Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

It’s been over a month in the making, but version 13 of this site is finally done and fully functional. This is the most comprehensive update since the first WordPress-driven version from June of 2005.

New

My biggest goal with this new site was to really start taking advantage of the power WordPress has, and that meant a switch to themes. Once I figured out the basics I was very impressed with the options that are available and how easily they can be configured. Versions 9 through 12 of the site ran off of a clump of PHP files that pretty much sat outside of the WordPress umbrella. It really worked in spite of itself, which I think sums up my feelings about it.

In contrast, I was surprised by all the options the theme system has to offer. The search function worked right out of the box (except for one day when it mysteriously didn’t), and now I have a 404 page and real category pages.

The other big reason for the switch is the fact that almost all the good WordPress plugins rely on the theme to do what they do. The contact form is a good example of this; it’s generated using a quicktag and therefore had to be set up as a WordPress page. And thanks to pages, my menus no longer have to be hard-coded.

Improved

Usability was next on my list of priorities. I’ve already mentioned the 404 and Search pages, but I also added PHP redirects on the old _____.php pages that push the user to the current page rather than a 404. Also, thanks again to the themes, all category listings are now clickable.

You’ll also notice the wider comment display area on the single pages, and, just for jb, clicking the header now takes you home.

Just Plain Different

Aside from this pretty new design (I swear, I DID NOT steal the banner idea from Jonathan Snook!), there are two more notable changes. The first is that I’m done with del.icio.us. It worked fine for links, yes, but since installing WordPress 2.0 back in February, I haven’t been able to make it play nice with Magpie RSS. Rather, I mentioned using a Javascript approach but that didn’t please me either, partially because it wasn’t searchable and partially because something in the way it was set up never displayed properly in Internet Exploere (not even 7!).

This time out I’m going mainstream and integrating the links right into the main body. They’re pretty easy to pick out, since they don’t have titles and have a cute little border thing applied to them. More importantly, they now have times and dates applied to them, and it’s one less service to rely on.

The other big step is a brand new logo, as you may have already noticed in a number of places. For now, suffice it to say that I like it much better than the old one and I’ll write more later.

That about wraps it up. What do you think?

Most of my working hours as a web designer have been spent with PCs of varying calibers sharing (and cluttering) the desk with my Mac. I say cluttering because they really weren’t much more than that; these were machines way past their heydays that had only one purpose in mind: Internet Explorer.

So it was with a lot of anticipation that I made the leap to Parallels Desktop at work a couple weeks ago. We’d already consolidated monitors by running the PC into the second monitor’s VGA input, but this eliminated the PC itself, the router, and the electricity required to power them. That’s all very novel, but I really just wanted a new toy that would put the Core Duo to good use.

My first experience with Parallels was of a more experimental nature; I figured that now was the time to kill two three birds with one stone and also crack open Vista and IE7. An in-depth walkthrough on the Parallels forum made installation and setup a pleasure. Well, mostly. Vista came with one caveat: no internet.

I searched and searched for ways around this before my boss saved the day. Vista’s network settings were configured to automatically obtain an IP address; unfortunately, it was exactly wrong. So we put in a new IP address and copied the rest of the information from my iMac’s settings, and viola – internet!

Now seems like a great time for an aside regarding both Vista and Internet Explorer 7. They’re very… colorful. I didn’t find either to be as intuitive as their Apple counterparts.

With Vista fully operational, or at least as functional as I needed it, I found a new roadblock: if you want to run IE6 and IE7 side by side, you’re outta luck. Hell, even if you just want to run IE6 alone you’re pretty much still screwed. There is a way to make IE7 emulate 6 in certain terms of performance, but not rendering.

So that’s when Virtual Machine #2 came to visit, and we call him Windows XP. The XP install process went even more smoothly than Vista (since it’s an officially-supported OS), but is really where XP shows its age. On the other hand, installing XP off the CD was actually faster than installing Vista off of the desktop, and the installation as a whole performs better.

Oddly enough, XP didn’t experience the networking issue that Vista did on its first run, but after that it suddenly forgot how to use the internet. The same fix applied here, but all the same it was weird.

So now I have a single-PC office, and that PC just happens to be a Mac.

The November 06 issue of details showed up today, and their advice is questionable as ever. You’ll remember that I don’t have a very high opinion of that magazine, and you’re probably wondering why I was reading it in the first place.

Well, I was eating lunch, and all the other magazines were upstairs. So, yeah.

Anyway, one article that caught my attention was entitled You’re a Boss, Not a Buddy, and covered the transition from fellow coworker to supervisor. For the most part, it was full of good points about how the writer tried to be a “cool boss” and ended up not being much of a boss at all. What I had to take issue with, so much so that I’m writing a damn post about it, was the sidebar, AKA “The Power Playbook,” a list of 10 ways to be a good boss and advance yourself up the ranks of executivity. From the article I get the impression that this is advice for bosses regarding their immediate employees; not, for example, a CEO vs. an intern. There are a couple decent points, but c’mon:

[Asshole Boss Tip] #2: Stay just out of reach
Let the tyros get carpal tunnel from their BlackBerries. The truly powerful are minimally available, and even then to only a select few.

Wait, what? So your immediate subordinates should have no way to run things by you when they have questions? Then what? You reprimand them for not consulting you? Asshole.

[Asshole Boss Tip] #4: Freeze out the new kids
Teach entry-levels the hierarchy by studiously ignoring them. You’ll motivate them to prove themselves worthy of your time.

No. You’ll motivate them to find work elsewhere. Asshole.

[Asshole Boss Tip] #6: Forget details
Take a cue from your grandmother and occasionally lapse on rookies’ names…

“Where’s what’s-his-face? Oh, he quit?” Asshole.

[Asshole Boss Tip] #10: Be cryptic
A terse e-mail—more William Carlos Willams than Willam Wordsworth—isn’t just a time-saver, it’s a mindfuck. A three-word reply will resonate much more deeply than a lengthy treatise.

Wow. So apparently you’re employees aren’t getting frustrated enough by their clients or customers who think this kind of communication is appropriate, you thought you’d join in too. Goes great with #2. ASS. HOLE.

I have been lucky not to have any bosses like this, but I feel really sorry right now for people who report to those who take details seriously.

Cast members gone from SNL season 32:

• Rachel Dratch
• Tina Fey
• Finesse Mitchell
• Chris Parnell
• Horatio Sanz

New cast members:

• All the featured players are now regulars, but that’s it, leaving an awkward space of music between Kristen Wiig’s name and the band announcement.

That seems, uh, rather thin.

Ever since I first heard about Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (music from the Beatles’ White Album mixed to rhymes from Jay-Z’s Black Album) I’ve been a fan of the mashup genre. Unfortunately, after hearing it I wasn’t overly impressed but I still support the idea.

Over the past year I’ve stumbled upon a couple more; Dean Gray’s American Edit takes the Green Day album and mixes it with songs across the board with great results, while The Gnotorious Gnarls Biggie was not quite so impressive. But earlier this week I came across The Silence Xperiment’s Q-Unit, the unlikely combination of 50 Cent and Queen.

Far and away, this is my favorite of the group. Tracks 2 and 7 are the best. Check it out.

• The Acura RDX is interesting, but not interesting enough to get out of the car. Especially if you’re hungry.
• There is a Chipotle Grill near the Acura dealership in Bloomington. This is an exciting development, because it picked up what otherwise turned out to be an almost totally unproductive day.
• IKEA Minneapolis, I give up. You were temporarily oversold on not one, but both of the items I came there to buy. Last time we tried to buy a shelf you didn’t have any on the floor, and were unable to take them down from the overhead area before the next day. That’s… inconvenient to say the least. Word has it that 65% of your customer base is local, so this kind of service, while inconvenient, may be okay with them. But that leaves 35% of your customers that drive hours from other areas only to exit empty-handed. It seems as though you’re not familiar with inventory management, which is sad because even Wal-Mart is better at it than you.
• Marshall Field’s has officially transitioned to Macy’s, marking the 2nd name change for all the local stores in less than 5 years.
• If you plan on visiting the Genius Bar at the Apple Store, prepare to wait.
• The 24″ iMac is beyond ridiculous. Abe thought it looked blurry.
• The 17″ Macbook Pro has the same max resolution as my 20″ Apple display.
• We checked Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cingular. None of them had Blackberry cases.
• CompUSA had manager’s specials on video games and that’s why they’re my favorite store. And also why I own PGR 3.
• Circuit City has an overwhelming number of large TV’s. And they were playing the same Eagles concert DVD that they were last time we were there. In July.
• It’s lame when the band you came to Minneapolis to see cancels for “a band emergency.”
• Olive Garden breadsticks and soup are good. And better when combined. Like Voltron.

There’s a particular thought process that I slip into every so often, and it’s something I can remember doing for quite awhile now. It’s basically a variant of the “one of these things is not like the other” game straight out of Sesame Street and it’s something that helps me divert and concentrate my thoughts (albeit briefly) on a new challenge. I’ll find a group of three or more objects and try to find something that excludes each item. For example:

• Saab 9-3 5-door
• Ford Focus sedan
• Mazda 626 coupe

Using that as an example (because that’s exactly what I happened to be focused on today as I was leaving work), I can say that the Saab and the Ford both have 4 passenger doors; the Saab and the Mazda both have tail lights that extend onto the trunk/hatch, and the Mazda and Ford both have separate trunks. Basic? Of course, but it’s fun and simple, and expandable to as many items as you can focus on.

Thus far, every post of mine regarding the Xbox 360 has been rather glowing, and for good reason: it deserves the credit. However, that doesn’t mean every piece of software that graces the CD tray or hard disk is worthy of the same praise; here’s a list from least to most offensive:

• F.E.A.R. is some kind of paranormal tactical first person shooter that just barely makes the list. Why? Because there is technically nothing wrong with the game and even the demo is scary (the whole point). Therein lies the problem; I have never been a fan of being terrified by my own media, which is why I tend to avoid scary movies as well. If you’ve played Half-Life, then you get a sense of the vibe, but imagine it much darker and with more blood. There is no doubt it’s a great game in and of itself, but not for me.
• Dead Rising involves zombies and is also rather scary. It inches ahead of F.E.A.R. because, for some inexplicable reason, I actually bought it and I still don’t know why. Probably because the demo, which I naively thought represented the overtone of the game, was fun and simple: kill zombies with TV’s; kill zombies with shovels; kill zombies with park benches; etc. Unfortunately they decided to go and put a story in it. And psychopaths. Great. And I haven’t gotten to the point where my character is strong enough to make it fun. And the save system is terrible.
  EDIT: I meant to mention this before, but forgot. I need to actually get myself to play the game some more to get myself leveled up, and then it will probably go a little more smoothly.
• Test Drive Unlimited is on here for wasting two hours of my life. Those familiar with the demo will realize I played it to the maximum time limit twice, which is indicative of how crack-like it is. I play and play, and all I can think is “I’m totally wasting my time on this,” a feeling reminiscent of Driv3r which (surprise) is from the same company (Atari).
• Uno: the computer freaking cheats.
• Sonic the Hedgehog, everybody’s best friend from Sega, will be arriving soon on the PS3 and Xbox 360. This doesn’t seem like bad news until you realize the last good Sonic game made for consoles was Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, and even that was debatable. That game was at least fun; the camera was decent and the movements were relatively predictable. It was easy enough to get through the first level or two without dying if you were familiar with 3D platformers. This new one though—and this seems to be a common issue—has been throwing a lot of people for a loop (and not in a good way). I used up my allotment of lives making it through the first section of the demo level, and then when I loaded it up again, I used them making it through the second section. After that I contemplated deleting it because let’s be honest, a Sonic game that you can’t just pick up and play is not worth playing at all.