I’m a simple guy.  I have pretty simple tastes and the glass I put my drink in is an example of that.  I was always a fan of Dean Martin and his swaggering, faux-loaded persona.  I have a memory of his glass being simple as well  (that could have been the poor resolution).

For a long time I’ve been using green, patio rocks glasses.  They’re big (which means less refills) but they’re also pretty cheesy looking.  I was cruising Canadian Tire, having just finished a paying job, and spotted some plain but heavy old fashioneds for about $8.  While it was more than Value Village wanted, they were perfect.  I scooped them and brought them home, proud as punch.

Arriving home I unpacked them, washed them, and put them to the test.  Perfect.  Or so I thought.

My wife noticed the glasses and wrinkled her nose.  Bad sign.  I had anticipated this reaction and kept the receipt but I was going to talk my way out of it, or so I thought.  She thought they looked cheap.  I countered, “simple.”  She countered “cheap.”  Ouch – not going well.  She said that if I didn’t like the green patio glasses that I could use the crystal rocks glasses.  Now we’re getting somewhere.

The pattern is called “Pinwheel.”  Not exactly simple.  I said I would give them a try.  I dropped the first three ice cubes in the glass and they made a very loud, very any-harder-and-they-would-break type of noise.  I got the look.  I said, “if you want me to use them, this is how they’re going to be used.”  Amazingly that passed for logic.

So now my drinks are sipped from crystal.  It’s fancier than I’d like.  I have to refill more often than I’d like.  I have to be more cautious than I’d like.  But I have a happy wife, which I like.  In a world of compromise I would say that this is one that I can happily live with.

Below is a picture of the three glasses.  I’m sure you can pick them out but consider that one glass is cost $0.99 for 4, one cost $8 for 4, and one cost $8 (and I had to ask if it could go in the dishwasher!).  I think I know which one Deano would use.

I was skeptical about the value of Twitter.  It seemed like another flash in the pan or another ‘teeny’ app, like MySpace.  I set up an account a long time ago but didn’t like the web interface and found the whole thing a waste of time.  It was right around the time that Facebook was finding the masses and I found much more value in that.

My how the tables have turned.  Now I try to Tweet at least once a day and only occasionally pay attention to my Facebook.  The difference seems to be that Facebook is social networking for your actual friends while Twitter is for the social network at large.  Chances are good that you haven’t met half of the people you ‘follow’ on Twitter but you likely have met and probably have even talked to most of your ‘friends’ on Facebook.

I’m not saying that I value strangers over my friends, it’s quite the contrary.  It’s mostly a difference in timing.  By and large the information that comes through Facebook is not time sensitive whereas the information flowing through Twitter is as-it-happens.

That brings me to TweekDeck.  As with most things on the Internet I stumbled across TweekDeck when I noticed someone’s status update in Facebook was posted from there.  Noticing the similarity between the names Twitter and TweetDeck I was intrigued.  It didn’t take long before I found out that TweekDeck is a social networking client unlike any other out there (and it’s free).

TweekDeck, first and foremost, manages your Twitter stream.  You can group different followed people, watch custom keywords, separate your direct messaging, and search for people and themes.  I have a very simple layout which involves “People” (real, live people), “Businesses” (businesses like Sears, FutureShop, Dell and EngadgetHD), Direct Messages (these are semi-private Tweets between you and someone else) and Mentions (any time a Tweet has your username in it).  The last column I have is my Facebook feed.  In version 0.30.3 of TweetDeck you can have several different types of Facebook columns but I just have the one, mass jumble of Facebook information.  The icing on the cake is that you can post updates to all of your social networks, at the same time!

Did you hear me?  At the same time.  That means I don’t have to have several browsers open and keep switching between them.  I can just have TweekDeck open and get near real-time updates from Twitter and Facebook and keep everyone updated, all on the same screen.  What has changed recently is that TweetDeck has added some strange kind of super logic into the Facebook posting so that they know when you’re updating your status or posting to your wall.  I’m guessing it has to do with the content but it is amazing.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the different apps you have to manage to keep in the loop, give TweetDeck a try.  It’s also on the iPhone.  Haven’t tried it there yet but hopefully soon. (hint, hint).

I was pretty excited about upgrading to iTunes 9.  My main reasons to be excited were the updated iTunes Store and the management of the iPod Touch/iPhone pages.  Truth is that I wasn’t really expecting much from iTunes 9.  It wasn’t until I watched Steve Jobs’ keynote about the release that I learned about things like Home Sharing and Genius Mixes.  That’s when I got really excited.

Here’s the good news, especially for me: the Store and the iPod page management are all they were hyped up to be.  The Store has received a facelift that makes sense, like the toolbar at the top of the page, and things like the Top Song lists got major UI improvements.  It is such an advantage to be able to preview songs right in the list and to see all 200.  I also like the ability to add to a wishlist, post to Twitter, or gift the song again, right in the list.  Page management is as simple as it should be.  No real surprise it was just missing for a long time.  I’d still like to be able to password-protect pages so that I could keep some apps away from my kids.

The bad news is that the other two features I looked forward to have some bugs to work out.  I’ll start with Home Sharing.  It sounds like an awesome idea for anyone with more than one computer in the house.  You’re tired of having to transfer tunes from one machine to another and then having to reauthorize.  Well, Home Sharing purports to allow anyone using the same iTunes account, on the same network, to simply access the others library.  And it sort of works.  My first attempt went off without a hitch.  I enabled HS on both machines and the libraries showed up.  I could play tunes and even copy them into the other’s library (this costs you an authorized machine but I’m assuming everyone here has less than 5 machines in the house).  The second time I tried it the Home Sharing section in iTunes was completely absent.  I noticed that the other machine was asleep so I woke it up but the link didn’t reappear.  I disabled and reenabled HS on both machines and the link reappeared.  But seconds later it disappeared again.  It hasn’t worked right since.  Boo.

Genius Mixes on the other hand is an extension of the Genius Playlists which I’ve been touting since their arrival.  The Genius Playlist is, well, genius.  You’re playing a song and you’re really into the vibe so you hit the Genius icon.  Instantly a list of 25 ‘like’ songs appear in a playlist with the current song at the top.  I’ve found that these playlists are 99% right on.  I’m never disappointed with the playlist.  Genius Mixes, on the other hand, are 12 ‘endless’ playlists of supposed like artists and songs.  In theory it would work the same as the Genius Playlists.  On the surface it does, but I wasn’t 4 tracks into my mixes when really disjointed tracks started appearing.  About 10 tracks in it was clear that the mix wasn’t contained at all to like tracks.  I’ve tried it several times and been disappointed every time.  (And yes, I have updated my genius database several times since upgrading.)

So there you have it, the things I was looking forward to initially have been done well.  The things I was surprised by but looking forward to need a lot of work.  That’s too bad because normally things don’t come out of Apple until they’re really working well.  And for the Mac-lovers out there who will blame my PC, I tried this on my Macbook too – same result.  I still love iTunes, regardless of the bloat and bugs.

Yesterday I put the finishing touches on a website for photographer Caitlin den Boer.  Her company is called Adelita Rose and the website features some neat tricks using Wordpress.

Along with her most recent Twitter tweet, we also automatically show an excerpt from her most recent blog post.  On the home page there is also a slideshow going on in the background.  I wanted the site content to be completely controlled by Caitlin so that meant using only standard Wordpress tools for the post and page editing.  Well, in the newer versions of Wordpress images can be displayed in galleries.  A gallery normally shows up as a series of thumbnails on a page which, while a neat way of showing a collection of images at one time, is not nearly as visually impressive as an auto-advancing, full-framed slideshow.  What I did was I hid the thumbnailed gallery and used Mootools to read in all of the links to the medium-sized images, used AJAX to follow the links and grab the images, stored them in local, hidden divs, and then created a cross-fading array loop of those divs. The effect is seamless and fairly quick.  The bonus is that each of the images is clickable to the full blown image (copyright Adelita Rose, of course).  The portfolio pages use the same tricks.

The contact page is a modified plugin and the music player is a free, Flash-based mp3 player that I have randomly selecting a loop of Caitlin’s chosen music.

The look and feel went through a couple of revisions with Rene Dick at Scout Design to nail down Caitlin’s vision but the end result is awesome.  I’m so glad we were able to deliver a non-Flash product that she can administer that still has that polished look a photographer wants.

Cheers to Caitlin and Rene on a very successful project!

J