For my b-day, I finally got my first salt water aquarium. It’s an Oceanic BioCube all-inclusive 29 gallon tank with all the lighting and filtration built in. I also got a nice custom made solid wood stand.

I have loaded it up with live sand and live rock. Apparently, live rock becomes the main biological nitrification base or biological filter of a saltwater aquarium and has a stabilizing effect on the water chemistry, in particular on helping to maintain constant pH by release of calcium.

It has to cycle for about four weeks before I introduce some fish and corals and stuff. I hope to add an anemone at some point. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’ve checked out a bunch of books and I’m really excited to learn all about it.

My goal is to have something close to as great as my friend Jared Cornwall’s nanocube at five months. And maybe someday a tank as fabulous as this or this or this.

Only a couple hours into my 30’s (2am on Saturday, July 14, my birthday) and I was woken to a series of miserable stomach cramps. Finally I do what my body is begging and upchuck a bit into the can. That sufficed for an hour or so, but now the cramps are back and my entire body would be better off dead.

This time I’m going in and I’m getting it ALL out…

There.

Better, but not good. My lower back is on fire and there is no pain meds to be found in the cabin. What the heck is wrong? Kidney stones? Appendix? … The fish!

I now regret the decision to buy frozen fish. The fish that tasted so good even though I had technical difficulties with the oven and could only bake at 400 degrees, not at 475 as the directions specified.

But I baked it for five extra minutes and even microwaved it for a minute… Apparently that did not suffice.

So what did I get for my thirtieth birthday???

Food poisoning?

No.

I got a wife that was smart enough to not eat the fish I prepared so she could take care of me for three days while I was half dead with food poisoning.

Best gift ever.

I’m really enjoying a lot of new music this year so here’s a quick review of what’s making my ears happy. (Hyperlinks are to the iTunes store).

Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha : I can almost guarantee Plasticities will be featured in a popular film or television commercial soon. Until that happens, it’s my favorite song.

Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder : My day would not be complete without blasting Joanie Don’t U Worry for my cube neighbors to enjoy. Same Old Drag is my fav.

Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger : Solid, consistent album from one of my all time favorite singer / songwriters. Can’t wait to see him perform it live at Red Butte Garden’s this month.

Albert Hammond, Jr - Yours To Keep : Thank you Albert for feeding my cravings of more Strokes music. A similar yet mellower sound from the lead guitarist of my fav band The Strokes does not disappoint.

M. Ward - Post-War (2006) - On my recent flight to Austin, TX, Chinese Translation was played on some video loop. I thought it had a new, unique sound and was definitely stuck in my head. I got home and checked out the rest of the album, been very hooked ever since.

Jim Noir - Tower Of Love (2006) - A fun album. Apparently Eanie Meany was featured on an Adidas commercial for the World Cup. I heart My Patch and Key Of C.

Tom Petty - Highway Companion (2006) - I was not a big fan of Petty until I heard this album. A classic.

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away : A solid album. A slight step down from their previous two awesome albums, but still fab.

– Honorable Mentions –

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - Some Loud Thunder : Not even nearly as good as their debut album, but a decent effort with a couple great tracks. I love Underwater (You And Me).

White Stripes - Icky Thump : A little hard for my taste but so full of talent, I may like this more as I hear it more.

Wilco - Blue Sky Blue : It’s no Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or even A Ghost is Born, but it’s Wilco and I’m into a few tracks.

I love music. Enjoy! LMKIYNBU.

Media Temple announced their Grid-Service (gs) about a year ago and discontinued the (ss) Shared-Server plan I was on. They allowed SS users to continue and I did on a month-to-month basis for around $8 / month. But as expected, this service was no longer being improved and was left lacking many features you expect from a useful web host now days.

I was planning to upgrade to the Grid-Service plan, even though it cost more than double what I was paying per month, but I read many bad reviews and the features were still limited compared to the plan I have with Dreamhost.

Over the past 8 months I have migrated all my sites and all sites I host for personal clients from Media temple to Dreamhost. Everything except this blog, which I held off due to all the dynamic data stored on the mysql database.

I was also waiting for MovableType to upgrade to 4.0 and figured I could do the transfer and upgrade at the same time. Well, MovableType 4.0 beta 5 is out now, I installed a test site and the process was smooth as you could ask for, so simple. But the application is lacking a few key features that will not allow me to upgrade, specifically there are no advanced options for customizing your URLs, called ‘Archive Mapping’ in MT 3.35.

So over the past week I’ve slowly started moving over this blog, then yesterday I backed up the database, transferred the domain DNS, installed Movable Type 3.35, imported my database, imported Mint webstats database, made some adjustments to PHP includes as Dreamhost handles them differently and bang. We’re back to normal. Everything is working accept my Last.fm display for recently played tracks (fix that waaaay later on).

Dreamhost rocks, period. These guys are dedicated to offering the most options they can and the best service possible. It’s very affordable ($8 month) and in the three years I’ve hosted client sites on there, I’ve had great success. And they offer domain names at competitive prices ($9 year).

[Read more]

I was outside when Jana came out and asked if I could look up a business phone number for her with my phone. Sure I can, an opportunity to demo to my wife the Google Voice Local Search (1-800-GOOG-411) and how cool it is.

Then I went back to playing with my boys in the yard and hardly even thought twice as I set my phone on the car that was parked right next to me. I’ll grab it when I go inside. Suuuuure.

A few hours later: Where’s your phone? Hmm, yeah, it’s probably in the road somewhere since you just got back from the store.

Jana called the phone, some high school punks answered, giggling and trying to be funny. I got on and asked where I can come pick up my phone, a kid responds, this thing has been ran over a few times. I said, that’s fine, just let me get it. He met me at a gas station and I gave the dork $11.

Then we got a call asking about the prank phone calls that have been made randomly to my address book. Oh the joys of high school fun.

But really, it’s a good thing. Assuming my insurance with Verizon works as they sold it to me, I should be picking up a new phone tomorrow, no charge. And that means a fresh battery. The battery life on this dung slim phone is none existent after one year.

Despite my previous post, the flights from SL to Toronto were very nice, iPod + a good book + good seat neighbor = easy travel.

I attended FITC two years ago and was sold on this conference with its focus on design and technology, the location (Toronto), top notch speakers with a great variety of sessions. I have attended Flash Forward three times, SXSW and other design conferences. These were all good for what they were, but FITC continues to be my favorite conference.

Below are a few points from sessions I attended that I felt were worth posting:

After Effects CS3
Beta is out now - final release later this year. From the presentation by the Adobe guy, wow, what an amazing upgrade for AE. Shape Layers, Fractal Noise Effects, and this Repeater tool that has much more control and options than the Particular plug-in.
There is this “puppet” tool that lets you set areas you want to manually animate “or puppeteer” then record these to the timeline for editing. Very fun.
The coolest new feature is the Brainstorm tool, this lets you compare and save randomized effects then save and further compare and narrow down the look or effect you are looking for. The opens up a fun way to quickly play around with an effect and stumble upon something unexpected and new.

Components in Flash CS3
Developed from the ground up by Grant Skinner, both the included components and the component extending system which is much faster and very easy to customize, all editable with code and at runtime. Now when you drop a component on the stage you can double click it and edit the design right there. Nice. Grand demoed a DataGrid with a million items and it ran super smooth, very good news for using Flash for application development.

Mario Klingemann
Mario showed off a system he’s developing in Flash to teach the computer to read an image, evaluate it so it can learn what is considered “good” design or photography or art. He talked about philosophical issues with what “art” and “Art” is. Then the system he’s building can create its own art in Flash, currently from vectors and eventually it will take the data it has “learned” and apply it to its own creations. Currently Mario has to tell the system what pieces are good, then it continually builds upon each selection.

John Maeda
I read his book “Simplicity” on the flight to the conference. His presentation was an extension of the great ideas and principles he discusses in this book. These apply to how we work and live as well as user interface design. A must read.

Marcos Weskamp
Off the charts good stuff, I’ve always been a fan of Marcos’ work. He built the recent re-launch of the Wieden+Kennedy site. He talked about that a bit as well as a few other amazing works in development. He talked about data visualizations and his process of Parse > Analyze > Visualize when designing ideas to represent data.

Papervision 3D
I’ve seen the demos and have been playing with the alpha classes for Papervision3D, but I had no idea how powerful and amazing this 3D engine for Flash is becoming. Carlos Ulloa’s presentaion was great as he talked about how this was build from the ground up for use in Flash.

//
That is all for now. If you ever have the chance to attend FITC I highly recommend it. There also offer fantastic training sessions the day before the conference starts. This year they had Joshua Davis.

Toronto to Denver flight notes.

FITC rocked this year. Notes and review coming soon.

Last week my dad, Ed Mayne, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He was being treated for symptoms of pneumonia when the doctors found some tumors. It’s at an early enough stage that he began chemotherapy treatments which should put him into remission.

Man it’s a hard thing to hear when you find out someone you love has cancer. But my dad is the strongest man I know and he’s going to fight this with everything he has.

We love you dad!

News items:

Statement from Senator Ed Mayne
SL Tribune: Paul Rolly: Slowdown not likely for Mayne
Deseret News: Mayne diagnosed with lung cancer

This “stay off your feet” thing isn’t so bad, especially with some good TV, movies, laptop and a sweet wife tending to my needs.

Last night while playing my weekly pick up church ball games I broke my ankle. I was running full speed defending a breakaway and near the hoop somehow stepped wrong on the foot of another player and really twisted my right ankle. I fell to the floor as it happened, not because I would have fell, but because I knew I jacked it. Lying on my back all I could say was, I’m done. Then the pain kicked in, felt like my shoe was going to explode so I unlaced and ripped it off quick as we all watched it swell up like a baseball on my leg.

Medical Center, X-ray, at this point I’m talking in a grunt voice with clenched fists due to the pain and having not taken anything for it which really kicked in after we left the house. The medical workers tell Jana they need to see the x-ray results before they give me anything.

Finally, the nurse practitioner walks in and they give me an ibuprofen. She starts asking me a million questions and finally I ask one, is it broken or what? Yep. Thanks.

Off my feet for 3 days, foot elevated, ice 20 minutes on and off, lortab!, ibuprofen, walking cast when not laying down. I’ll be in a walking cast for probably 5-6 weeks.

The biggest bummer is that I can’t play basketball for at least that long. But better my foot than my mouse clicker hand.

[Read more]

Last night ABC.com launched a new streaming video player using Move Networks technology that allows users to watch all the ABC shows online at full screen, near HD quality.

This technology is a great replacement for Flash video especially in longer form programming like TV shows and movies. You can scrub the timeline and begin playback almost immediately without any buffer time.

What are you waiting for, go re-watch last weeks episode of Lost before tonight’s new episode.

[Read more]