David Correll Studio, Brooklyn, NY

On November 12, the first day the OLPC was available to the public via the “Give One Get One” campaign, I woke up and went straight to the website to order mine. I filled out the form, they charged my account immediately (I paid via PayPal), and I started looking forward to receiving my laptop. I couldn’t wait.

After receiving a thank-you email on Nov. 15, on Nov. 28, I received an email saying that I would receive my laptop between December 14 and December 24, pointing out that “Our ‘first day’ donors are our highest priority and we are making every effort to deliver your XO laptop(s) as soon as possible.”

No problem. Sure, I was hoping to get it sooner than that, but if they got a little behind due to overwhelming response, that’s a good thing, right? Sure. I can wait until the end of December.

The week before Christmas came, and I still hadn’t seen my OLPC. On December 22 (two days before the final date they gave me on Nov. 28), I received an email apologizing that I would not receive my laptop by Dec. 24. They gave me a link to print out a certificate if the laptop had been intended as a Christmas gift, and told me that it would be delivered “before January 15.” Before January 15. Cool. (more…)

I’m proud to announce the soft launch of Phil Harris’s new site, phillustrations.net. Phil is a good friend of mine, and a very talented illustrator, and I was honored to work on his site. I call this a “soft launch,” since there are still a few sections that need to get up, but the bulk of the work is done. Take a minute to check out his work, and hey, if you’re looking for an illustrator… I can recommend one. ;)

I’ll have shots up in the portfolio section after the holidays. (The same goes for Bright Pages).

Well, after many, many late nights and a lot of stress, my day job launched Bright Pages, a Yellow Pages search engine. We have been working on this for a long time, and I’m pretty proud of it. It’s not perfect (what is?), but overall, it ended up pretty nice. I’ll get some screen-shots up in the portfolio soon, but in the meantime, check out the site.

Phew! I didn’t even know that was a problem! For a long time, the category link on each post hasn’t worked. I was seeing a ton of 404 errors in my stats, and didn’t know where they were coming from. A friend at work helped me write a script to keep a log of what page was requested for each 404. Looking at those logs, I saw a bunch of links to /news/category. I thought to myself, “Well, that link doesn’t work, of course it’s a 404. Must be spam.”

But something still didn’t seem right. So I ran the W3C Link Checker on the site, and realized that none of my category links were working. Yikes!

Anyways, that’s been fixed. Apologies to anyone who has tried to view a category!

Well, comments are back up. A friend recommended Bad Behavior to me, so I’m going to give it a shot. Let’s hope it works! Thanks for the recommendation, Clint!

I have temporarily disabled comments on the site due to a barrage of spam I have been recieving lately (just got 15 spam comments in the past 5 minutes). I’ll re-enable commenting as soon as I figure out a solution. (Any suggestions would be warmly welcomed — but you’ll have to email me.)

Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesizer, died this weekend at age 71 of an inoperable brain tumor.

Thank you for the music. Rest in peace.

New York Times story
Moog Music

Well, here I sit, on my couch, writing from my shiny new PowerBook G4. I’ve been working on an aging blue & white G3 since, well, I think since 1999. About a month after I bought it, the G4s were announced. While I was originally (and understandably) frustrated, I soon learned better.

That old G3 was a workhorse — I love it. The thing is rock-solid. Over the past couple years, I’ve had to give it some love to keep it going — an extra 640MB of RAM, a new internal CD/DVD drive, and two additional hard drives. It is currently choking under the weight of Adobe CS (’course, so is my dual processor G5 at work, but that’s for another post), but it’s still a great, solid computer.

It may not the most trendy way to work, but I strongly believe in buying late models (if not the very last, as my G3 was), rather than the newest thing. I’ve had enough experience through school, work and friends (and friends of friends) to see that the first few rounds of any new Apple model are lemons. I love Apple, but their early models crap. Ask anyone who owns a G5 iMac. Or an early G4 iBook.

The G3 will stay in use, probably as a file server of sorts, seeing as it has 240GB of hard drive space to my laptop’s 80, but this probably marks the end of it as my primary machine. So thank you, old G3. Thank you for a few years of rock-solid computing and companionship. And here’s to what will hopefully be an equally good computer.

Out with the old,

in with the new!