markpetrowsky.com

I’m a little late to the Mad Men table considering I missed the proper season, but I just caught my first episode last night thanks to AMC for doing an encore presentation of the series. Matthew Weiner, one of the producers / writers from the Soprano’s is behind the series which was part of the reason I wanted to check it out. Let me say, very nice opening title sequence! The opening reminded me of a modernized Saul Bass Vertigo kinda thing, specifically the movie poster more so than the movie credits. Before the show even started I was already very optimistic and looking forward to more good things.

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If you missed the first SEED conference in Chicago with Jason Fried of 37 Signals, Carlos Segura of T.26 and Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners like I did, this is your chance to catch it the second time around. From what I read and heard from an old coworker, the conference focuses on design and entrepreneurship, and it definitely sounded worth the money. Unfortunately I’m out of town that weekend so I’m missing my chance to go again! Doah!

Last week I attended my first Chicago IxDA group event. The topic was RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications): what are they, how do you define them, etc. The monthly discussion is only the second the IxDA chapter has held, and on my first attendance my impression was very positive. Some interesting conversation came about, and overall I thought it was definitely a worthwhile way to spend a school night.

A couple interesting questions from the session:

1. Does an RIA have to exist in a browser window? For example, is iTunes a Rich Internet Application? iTunes pulls from the web so does that justify calling it an RIA? (more…)

My wife and I joined a couple friends at Habana Libre located on Chicago Ave, just east of Ashland, for some Cuban eats. The restaurant had been on my list for some time since it’s BYO and we live in the neighborhood and walk past its storefront every week.

From the outside Habana is a pretty modest looking place, and upon entering you won’t be blown away by the interior decor (although it’s not terrible either). The real focus here is the food for sure.

I called and made early Friday evening reservations for our party and boy was I glad I did when I saw the line of customers waiting outside the restaurant around 8pm. For appetizers we ordered a few empanadas, including chicken and a guava and cheese, which I highly recommend! In addition to the empanadas we had plantain chips with garlic sauce and pappas rellenos - little fried mashed potato balls with beef inside. Very tasty!

I ordered the Cuban sandwich, my wife had the chicken sandwich (pan con pollo) and our friend had the Pan Con Ropa Vieja (shredded beef sandwich) and informed us its literal Spanish translation is dirty laundry. Every dish was fantastic. In fact on our second visit to Habana I actually ordered the Ropa Vieja because after tasting my friend’s sandwich the first night I thought it was even better than the Cuban I had. All the sandwiches are served on a toasty French-like bread and come with black beans and rice for a bit extra, and I’ll also note were some of the best black beans I’ve had in some time.

The best part of the evening was the price - after a couple bottles of wine and an extremely satisfying dinner with our friends we walked out of the place after paying a mere $55 bill between the 4 of us. Needless to say we’re starting to become regulars at Habana Libre.

I was looking for a way to display a small sampling of recent photos on the site. Ideally I wanted a solution that tied in with Flickr so I could manage my photos from one location. While researching I ran across a WordPress plugin called FAlbum from the people at RandomByte.org.

The plug-in, as I was thrilled to find, pulls your photos from flickr and displays photos, albums, and tag sets right in your WordPress blog. Considering I was looking for a solution much simpler I was pleasantly surprised at how robust FAlbum was! The setup was pretty painless. I’m still in the midst of tweaking some of the presentation but so far everything seems pretty customizable. The only small snafu I ran into was a few database errors on initial setup. I’m running WordPress 2.3.1 and after installing the plugin (version 0.7) I kept getting a caching error that read “WordPress database error: falbum_cache’ doesn’t exist] DELETE from wpfalbum_cache…

I read on the RandomByte wiki that if you manually create the falbum_cache table it would take care of the database errors issue and sure enough it did. It looks like they just released a 0.7.1 update to FAlbum. Taking a quick glance it looks like they might have fixed the database cache issue.

I told myself months back, heck maybe even years ago, that I’d get my personal website up and running in a somewhat respectable state. Well many weeks and beer cans later, as the story goes, the promise I made myself was not fulfilled.

Although there have been many variations of markpetrowsky.com, most of them usually consisting of random directories and splash pages for freelance projects I did in my off hours, I’ve never had a nice clean user friendly site that communicated with the outside world just who I am and what I do as a professional. As many designers may know, I personally have always found it extremely difficult designing anything for myself. In fact maybe it’s the toughest job a designer may ever have to deal with. You know all those questions that get turned on yourself, instead of the client (OK a little overboard I know, but maybe I’m just being dramatic to compensate for my procrastination for all this time). God knows how many wasted nights at the drafting table and how many abandoned mockups, html, and css files are crumpled up in my local trash bin. Well, it may be be a bit too early to jump and cheer just yet, but I’ve got a skeleton up with the help of my trusty friend Wordpress and hopefully over the next month or two things will become a bit tidy around here.