Day Two - Big & Small

Both of my sources for this theme’s entry are from Flickr. We have small plant by baarah, and Sequoia Wonder, Big Trees State Park, California by moonjazz.

Brad’s entry was significantly different than mine, and I like how his turned out. He also did more creative work in Photoshop as far as image compositing and editing goes.

Brad - Day Two - Big & Small

Let me take this moment to deviate from the topic at hand and say that I am thoroughly confused by WordPress’ image library tools. I just want to upload an image, provide a thumbnail of a dynamic size (so, have WordPress generate a custom thumbnail size), and have a click-through to the full-size image if I so choose. This has to be possible – I have a feeling I’m just missing something. Since this is the first I’ve really used it in a long time – we’re talking years – I think that’s a safe bet.

Yesterday was the first day of the creative exercise, meant to both help pass the time and give ourselves a creative “break” from work and the other necessities of day-to-day life. Yesterday’s theme was “Flowers”, and my entry is below, which is followed by Brad’s.

Day One - Flowers

I found the picture of the lily from an AKVIS tutorial and modified it to expand the background.

Brad - Day One - Flowers

See? Work hard now and reap the benefits later – and also important, having the satisfaction of knowing you gave it your all because you’re passionate about what you do. The fact that I was rewarded for doing a good job in the first ace is just icing on the cake.

What I find even cooler, though, is that they took the time to respond to individual responses. In my feedback, I told them I always seemed to have trouble finding alpha/beta versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to test. What I received last month was a friendly response from Alix Franquet with a helpful list of places to go to find early releases of Mozilla products.

Also in my response to the survey I mentioned how I was having serious memory usage issues with Firefox 3.5 – and I wasn’t alone. It’s also not the first time I’ve run into this problem, either. I think 3.5 peaked out at ~1.7 GB  of RAM – insane. Alix asked if 3.6 was better, but at the time I still hadn’t upgraded because Google Gears and, more importantly, Ubiquity weren’t supported. Having upgraded now, I can happily say 3.6 is much better at managing memory. Right now it’s idling at 280 MB, or 17% of what 3.5 would so often near.

More important than getting the information I commented on (after all, I usually found the product version I was looking for after a while of searching) is the fact that the company – a big one, at that – took the time to respond to an individual user’s concerns. Even when I had issues over two years ago with Firefox’s memory usage, a Mozilla rep reached out then, too. It really goes a long way to building a foundation of trust and loyalty in a customer when they know their needs are being addressed.

When it came down to it, it was just too much work trying to keep three sites up and active and full of content, which led me to update none of them. Far from ideal. It’s also a lot easier to give people one link instead of three and makes it less confusing when they don’t have to try to decide which one they want to visit.

Next steps will be to take my web development stuff over at Left Right Designs and bring that here as well, which will coincide with me getting some of my projects set up on GitHub. Over the next few days I’ll also clean up my blog categories and tags that came over with my old blog and start filling out some of my pages.

Until then, have a look through some of my other posts while I get settled.

Update: For those of you who subscribed to my old feed, be sure to grab the updated link! The old Feedburner one will still work, but you should update yours anyway.

I carved up Yoda on the right, Cassie did the bats on the left.

Let me just say this: Whoever says Macs are more stable than PCs are full of shit. I purchased a MacBook a few weeks ago, and while so far I’m enjoying it, programs crash like I didn’t believe possible. As Seth W. said:

My iBook is giving me more beach-balls than a holiday weekend… at the beach.

Speaking of Seth, he recently plugged my Warped Tour shots on BuzzGrinder. About that: this year I was approved for a photo pass for Milwaukee’s Warped Tour. I have to say, it was easily one of the coolest things I’ve done. You can check out my photos from the event on the Warped Tour page I put up.

Using the code view, I (unsuccessfully) tried many times to post four Family Guy videos from YouTube, but WordPress’s WYSIWYG editor kept messing them up.

I could post links to the four videos, but who wants that?

Video or it didn’t happen!