After finding the phone a trusty companion during long trans-continental flights, I wanted to see where else it could guide my music listening, and naturally thought I could give my collection of burnt mp3 CD's the boot and just use my phone. At first, this was simple and straightforward - just use the same aux connection I was using with my Zen Micro with my phone - but this turned out to be awkward for one important reason:

• If anyone calls, I need to unplug the phone to be able to have a meaningful two-sided conversation. Otherwise, while I could hear the person calling me, they wouldn't be able to hear anything I said.

Now, I'd been looking at ways of getting Bluetooth in my car before, as answering phones without a handless devices such as a headset is not only illegal in many states, it's also very dangerous and hard to do in a manual. It's actually been rather recent when good intermediate devices have been getting more affordable, and after some quick research picked up a Jabra SP700 speakerphone. Unlike a headset, it does not make you look like a duchebag, since it is meant to stay in your car – specifically, hanging from inconspicuously from a shade. But also unlike a traditional one earpiece headset, it has the following features:

1. The ability to play stereo music from a phone
2. Transmit whatever it's playing to any FM radio through its FM Transmitter.

While the sound quality could be better, its lack of wires to play booming phone music is definitely a win! Sure, you could say that lone headphone cable that connected my phone to my car's head unit was simple and easy to use, and it's true, but the obtrusiveness of the cable plus its incapability of allowing phone conversations made it annoying and a chore. Now, I think of these 3 button presses (one to turn on Bluetooth, one to turn on the speakerphone, and the last to turn on the FM Transmitter) when I enter my car as a ritual that will allow the most awesome music to emanate forth.

I was actually pretty impressed at how seamless and automatic (outside of my 3 button press ritual) it all was, once the devices are connected, my Blackjack sends all my calls and music to the speakerphone. Though pairing up the device with my phone did send me searching for the manual. And when a call comes in during a song, I no longer have to worry about both breaking the law and unplugging and then plugging back my phone, since the call music will transition smoothly to my conversation when I answer the call. It's actually rather neat - Kate actually tried it while in the car to see if it would work, and was impressed!

There are downsides, sure; I've had many conversations were listening to the other side through my car's speakers was very tasking. I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the FM Transmitters rather low strength (I have to set the volume pretty high just to listen to music) or from the other parties unconscious effort to keep from sounding like their being overly loud. I've also been forced to work around the unit's low transmitter strength: by both removing my cars external radio antenna and creating a makeshift antenna out of USB cable that dangles a little from the rear view mirror. Though after finding an FM band without too many stations around it, 105.5 seems to be working well, I've at least not had any more issues with interference or the sound fading out.

I'm still trying to decide what to do next. I would like to have better and louder music then I do now, but that might mean messing around with the internals of my SP700. I could also save for a new head unit, but I think I would prefer a new bed instead. So, there might some things that I could think could be better, but while it's not perfect, it's easy to set up and does just what I need. Think I'll leave this setup for a little bit longer.

When we acquired our Aspelund Bedroom furniture (including the drawers and night stand) it was a pretty straightforward setup. We made sure not to forget any important things (like the mid beam which is sold seperately) or the slats (also sold separately) or the bed (also sold separately but at least we already had this part). We liked the idea of using slats as opposed to a box spring - the bed frame can be used with either type of support - since we were fresh out of box springs thanks to a friend who made a rather unfortunate mistake of forgetting how much force his body can create with gravity. Unfortunately, this one decision was what has led us to have problems with this bed. But, outside of some problems attaching the backing to the night stand, there were no problems getting the entire set assembled in the guest bedroom the day the frame was delivered. We both thought it was pretty comfortable and almost thought about switching beds.

It wasn't long afterwards that we started experiencing a problem that many have with similarly designed Ikea frames, the mattress kept falling. Of course, this usually happened in the middle of the night while someone was sleeping on it – thankfully, no guests had that problem. It was sort of strange though, but it was something I had thought could be a problem. While assembling the bed, I felt like I couldn't quite fasten the support beams quite to my standards, but I didn't think too much about it. I probably should have, as after a couple more incidents we realized the slats were falling off the mid beam!

While there are a great many people that are quick to point to shoddy design, or crap manufacturing, I still think that it's probably something assembled incorrectly. The main problem is that the sides of the frame keep bowing out. The bed has crossbeams to keep the sides from bowing out; they, however, keep loosening due to a push/pull force that's caused by the mid beam whenever someone gets off and on the bed or rolls around quite a bit. Since the variable length mid beam is not fastened at a certain length, whenever anyone older 5 is on the bed, the mid beam will expand and bow down, causing the head and foot board to move, causing the crossbeams to become lose. So how is this not a design failure? I'm sure that there's a step in the manual that’s not emphasized more. There could be several steps:

1. Exactly how to tighten the cross beam? Which hole should the screw go in?
2. The screws look like posidriv screws, which while they may look like Philips, but aren't.
3. Maybe there is a way to secure the mid beam, but the manual just doesn't cover it?

I've tried using different configurations for tightening the cross beams but nothing seems to keep them from loosening. I also don't own any posidriv drivers so I can't tighten the screws as best as one should be able to. So, I started looking at what other people were doing to keep their mattress from falling in their beds. And I was not disappointed as I found many creative work-a-rounds to keep the slats from falling. You can:

• Drill and screw the slats in to the mid beam
• Solder the cross beams
• Attach the crossbeams in a different manner
• Use rope to keep the sides from bowing out
• Adding wood pieces in between the spaces of the slats as the bed bows out

We went for the simplest solution we could think of, mostly because we already do this on our bed, throw money at the problem! $600 worth of college text books that is. It's been working rather well, adding the text books under the mid beam keeps it bowing down under the stress of any kind of weight so the slats have stopped moving around. The cross beams also seem to be maintaining their firmness, though there's still more slack in them then I would prefer.

i did run into one little problem though. After a couple of times of use, one of the keys fell of. I was able to snap it back into place temporarily, but it continued to fall off. It was very annoying, this needed to be fixed, but I didn't want to have to send the notebook in for something that looks to be a simple thing to fix. So, I had to look it up. Found a good site that explains how you, if you're gutsy enough, can fix that pesky key problem for yourself.

I'm really exited about Rock Band 2. While there hasn't been much Rock Band playing at our place of late (due to my stupidity in breaking the drum pedal), Kate and I jump at every chance we get to play. We recently helped out some bands out at Chris and Fla's house and at Nakfoor's place as well. It's really such a great Party Game, or make you feel good game, that almost a year after release, we're still playing. It's no surpirse that we're both looking forward to Rock Band 2 coming out in a couple of weeks.

While looks to be the Rock Band 1 that should have been:

• No weird leader for bands
• World Tour playable by offline and online players
• No vestigial "Guitar Hero" solo tour
• Solid instruments.

We're not going to pick up the special edition this time. Sure our pedal is broken, and it would be nice to have wireless drums and guitars, instead we'll be enhancing our experience with the Omega Pedal. While it's been extremely unfortunate we'll be getting our new pedal a solid two months after we ordered it, I still can't wait to get it and play some drums. Sure, Rock Band 2's drum pedals will have a supporting metal plate, but even they won't compare to the difference of the pull springs in real drum pedals as opposed to the push spring of the game instruments.

If you're looking to enhance your drumming in Rock Band, there are several other modded pedals you can find online (there's the Destroyer Pedal or the Rock Pedal). I decided to go with the Omega Pedal mostly because I couldn't find a matrix with the difference of all three pedals, and because of the good review from Ars Technica.

It's really great that Harmonix and MTV could get most of Rock Band 1's songs transferable to the sequel, as well as all of the DLC. I'm sure Kate won't be missing the three songs that won't be transferable, I am a little sad that "Paranoid" was in that short list. It's no matter, I don't mind losing those songs in comparison to the total list of Rock Band 2's songs. I'm in particularly looking forward to enjoy:

• "Feel The Pain"
• "Everlong"
• "My Own Worst Enemy"
• "Come Out and Play"
• Spoonman"

And if they release The Colour and the Shape like rumoured I'll be in Rock Band Heaven. Just take a look at the gameplay trailer that features "Everlong". That single clip made me wish September was actually much earlier.

Very excited at what the public is going to think of our features this year. Take a look at what we've got prepared in 09:

While this years release of Tiger Woods isn't on my birthday, like it was last year, it's still coming out around that time. You can expect to see it on store shelves August 26.

One of the nice things about the Windows Mobile platform, is that if you're capable, it's somewhat simple to create your own custom home screens. There aren't too many resources available, or plugins for that matter, but it is a possibility. The home screens are simple xml files that contain information on which plugins to use as well as simple layout information. All the home screen files are kept in \Application Data\Home folder of your phone. You can just place a new file there, and the display settings will read it up. I just used the ones that came with my phone as reference, and moved some stuff around to create something that I found useful.

Decent software has been a little bit harder to get a hold of then I originally thought. While there seems to be a renewed interest in creating good applications for the windows mobile platform, it seems to all be directed purely at copying the success of the iPhone. This means that all the really nice applications are touch only. I tried downloading some of the applications at I (Heart) Windows Mobile.com but couldn't use any of them because they are touch only. I actually encountered that with several applications I installed. Thankfully, the creators of iContact added regular input to it so that I can still use this application without the touch feature.

Even iContact makes me feel like a secondary citizen. Without touch input, I can access some of the buttons on the screen! Use of the soft buttons, as well as the back button in windows mobile devices is not consistent at all. ExtremeText, the application I'm using for threaded messaging, doesn't do anything when I press the back button, same thing with the IM app my phone came with. One would hope that pressing back would take you to the previous screen, but this apparently needs to be done in the app level.

Setting up ActiveSync in vista has been really simple though. So, at least that's a nice break. It's really nice to be able to sync your pictures and music from phone to your computer. Syncing is so painless, I've been thinking about trying to get podcasts to load onto my phone. I did have one snafu though trying to connect sync through bluetooth. After syncing with the computer through a USB cable, and setting up the bluetooth connection, you still have to run the ActiveSync app on you cellphone to connect. Still simple, but an extra step I hadn't though of until I googled it.

However, this is when the entire thing became hugely satisfying for my problem solving abilities. Without thinking about it much, my first instinct was to see if DAEMON Tools could read the .img file extension of the Vista SP1 DVD image. And while the extension wasn’t in the list of valid file extensions, it was able to read it just fine, thereby creating a somewhat roundabout way of burning a simple disc image file. So in essence, one program was emulating a DVD Drive from an image file, while a second program was reading that emulation to create yet another image file so that it could burn that to an actual disc.

To my surprise, it all worked pretty well, especially since my dying computer didn’t even crash at the thought of doing all that work. The reason this entire little problem was so wholly satisfying to me was two-fold. First, it sometimes still amazes me how when things just work, it makes people happier. This experience was just reinforcing some of the concepts Joel Spolsky talked about in the first chapter of his “User Interface Design for Programmers.” Secondly, it also made me feel pretty good that I didn’t have to resort to big software to get stuff done; two small, free and very specialized applications gave me the results I needed.

As a side note, over the holiday break I had bought some of the Christopher Bean's and left it at my parents house, when they got back and found it they were pleasantly surprised.

So, as you can see, even though I think I have a pretty good taste for coffee, I know it's very limited. This is best exemplified with my love for Tim Horton's Coffee. For some mixed reason of nostalgia for Canada and dislike for most restaurant's coffee I just love Tim Horton's Coffee. Although, in it's defense, the blend of coffee Tim Horton's sells really is particularly very good, especially considering that this is the equivalent of Dunkin Donuts in Canada and their coffee is terrible - I was really surprised to learn that they were going to start selling it in grocery stores, people actually want it?

However, living in Florida makes it very hard to get a can or so to keep for a while. I usually only have any in supply whenever anyone in my family goes to Canada - it's customary to return with at least two big cans of it, on for yourself, and another one for anyone else. We really love the stuff.

So, it was somewhat surprising that his past Christmas I got two cans! It was quite awesome really. Kate was able to get a large 34oz can on eBay while my Mom was able to find me a 12oz can from the Canadian Store in London England (Tim Horton's if your reading this, you should sell your coffee worldwide through your website). No had to travel to Canada to get any this time around!

Currently, I'm slowly making some every morning from the 36oz can with my 4 cup drip coffee maker. Which is fine, since Tim Horton's coffee was made to be made in drip machines and still taste good. At work though, I have the smaller can which is course ground so it makes it perfect for the French Press John and I use to make coffee at work. This is by far the best way to have coffee at work since it's fresh and doesn't accrue bitter burnt coffee flavors while it stews in the gigantor coffee thermos.

It's actually been two months since my birthday, but I finally got around to posting this picture of the Birthday Cake Kate made for me. I was very surprised since I was not expecting a cake. We had two slices so I had to take the rest to work with me the next day. Everyone that saw it noted how awesome it was as they all ate around the mushroom middle.

me:

btw... i gave in joined a social networking site

mh:

haha what'd you join?

me:

facebook

mh:

what prompted it?

me:

well... i was thinking if was going to join one, it would probably be that one, just because it's so web two-oh and that's totally the cool thing to do these days...

mh:

haha you sucker :P

me:

and they flaunt that around so much, because i got two independent IM's from facebook, on behalf of two users that wanted me to join

me:

so, apperantly, my peer pressure for web two-oh fads is 2 people pressuring me

mh:

haha

Technically, however, this isn't the first social networking site I have joined. I already joined LinkedIn.

CSS frameworks aim to do the same thing to our styling. But the main thing I have against the Idea, which I also feel about resets, is that perhaps they add too much that isn't needed.

I think most people won't argue that the visual design of a website is very unique. I think most people also won't argue against reusing CSS selectors for tabs any time tabs are needed. But if your website doesn't make use of tabs, what is the use to have that in a CSS file that gets downloaded every page? This is exactly the same problem Javascript frameworks have - and though good front-end frameworks will be modularized to prevent against this, there may still be unused code or selectors in the modules that you end up including.

When I think of CSS I think of styling for a specific type of semantics that make sense only in the context of the information they will be styling. So for example, perhaps all tabs used in a website will be either secondary navigation, or navigation for a tabbed widget. Sure, they can use some of the same selectors, but while a framework may use a more generic name for the selector than what the tabs themselves are trying to emphasize. For example, you might want to name your selector .horizontal-nav as opposed to .tabs. Which makes more semantic sense in the example illustrated above?

Sure, you could always change the selector's names in the framework, but then you aren't getting the benefit of using a framework! The semantics and language of your site's information will always be different then another's site. Unless you are always building the same site template over and over again - lets say blogs that use the same semantics, then having a general framework probably won't help much.

That's not to say the idea is completely bad. While working at Alienware I had set up the site's personal css styling framework. This included the proper naming convention for all the style sheets, each different area had it's unique style sheet that covered only the semantics and language of that area, as well as the contents of the universal style sheet - that contained styles that were used by a majority of the pages in the site, including the font family and font sizes for certain type of tiles and the body text. This made it very easy to add different pages with a diverse multitude of supported semantics.

However, I wouldn't want to use any of that CSS in my website. What would a selector called .pressreleaseheader mean or do in my own website? I don't have or do press releases. And yes while Alienware does have many tabs, and my sites navigation could be considered tabs, not only is the styling different, but so is the semantics.

So, what I want to finish with is this:

• Frameworks can be good - they give me WAFFy's
• General CSS Frameworks are probably too general to add semantic meaning unless you work with sites that have similar languages
• Site Specific conventions and frameworks can help out in large enough sites
• Like javascript frameworks, can be somewhat inefficient in the use of bandwidth - Including more then is needed.

These are just my opinions though. I am not trying to tell anyone General frameworks are bad, I am just exploring my feelings of unease about using them in my future projects.

Actually, the Orlando Sentinel did a piece on the pranks that happen around here and it got pick up by Kotaku! I'm pretty used to the company I work for being in the news a lot - Alienware always makes some kind of racket, be it positive or negative, whenever they release something - but never as an inside look at what happens inside the office.

Yes, the ball pit rocks. Being able to take a couple of minutes out of work and relax in the ball pit s definitely a job perk. And yes, when it was constructed you couldn't find plastic balls in the Orange and Seminole county area as they had all been bought to make the Ball pit.

One of the reasons I enjoy working at Tiburon so much is because of this laid back environment, it really fosters creativity in the employees.