The ChicagoTribune has a nice set of 30 vintage winter photos to get you in that holiday spirit. In particular I especially like photo number 16 (shown above) of the motorists snowed in on Lake Shore Drive up near Foster Avenue. That reminds I need go toss a bunch of random junk in the street to reserve that parking spot i just shoveled out!
If you haven’t heard the latest effort from our government to try and infringe on our rights you should read this post about the new bill called the “Safe act” proposed by the House of Representatives.
Our government want’s to keep us safe from all smut peddlers online by creating legislation that would enforce the monitoring of all publicly open WiFi networks for “obscene” image downloads. I’m all for keeping our children safe from pedophiles posing as 13 year old girls online but this clearly is not the answer to those problems. We don’t live in China nor a police state and I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to enforce such a ridiculous law. It’s guaranteed if this thing passed we’d immediately see a huge reeducation in public WiFi.
It begs to the ask the question, what lobbyist are behind this B.S? Telcos and ISPs seem to be the only ones who’d benefit from the bill.
Google recently added a new feature that allows you to easily embed Google Map Street Views in any web page just by copy and pasting some generated HTML. After you’ve drilled down to a street map location just click “link to this page” in the right hand corner. From there you’ll notice the second form field on the page reads “Paste HTML to embed in website”, that’s the code you want. Another cool thing to note: below the form field you’ll see another link that says “Customize and Preview embedded map”. This links to a new popup window that gives you a choice of selecting predetermined view port sizes (small, medium, large) or entering your own custom dimensions.
I’ve entered my office address and customized the view port sizes for my page layout. Here’s the example:
Looks like Adobe is working on a new product that would give designers another tool to help bridge the communication gap between design and development. The product is code named “Thermo” and after viewing a demo video it looks to be some sort of WYSIWYG product for flash/flex applications.
There is definitely a gap that needs to be addressed in product development between design and dev and with the advent of the “Rich Internet Application” a simple tool that would allow designers to work with data and specify functionality and behavior would be welcomed. As the demo illustrates you can start with a Photoshop comp, bring it into Thermo and then turn items into functioning components with just a few clicks.
On the plus side described in the video, Thermo supposedly will write code that’s reusable to developers, so the designer is actually creating a functioning prototype. This allows the designer to contribute more than just static comps. The problem is I’m a little skeptical on how usable the generated code from Thermo would actually be. And Is it realistic to think that a developer would use the code?. It reminds me of the garbage html and JavaScript that Dreamweaver would spit out. Sure, your front end developers loved using that stuff right?
At the very least It could be a powerful tool that would help convey the designers vision, regardless if the code was used or not. It seems like the product could be quicker and friendlier than using flash.
Do you own your dog, or does your dog own you? Regardless, if you’re a dog owner and you like poster design check out www.obeythepurebreed.com. A fellow friend of mine who is also a frenchie owner passed on a link to this really cool French bulldog poster. In addition the site has a slew of other poster designs (as well as coffee mugs & T-shirts) for an impressive list of other dog breeds.
The site concept and most of the posters are reminiscent of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant propaganda art work. Vive la Résistance!
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.
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? Read the rest of this entry »
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.
