Andy Laub they call me "The Solution"

Last year I introduced the new year by participating in what had to have been one of the lamest questionnaires ever. This year I feel the need to again look back on the year that has just passed, but I want to do something that’s a little more original. Instead of a bunch of arbitrary questions, I’m choosing one event or experience from each month that has held the most significance in my mind.

The year started strong. January didn’t bring the same drama this year that it brought in 2008 (thankfully). Instead, I get to point out that that was the birth of the current iteration of this website.

February was relatively uneventful as well, aside from preparing for shows. But I did put together some awesome LEGO.

I spent a lot of time complaining about the weather this year, as I was already raring to get back on two wheels when March rolled around. That was only exacerbated by the new toy. The day trip to Minneapolis to pick it up was awfully fun too.

In April I put new wheels on my car. No, I mean I put them on. By myself.

May brought the first of a number of shows last year: The Last 5 Years, in which I was approximately 50% of the cast. It was a great experience and the theatrical accomplishment that I continue to be most proud of.

Then Godspell happened in June, and that was awesome too! Great cast, great technical staff, great venue, and a great show. Probably one of WCT’s best, ever.

Things wound down a bit in July, but we had the official Godspell reunion / cast party up in Tomahawk. AKA Real World: Godspell. TEXT MESSAGES!

August was a quiet month, so I spent a lot of time on the bike, and did my first (and second!) 40-mile ride(s).

After years of planning and months of labor, Citizen Wausau 2.0 was finally launched in September, much to the excitement of those involved.

In October, I ran.

The only potentially negative item on the list happened in November, when I passed out on stage. Even then, it’s just something that happened, but I don’t think of it as being decidedly “bad”.

I had such a great vacation in December, you guys. Seriously, it was wonderful. Plus it was my birthday!

In the last week or so, I’ve found myself facing a bit of a dilemma with regards to the various bits of content that I’ve created/found/shared online. The problem with the social Internet is the it inevitably results in massive stacks of content distributed widely throughout the various services; in my case what began with a handcoded blog gradually turned into WordPress, and soon was joined by links (fed initially by del.icio.us) and then Flickr. Then Twitter joined the party.

Through this point everything remained fairly manageable. Thanks to the terriffic Twitter Tools plugin I was able to easily turn those tweets into “real” posts. But recently I’ve become smitten with a new (to me) service that leaves me wondering where to go from here: Tumblr.

I’ve been playing with Tumblr for a week or so, and I’ve found it to be a neat bridge between WP’s long-form posting and Twitter’s extreme short form, text-only entries. I like Tumblr’s versatility when it comes to handling a large variety of content types, and it seems to have just the right amonunt of meta for such things.

The problem is, I still like WordPress. I’ve built a nice little home with it over the years, and for longer pieces (like this one), it’s pretty darn great. Plus it has comments, although I’m just not sure how important that is to me anymore.

So given my current situation, it seems I have some figurin’ to do with regards to what andylaub.com actually is. The ideal for me would be to treat posts from Tumblr similar to how posts from Twitter are handled in that they’re imported into the actual WP database and join the archive. From there it’s safe to assume I could use the associated meta to manipulate the various sorts of posts as needed. Honestly I would love to see the same behavior with Flickr.

Currently, though, it doesn’t seem that such a plugin exists. I’m about 99% positive that I’d prefer to avoid the opposite approach (RSSing WP into Tumblr). The other option is to break everything apart completely and then reaggregate it into one central location, but that too seems like a huge compromise.

You’ll probably see me messing with this issue over the coming weeks; alternatively I may lose hope completely or go completely crazy and try to replicate some of Tumblr’s functionality within WP. Time will tell, but ’till then I’m certainly open to suggestions.

This Russian cartoon. On Youtube:

0:00 – Fire.
0:05 – Cat! Off to a good start.
0:14 – That kid has awesome painting skills.
0:17 – While the dog seems to be incredibly competent at kneading, I’m still not sure this is the best staffing situation.
0:22 – Okay, I don’t know any humans who can make dough look like a bone OR a string of sausages. I retract my previous statement.
0:25 – And some dude fanning himself with his hat.
0:26 – And a dude with a pipe.
0:28 – …and a screwdriver.
0:31 – Wow, seriously. That dog is impressive.
0:35 – Fire.
0:53 – The problem with this television is clearly spiderwebs. But it’s not enough of a problem to actually fix, I guess.
0:56 – The cat looks kind of flirty now.
1:11 – Flirting = success! Maybe?
1:12 – Okay, definitely.
1:14 – Those curtains are magical!
1:22 – A screwdriver is still not the best tool for not fixing spiderwebs.
1:32 – You made a bone? What happened to the dough?
1:49 – It’s just Snow-freaking-White up in here. But at least the spiderweb problem has been resolved?
1:54 – Something awesome obviously just happened.
2:05 – I’m not convinced the kid is speaking a real language. It’s just consonants. Also, does he have pupils?
2:07 – Ooooh, it’s Christmas.
2:16 – And we’re outdoors.
2:19 – I’m thinking the money spent on the zoom lens could’ve been better used on a coat or something for that dog.
2:22 – Wait – the camera has a rifle grip? What?
2:26 – “If he shoots us, I want you to know that you’re my favorite. Also I’m drunk right now.”
2:32 – “I’ve had better.”
2:35 – “Oh.”
2:40 – That’s just not a camera I would be comfortable standing in front of. Or near.
2:41 – Like that guy. I’m with him.
2:47 – “Great! Dinner!”
2:49 – Oh.
2:51 – Beardy is talking about moose. Or ghosts. Ghost moose?
3:01 – Wouldn’t it be better for them to just go inside and watch Mustachioed Pianist Variety Hour?
3:02 – “Whose mustache is better? Be honest.”
3:06 – “Eh, you’re both equally queer.”
3:07 – Cat and boy are both astounded by the forwardness of such a statement.
3:12 – “Ohhh snap!”
3:14 – That lady is certainly… geometric.
3:20 – I don’t think that’s music.
3:28 – Here comes a lady with skis. Is this an Old Navy ad?
3:35 – Mr. Mustache clearly doesn’t understand how this technology works.
3:39 – On second thought – Michelin?
3:46 – She sounds like pretty much every Russian lady I’ve ever heard.
3:56 – Uh oh – something magical just happened, as it’s now time for the traditional Christmas Snowflake Treatment™.
4:00 – Aaaand that’s a wrap. I think we all learned a valuable lesson here.

I like the concept of comments on blogs. While I don’t see too many comments here, I like that the few people that follow my bouts of incoherence have the option for feedback. Of course the occasional spam seeps through, but Akismet is pretty effective in catching that sort of thing.

But I woke up this morning to a comment on a post I wrote months ago about video games, in which the commentor basically just called me biased and said I was a fanboy. While the bias accusation just leaves me stupefied (in terms of bias, that particular article ranked pretty low – you may be more interested in this one or this one or this one) but as a whole I’m not sure how I’m even supposed to react to a comment like this. I could write a real rebuttal or offer a slightly less mature response (the PS3 sucks and so does your face), but both of those would be based on the assumption the commentor is going to show up again, which seems unlikely – they took their shots, why would they come back?

So the only option left is to ignore it, which just irritates me. I just can’t figure out what compels someone to Google “MS NXE vs PS3 XMB” and leave a half-baked comment on the first site they find about how M$ sucks and Sony r000lz. It’s sad, because I love discussing this sort of thing and would be totally willing to have this conversation with a total stranger regardless of bias, yet these are the sort of people who share this hobby.

Oh look – option four is whine about it. I can do that!

It seems that content providers have decided that Hulu will no longer run on boxee. What I’ve read suggests that they would prefer the revenue from actual TV ads versus the revenue generated by watching Hulu on a television.

Except the content providers always seem to ignore that it’s not black and white. My viewing choices aren’t limited to “watch it on Hulu” or “watch it on live TV”. They also include “don’t watch it at all”, “torrent it”, or “watch it on TiVo and skip the ads”. So are those zero-revenue choices (admittedly I’m not sure about the TiVo one) really preferable to the revenue from Hulu’s ads?

I launched version 14 of this site, officially, on May 1, 2007. That seems like a really long time ago, especially by my standards. I’m not sure how long I expected it to last back then, but I knew that I was pretty happy with it, especially considering how quickly it all went together.

Comparing the launch version to version 13 before it, it’s not hard to see what I felt was working and what wasn’t. A good portion of the content styles and graphic elements made it to the new site unscathed, while dropping the heavy-handed and overly divided feel of the previous design.

The Grid

Version 14’s major defining element was the grid based entirely on the Flickr photos at the top. Initial versions had nine 75px columns separated by 5px alleys, and in November 2008 I added a tenth. While it’s not a new thing for me to have grids defined by the size of my images (as evident in all of my site designs back when this was purely a photoblog), this was the first time I gave myself more than four columns to play with, and I really enjoyed that flexibility. I think the layout worked even better on pages where the Flickr photos weren’t visible; there was still a strong sense of grid and organization, but without the obvious indication of where it was all coming from.

Content Separation

The other major stylistic decision was the way status/blip/link posts were presented when compared to the regular journal entries. After experimenting with different options I ended up with the meta for the posts in the center column, while short posts would live on the right and full posts on the left. It worked best when it was populated evenly, but there were many times where compulsive Twittering would leave the home page entirely empty on the left column.

Then & Now

So how does this newest version compare to the outgoing iteration? You can see that while I haven’t done much with it yet, the grid concept remains intact.

In terms of visual carryover, though, that’s about it. The overall look of the new site was influenced heavily by those wallpapers I just did and my portfolio. I continue to use Helvetica for the headers, but I’ve moved back to Lucida for the body copy, which harkens all the way back to Version 8.x, as ever since then I’d pretty much used Helvetica for everything.

The dotted lines, which I have dearly loved for a very long time, are hanging on by a thread. Because I’m not using a white on white on white layout this time around, everything is divided by blocks of color and shading, which means borders as a whole just aren’t necessary.

Finally, the Status/Twitter posts have become the foremost bit of information on the new site, with Flickr taking the slot below that and the Journal even further down. This just seemed like the only way it could work, organizationally. I didn’t feel that the Flickr content was deserving of the most prominent spot on the page, and the Journal couldn’t be at the top simply because of length. As-is, most visitors should see all three sections when they visit and be inclined to scroll down. Or everybody reads this in RSS, in which case it doesn’t matter anyway.

All that said, I’m quite happy with this latest version, and I’m most interested to see what it evolves into as time progresses.

I’ve the iPhone from the first time I used one last year. The idea of having the “real” internet and email that didn’t feel like you were reading it on a phone really appealed to me. It truly felt more like a pocket-sized Mac than a typical phone. Since then there’s only been improvement – 3G, GPS, and of course, the App Store. In the past two weeks I’ve downloaded at least a dozen different applications, some good, and some not so good. Instead of reviewing them all, which would be remarkably boring, I want to just share the applications (included and downloaded) that I most appreciate. Disclaimer: this may be just as boring. Also I have not counted the “Phone” and “Text” functions as apps, since they are core functions of any modern mobile phone.

AIM (Free)

Having any instant messaging app at all is nice, as it doesn’t use up my allotted text messages. And at least a majority of my contacts are on AIM to begin with. But here’s hoping for Adium mobile.
Download →

Calendar (Included)

I was a little hung up on how I was going to handle calendars on the iPhone. The built-in calendar works well, but I’ve been using Google Calendar now for about a year and really appreciate its across-the-board accessibility. The problem is that Google Calendar on the iPhone SUCKS and is extremely limited in its functionality. Then I stumbled on this article pointing to a site called NuevaSync, which basically keeps your gCal in step with your iCal. Phenomenal – it’s the best of both worlds.

Mail (Included)

It’s email. Having email on a phone is nice.

NetNewsWire (Free)

I’ll be honest – I’ve never been much of an RSS user. But on a mobile platform it makes so much more sense than accessing sites one by one. NNW has been great in this regard. The only problem is that I haven’t seen a way to add feeds through the app itself – you have to manage them through NewsGator’s web interface. Not a big deal if you’re adding feeds at home, but if you’re out and about and only have Edge, then have fun hoping the page will load. Once it’s done though, it’s fantastic.
Download →

Safari (Included)

It’s the internet. Seriously, I’m not sure what else to say about it, but I love the internet and therefore I love Safari. Duh.

TWC (Free)

It’s The Weather Channel, on the iPhone. Much nicer interface than their website, and loads faster too. Great for checking out the forecast as I’m getting out of bed.
Download →

Twitterriffic (Free)

A nice free Twitter app for the iPhone. Ad-supported (by The Deck), but it works extremely well for the cost of zero dollars.
Download →

WhitePages Mobile (Free)

Why in the world would you not want a built-in phonebook on your phone?
Download →