Rinsefirst

Take a time out. Now. Just for an hour… really… Just go play smash brothers or something.

Thanks for reminding me to do that Justin.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly an a decision can be made without thinking it all the way through… For example… It’s not all that uncommon for me to do something for a client (against my advice), and then have that client realize a day later that they hadn’t listened to what I said was going to be a problem, and sure enough, now need it undone. People lose focus on who they are trying to serve to quickly, and very quickly begin serving themselves.

Case in point:  Creative.

If you haven’t heard the story… Creative came down hard on one of it’s forum members for distributing drivers he created/modified to improve the usability of Creative’s sound cards in Vista. Basically, he figured out a way to re-enable all the features that were available in XP that were not yet available in the Vista drivers… And to put it a little more in perspective… Creative has done next to nothing to get these features back into Vista (Their vista driver has been crap for well over a year now). In any case… When they came down on the guy, and he was forced to pull the driver, the backlash from the community was huge.

In less than 3 days, the news about what Creative had done hit Slashdot, Engadget, Fark, and a dozen other technology blogs. Their forums now have almost 1000 messages telling Creative how “dissappointed” they are in Creative’s decision. Talk about negative press…. In fact, now the people are starting to organize to sue Creative for false advertising the features available in Vista.

Creative has already started the spin control by posting a forum message saying they plan on reversing their decision.. However, it’s to late… With a full weekend of minimal action, they’ve done enough damage to their name with one stupid decision, that there going to have to do something more than just “reversing” the decision to make this right with their customers.

In any case, if your ever in business, always try to remember that the customers really do come first… Maybe not singular, but if you have 1000’s of customers with the same problem, it really is in your best interest to not do something that hurts all of them, and would be much better to help them instead.

The FIRST Robotics Competition was this weekend (Thursday thru Saturday). I learned a few things from this that I thought would be worth sharing:

1. It doesn’t take $1000’s of dollars to get 2000 people to a webpage a day… All it takes is something that 2000 people really want… Like a webcast of a live event where lots of the viewers are hundreds of miles away because the team was all that traveled.
2. 2000 visitors per day is a lot of video bandwidth when streaming live. By a lot, I mean more than I would have ever imagined.
3. People don’t get mad at you if it isn’t working if they have no way to contact you.
4. It’s never to late to monetize a webpage that is getting 2000 visitors per day… (see:$5.00 in 5 hours doing absolutely nothing, yes I know, we aren’t rolling in it… but thats pretty dang good)
5. It’s never to late to take advantage of Google’s search algorithm… Namely, the fact that 100’s of quick “high quality” links come in if you have something (aka, a live webcast) to promote. Just make sure you have the keywords where you need them.
6. If your in high school/college, you should take part in as many team activities as possible… for they just don’t exist when your an adult.
7. You can never have to much bandwidth.

I’m sure I learned something else too… Hmm… guess I’ll have to think harder.

Good Job Team 2175 (aka the Fighting Calculators)… Can’t wait til next year!

I just finished writing an email to a friend helping him out with some CSS trouble he was having. I decided that the 5 tips I put at the beginning of the letter is good CSS advice for all of us… And although it might not be perfect… when your learning how to program CSS, it’s probably best to implement some of these things… Cause it can only save you from a headache.  So without further adu… the 5 tips:

1. Always build for firefox, and then fix IE… Never the other way around. Why? Because Firefox is standards compliant… IE is not (yet). There are fixes for the problems in IE. There are no fixes for the problems in firefox (because it’s all standardized). That said, if it looks bad in firefox, it’s probably because your taking advantage of something broken in IE, and how do you “break” firefox to fix it :-). So that said… code from firefox!
2. Make use of Firebug and Webmaster Toolbar (both in firefox), it will allow you to code realtime, which is priceless when it comes to debugging.
3. Start your css with the following line:
   * {margin: 0px;padding: 0px;}

   The reason: it basically gives you a leg up on building with the box model because every single object has the same margins and padding to start with (where as, they normally don’t… For example ul’s tend to have a margin of like 15 or something… which can throw everything off.)

4. Get in the habit clear “clearing” sections… Namely by using clear: both;. If you treat each section of your webpage as just that… a section… then at the end of every section that has a float, you need to be sure you have something that is clearing everything… otherwise the float from the previous section may have adverse affects on the next section.
5. Lastly: when all else fails… clear all the formatting… and start over…. and work your way down… Building CSS on top of existing content is probably the easiest way to do it… and it’s much easier to work top to bottom than it is any other direction when it comes to building layout.

Hope someone found this useful… It’s time for me to write another post…

Just got this in my email after doing 3 months of nothing but running a very tiny computer application:

Thank you for participating in the Windows Feedback Program! 

This message is to notify you that your 3 months participation term has completed, and we are getting ready to ship your product.  Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.  You will receive another email from us when shipments have gone out.

Your product selection:

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007

Woot! Free Full Version of Microsoft Office 2007…

That is all!

I had a pretty great night this evening.

After a rather long day of getting the Bridge’s televisions setup at church, Amber met up with me and we decided to go out to dinner, hitting one of my favorite places to get Pizza, the Green Mill. From there, we came back to my house and began talking about wedding stuff.

In passing at some point, I mentioned that I wouldn’t mind heading up to Walmart around midnight to pick up Smash Brothers for the Wii (it came out this morning). That very quickly lead to, why don’t we go to Walmart and register then. So Amber and I left about 10:15, and spent the next hour and a half registering for our wedding. At around 11:45, I got in line (yes, there was a line of about 35 people, they had about 48 copies of the game, so everyone got one, but still… not bad for a game release that you could have pre-ordered. )

I picked it up, came home, and I smashed for about 30 minutes before calling it a night. All in all a great evening, both in time spent with my future wife, as well as in just plain non-work related fun.

Me after getting home with Smash Bros the night of it’s release.