d:notes online advertising blog

1994 BMW 318iC for sale

Mon, 25 May 2009 22:01:44 -0600

Yes, I am selling my 1994 BMW 318iC convertible... *sniff* Take a look at some pics and some more details here: http://web.me.com/derekleverington/BMW/BMW318ic.html

Flash running slow on Powerbook G4

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:26:11 -0600

Got a hold of an 550 MHz Apple Powerbook G4. But Flash 10 runs lousy on it. Frame rate slows right down and the whole machine chugs while Flash is running. I found a couple of helpful articles on this. http://www.veriy.net/2008/12/flash-player-slow-on-macos-x-ibook-g4.html http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8489540 I've uninstalled Flash 10. Installed Flash 9.0.47 (the non-universal binary) and it seems to have helped some. It still doesn't run a YouTube video that great at all. The frame rate slows right down. I upgraded the RAM from 512 to 768. The machine will handle 1GB so I'm going to fish around and try that upgrade next. It's a shame. The machine runs pretty well otherwise. Next step is a Flash 8 install. We'll see if that helps. UPDATE: Flash 8.0.42 seems to run pretty well. Going to try that. YouTube is still bad but slightly improved. I'm hoping that the upgrade to 1 GB of RAM helps to get things into the clear a little more. (BTW - this is a 550 MHz PowerBook 15" G4 machine on OS X 10.4.11)

Twitter and Facebook are killing my blog

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:41:08 -0600

But I made a donation to Wikipedia so that eased my Conscience 2.0 for not doing more frequent postings.

What is a prostate anyway?

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:45:01 -0600

This is a funny video to watch but it touches on a very important issue that men everywhere need to know more about. Full disclosure: Canadian Cancer Society is a client.

Google is Cooler than Cuil

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:02:38 -0600

I have absolutely no idea why Cuil is getting as much press as it is. Either the general level of savvy in the press is lacking or the CVs of the folks that are part of the Cuil project has captured someone's imagination. Sounds like some of both to me. Can anyone really look me in the eye and tell me that this is going to knock off Google? Or even give it any kind of run for its money. I'm sure if it was going to, Microsoft would have acquired it by now in their desperate attempt to get any kind of growth in market share for their Live search. I applaud anyone taking a run at providing a better search experience than Google, but I can tell you that this one is not it and I can't see Cuil being more than a passing story. I for one found the interface confusing and I didn't see anything there that would have me going back. It is slow. It is bailing most of the time when I throw a query at it. And the results are so-so at best. I'll take the time to learn a more advanced interface if I believe that there is something worth learning, but this just didn't give me any inspiration to do that. At this stage of the game, there are fixed user expectations for how a tool like this should function. I read left to right. And I read search returns from top to bottom. It's entrenched by now. Don't mess with that. For one thing, the servers aren't even returning results right now. The fact that a search tool should be reliable is about as relevant as it gets.

iPod Touch and iPhone Update

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:44:37 -0600

After two days of frustration, I've now successfully gotten the new version of the iPod Touch software loaded and am now just doing the sync of the applications I've been acquiring since Thursday. The time is now 00:44 on Sunday a.m. The process of loading the new software and all the associated backups takes longer than you might expect (even on my mere 8 GB version of the Touch) at a good 30 minutes. Just tried out the Remote app. Super cool! Change the volume on the iPod and watch it update the volume on your iTunes. Cool. The response time is impressive, less than a second, and that with the music streaming to an Airport Express. Only minor disappointment is that the cover flow view doesn't work when I'm looking at the album view but it makes sense given the bandwidth requirements that would be associated with that. The Facebook app is an improvement over the browser one in many ways, although I do feel like I'm missing some functionality as it seems simplified somehow. The more frequent uses of images is nice, as is the the chat function now included. The AIM apps seems to not make it easy to switch back and forth between accounts. Once I logged in with my AIM screen name I can't seem to get back and login with my .Mac account. It seems once you have picked an account type, you're stuck with it. The PayPal app is very stripped down i.e. no choice of funds source, not enough confirmations, etc. I did my test sending $5 but I'd rather use a browser for anything more than that just to have some control over the transactions parameters. NetNewsWire worked well in terms of synchronizing with my online account, but felt a little sluggish at times compared to the other apps I downloaded. That said, I'll definitely use it help my get through my feeds more often. I downloaded Sudoku because my girlfriend likes it and I saw that Electronic Arts made it. The interface looks beautiful and functional so far and a big improvement over the browser versions I saw before now. More apps and credit card transactions to come but this is a great addition to an already great device. Now if only Apple could get their infrastructure together to handle the infrastructure requirements for this scale of launch. The software update for the iPod version 2 was 226MB which is no small amount, but if the iTunes store can handle music and video and Apple can normally manage big OS and app software updates, they should be able to handle this without the kind of hassles customers had to put up with in the last couple of days. Still worth the wait, but I saw a little better management of this kind of thing on the XBOX360 servers, than I saw on this one from Apple. They better buck up a little next time round, Apple lost ground in my books on the technical gaffes on this launch. Hopefully I can get a hold of an iPhone in the next week. I had not luck today although I didn't start until mid-morning. I'm convinced Rogers only brought about 50 into the city where I live (I heard 17 at one location and 5 at other), no doubt so they can brag about the "success" of their launch day. Too bad the rogers.com website was unusable most of the day, but I find it quite slow at the best of time when logging into my wireless account. I often get errors just signing into my account and looking at phone upgrade paths. At least the fido.ca site was functioning at much better capacity. I'm considering Fido instead, just to get more reasonable pricing on the voice plans now that we can add on Roger's face-saving 6 GB data plan.

Apple Web Apps Store Update

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:45:43 -0600

It looks like the Applications store is open on iTunes and I was able to do the update to version 7.7 to download the apps. The new iTunes seems to be ready for the little Remote application that you can use to control iTunes and your Apple TV from your iPod Touch or iPhone via wifi. That sounds pretty cool. But, the new software update doesn't seem to be able available yet to actually make the app work on my iPod Touch. Here's the link to the app store if it's not showing up in your iTunes for some reason. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewGenre?id=36&mt=8

When giving a sale pitch, sometimes less is more...

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:26:15 -0600

I had a funny experience the other day when out shopping with my girlfriend. And it all started with the promise of a golf club. We walked into a big box electronics store the other day fully expecting to walk out with a new TV. We had looked it up online in advance. It turns out the TV was on sale and to make it even better they were giving away a free golf club with it. We knew exactly which model we wanted, someone basically had to take our money and help us lift it into the back of our vehicle. Enter dufus sale guy... I walked out of the store about a half-hour later with no TV and so annoyed that I basically refused to buy it there no matter what. What should have been an easy process turned into a whole routine about how the manufacturers mess up the colour so their TV sticks out on the sales floor so we better have the tech guy come out and make it right, how it would be a good idea to get their "performance guarantee" plan (not to be confused with a mere extended warranty) to the tune of almost $500 and the best line was something like "what I told you there was a way that you could get this TV for free and I'll get my manager to throw in world peace, would that interest you?" (huh?) Puhleez...SHUT UP! All this from someone who claimed he was non-commission. Whatever... Anyhow, after making an excuse to look at some other product outside the TV department we left the store. We ended up going back to a place we had look awhile before. A locally owned electronics store called Audio Warehouse , owned and operated by guys that have been around for good long while in the business. These are guys that I remember saying hi to me when I'd go in there when I was 15 and didn't have enough money to buy more than a CD. People remember that kind of stuff and smart sales guys think ahead to the potential lifetime value of a customer. Anyhow, they gladly matched the price and we left with a particular set of components that I was really happy with and felt like "our" system. Even though it was a Sunday, that same owner guy who used to say hi to me 20 years ago was there at close and helped put the TV in the back of the vehicle. It sounds cheesy, but it's really nice to see that kind of thing these days. And to top it all off. Guess what? The golf club is a manufacturer's promo, not the retailer's. So I get the golf club after all. :)

Fresh Air Computing

Sat, 31 May 2008 22:33:49 -0600

As I type this, it's a beautiful evening with a bit of soft rain falling, I'm enjoying a fresh espresso made from beans from Dark Horse Espresso Bar in Toronto and rather than the usual trick of slouching over the laptop on the couch, I'm sitting outside. We just today invested in some outside furniture I very much appreciate, which I'm sure is the biggest part of the reason I'm outside. (Not to mention that my sigificant other is at Sex in the City tonight and I wasn't able to make it on account of parental responsibilities). But I have to say, geeking out never felt so healthy as when you can smell the rain and get some fresh air while doing some work on the laptop. I'm sure if I worked in some type of gazebo thing to keep the direct sun off my laptop screen while still allowing some fresh air to oxygenate my brain, that would be the best thing ever for a lot of reasons. I think I'm going to have to start working like this more often.

Animato Communications Goes Live

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:33:17 -0600

Congrats to Brittany Staines on getting her website for Animato Communications up and running.

Waves APA32 Review

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:00:18 -0600

I have a Macbook Pro running Pro Tools LE/M 7.4 with the Waves Gold/Renaissance Bundle plugins as my main audio plugins. The systems performs well but I use a number of software plugins such BFD as my drum software and it seems to dispose of a fair bit of CPU on its own without running any of the Waves software for actual audio processing. So, I recently bought a Waves APA32 and had a chance to plug it in my system tonight. To test how many instances I could run, I took a stereo mix and initiated 5 instances of the Waves C4 Net plugin (to address the APA32 instead of the host CPU) on the track itself, ran the track into an Aux with 5 instances there and repeated this until I had 16 instances of C4 running simultaneously. At that point, the unit was running at 98% CPU. My Macbook Pro was running at between 5 to 7% CPU. From there, I took all the same instances of the plugin and switched them to run on the host rather than the APA32. With all the same 16 C4s running off the host, the CPU was at about 45%. I was quite pleased with this, considering that the usable amount of CPU on my machine before it starts to give errors on playback is about 60%. Working the CPU any harder than that is very frustrating resulting in very frequent stops while doing playback in the timeline. So, effectively I feel like I've been able to more or less sub-let about 2/3 of the usable off my host CPU to the APA32. That should free my up ability to run roughly double the amount of audio plugins as I was able to before. I'll include the screen caps of both scenarios of the Waves Netshell software and the Pro Tools System Usage meters so you can see for yourself. P.S. This thing is machine room material only. It's as loud as everyone says it is.

New Years Resolution: Get Your Internet Together

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:48:59 -0600

It's 2008 now... That means it's getting to be about 10 years since a lot of companies put up their first websites. And the sad truth it, most haven't progressed that far from where they started. Sorry-looking websites abound while seemingly everyone in the company agrees that the website is ugly and old and embarrassing and all that. But, it stays the same for this reason or that. It's come to mind a lot lately how much resources and budget have to do with the success of initiatives. And no more is the gap often more apparent between a stated priority and actual priority than when it comes to the internet. Calling up an interactive design shop with $10 or $15K in your budget isn't going to get you far. It's not like everything has to be outrageously expensive, but you don't have to look far into the budget to see things that get a lot of more money than that. And I'll wager many of those things don't see the light of day from where your customers are standing. But your website is often the first component of your brand experience that prospective clients are exposed to. So, if you are looking at budgets at this time of the year.... Be bold. Ask for an adequate amount of money and expect that there are aspects that you won't be able to anticipate. And if the money doesn't come, it's pretty good proof that no one cares that much. Companies throw money at things they want to fix. If there's no money, it's a pretty low priority, regardless of what anyone says about it. So, it's 2008! Why not make this the year that the website doesn't suck anymore. After all, why live life knowing that you have an ugly website? Make that change!

Great diagram to explain the life cycle of a blog post

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:08:06 -0600

This is a good diagram that explains some of the online activity that happens when blog content is generated. This via Wired.

You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You

Kudos to MSN Video for Mac Accessibility

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:34:08 -0600

I'm done my fair share of razzing the good folks at MSN Sympatico over some of their apps either not being compatible on Mac or being released way after the Windows version. So, I thought it's worth giving some credit where credit is due now that the MSN Video Beta is up and running. It works well on Firefox on my Intel MacBook Pro. It didn't seem to want to go on Safari, but if I was them I'd have looked after Firefox user first. It will be interesting to see if it does eventually run on Safari. It's a bit surprising to see the use of Flash as the playback technology, given Microsoft's usual loyalty to use their own Windows Media platform as well as their rising star, Silverlight. Regardless, the MSN video portal content is great, so it's nice to have access.

Canadian Virtual Hospice Palliative Care Video

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:33:19 -0600

This is a video project I produced last year, but was just recently uploaded to YouTube. Special thanks to Jessie Wallace, Ryan Latham, CJ Gibson, Colin Hubick, Roslyn Kozak and a great bunch of clients at the Canadian Virtual Hospice (the best Canadian palliative care site out there).