ve stretched things out a bit more, which gives me a little more space to separate the different page elements. This hopefully makes the site “easier” to look at.

Letter To Steve Jobs & Apple – New Cinema Displays Please

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Unless I’m on the move, I typically I have my MacBook Pro “docked” with an external keyboard, mouse, and display. This is a habit I picked up from Kyle plus that fact that the new MacBook Pro’s get really, really, REALLY hot. That being said, I’d like a new monitor for home. But one of the biggest annoyances when docking my MacBook is that now I’m sans iSight. Total crap.

Cinema Display

My request to Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple: Cinema Displays with built in iSight. Please. I’ve heard rumors of them forever and I’m almost expecting them next month at MacWorld. If they don’t come out I’m going to be totally bummed. Mostly because I can’t imagine this would be hard or costly for Apple to do. It also seems like the next logical step when refreshing the “pro” line like they did with the new iMac and its cool, sleek design.

I’d buy another brand display, but really, nothing compares the the quality of the current Cinema Display in my opinion. Yeah, you can probably get more “bang for your buck” or whatever that means, but I’d prefer an Apple. So Steve, whadda ya say ‘ole chap?

Printing Collates in Ecometry

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A recent discussion on the Ecometry Google Group got me to thinking that we could use a central place for information on supported printers in Ecometry. If you call Ecometry about printer support, you’ll be told that they only support the HP 8150 series printer with an add-on font dimm. In general they work pretty good with the thick collate stock that we generally use.

About 6 months back though, we had a jamming problem with them. With collates coming out of Tray 3, they’d travel through the inside of the printer and jam. We’d have the printers serviced and a couple days later, they’d jam again. Our printer tech pointed out that since the collates are so thick and the long path they have to take through the printer, they’ll be more likely to jam over time. He suggested feeding them through Tray 1, the manual feed tray. Its a straight path through the printer, so there should be less problems. To date, he was right. No jams at all. The one drawback is that we can only feed about 50-100 collates through at a time. This isn’t that big a deal since we only do high volume 2 months out of the year.

Other Ecometry users have claimed success with other printers. I’m not sure what Ecometry’s official support is for them, but I’ve listed them below for others who are wondering the same thing:

  • HP 4240N
  • HP 9040N (some jamming issues?)
  • Ricoh 2090 Copier/Printer
  • Kyocera

If anyone else has any success or failures with other printers for printing collates in Ecometry, feel free to email me or post it below so it can be included here for future reference.

Revel Video Wedding Videographer Web Site

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Shannan (my fiancee) and I hired J.G. Lis of Revel Video to be our wedding videographer. During our initial meeting, he mentioned he needed his web site updated. Ironically, that’s what I do for a living, so we decided to exchange services. His existing site was basically a mashup of images that was hard to maintain. J kept having to have his designer make simple textual updates. Continue reading →

YumDrop.com now on Facebook!

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YumDrop.com is now on Facebook! You can become a fan of Yumdrop by clicking here. If you’re looking for sexy lingerie at good prices, check out the site! Yumdrop is quickly becoming one of our most popular web sites and its growing every day. Help us grow its popularity by becoming a fan and sharing it with your friends today!

YumDrop.com is also on MySpace. We’ve had an account there for a while, but we’re trying to build up our following. If you have a MySpace account, become a friend of YumDrop!

Being Passionate About Your Dream

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…And also seeing it through. I found a link to a guy (via reddit) who is a 3D Animator (he worked on Matrix Reloaded) that has spent the last 4 years of his life and his entire life savings (and maxed out his credit cards) to produce his own animated movie called Killer Bean Forever. The preview is pretty funny. What impresses me so much is that he’s that passionate about what he does. He’ll do whatever it takes, even if he goes bankrupt. I admire that type of passion.

Google & Apple’s iPhone

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There is an interesting article over on CNET about Google and Apple outsmarting all of the cell phone companies over the next 5 years. Google is coming out with the “gPhone” (either a phone OS or an actual phone) and Apple has its iPhone. Now, when the iPhone was first coming out Kyle and I talked about how cool it would be to just run Skype on the iPhone over WiFi and just circumvent the cell company. Basically VoIP, but mobile. Super neat!

Well, this now gets more interesting. With Google aimed to bid on the 700MHz spectrum in January, the cell phone landscape could change dramatically. Now we have wide spread WiFi, available at a low cost. You can use your “gPhone” or iPhone to talk to anyone and everyone over this WiFi network. What does this mean? No more traditional cell companies. No more crazy cell phone charges and taxes (granted, there will probably be government WiFi taxes). No more 2 year term agreements that bind you to crappy devices on an even crappier network.

At the end of they day, I think this article has pretty much hit the nail on the head in saying that in the next 5 years, Google and Apple will have snookered the cell business really good. They’ll be the ones left out in the cold.

Apple vs. NBC – iTunes Saga

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I’m sure most people are aware of NBC pulling its content from Apple’s iTunes store a few months back. A new article on Apple Insider sheds some more light on NBC’s “position”. Jeff Zucker, Chief Executive of NBC, claims that they wanted to increase download prices for its shows to $2.99 from $1.99. The reason being that they had ONLY earned about $15 million from the service last year. ONLY?!?! ONLY?!?! Jeff, that’s $15 million you wouldn’t have earned on T.V. episodes without iTunes. I’d love to make $15 million without lifting a finger on the back of someone ELSES platform.

You sound like the RIAA claiming that downloadable music is killing the recording industry. Uh, no. Its just killing your profits, so you’re going to take your ball and go home, no matter how much it could affect what you COULD make in the future.

Jeff goes on to claim that Apple made millions by selling its hardware on the back of NBC’s content, money NBC never saw. Uh, yeah, right. Jeff, Apple makes a superior product that people see value in, hence they buy it. Show me some numbers on that claim and I’ll listen. Reading comments such as these only get me more excited that recording artists (and I’m sure we’ll see something similar with film in the future) are taking control of their own content and controlling how its distributed. Tell me Jeff, when NBC can’t make money on commercials anymore, will you take your bat home too and take my DVR away from me?

This Is Why I Love Gmail

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This link via Reddit to a page on Google’s site for GMail shows why I love Gmail so much. More than 70% of mail to hit the GMail system is SPAM. That’s a lot.

GMail Spam Chart

Image Courtesy of Google

What’s amazing is that less than 1% of it gets through to a user’s Inbox. I can definitely see this in what hits my account. Using GMail for all of my emailing needs (I have 10+ accounts set up in GMail), I definitely get my share of SPAM. Especially to a couple of accounts I designate for use when I think I’ll get spammed. What’s great about this is that all of my email gets filtered and flagged by Google so I don’t have to worry about explicit SPAM messages for stuff I don’t care about. The one downside? Well, Google knows a lot about me. But so does the U.S. Government…