After a long break, I am hopefully back to blogging somewhat regularly again. I needed to take some serious time off to re-balance my priorities in life, and to get a solid grasp on all of the things I need to do on a daily basis.

At least at the start, I’m not planning to try to blog every 2 or 3 days the way I had been doing; but I am hoping to post a new article once each week.

I apologize to anyone that actually reads my blog posts. I didn’t initially intention to disappear for quite so long.

I am not really a fanboy of any company (other than Sega), but I do appreciate when a company does something well. For Microsoft, there have been a few bright spots over the last few years (even if they haven’t all been commercially profitable). Among those, I’d include the Zune as the best portable media player (note, I didn’t say “handheld entertainment device”, as the Zune and the ZuneHD were basically designed to do one thing, and do it extremely well); the Xbox 360 as quite possibly the best modern gaming console (though I do love my Wii, the Kinect kind of tipped the playing field slightly in Microsoft’s favor – or so I’ve been told; I don’t own a 360, yet); and Windows Phone 7 has, as much as Android and Apple fanboys would hate to admit, somewhat revolutionized the mobile touch interface.

Do I expect to see whole-hog clones of the WP7 Metro UI, the way we did with iOS? Absolutely not; but I do suspect that we’ll see subtle changes to touch interfaces over the next year or so as a result of the way the Windows Phone OS works.

All of that said, I can’t help but wonder what the Xbox team was thinking when it came up with the pricing structure for Microsoft Points or when they integrated Netflix into the Xbox ecosystem. (more…)

One of my Twitter friends retweeted a link to a post of the “Top 5 Coding Albums Of All Time” earlier (with his own comment that he’s more of an Op Ivy type of guy), and it got me thinking. What would my top 5 coding albums of all time look like? I’m not really sure how to answer that question (I’ve never been very good at creating “top 5″ or “top 10″ lists, because I am never able to shave things down to such a small number), but I do know that none of the five listed on that blog post would be on my list. (more…)

Since I got my new netbook, I’ve been thinking a lot about the somewhat cyclical nature of computing. Today, I was thinking about the fact that, when computers first started out, the majority of peripherals were external devices. Then, towers got larger, components got smaller and everyone started packing all kinds of internal peripheral devices into their computers. At one point in time, it looked almost as though external peripherals (optical drives, hard drives, disk drives, modems, equalizers and all kinds of other crazy stuff) would disappear forever. (more…)

It is with great sadness that I share the fact that there are now more Dell computers in our house than HP computers; but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity I had over the weekend. I was able to pick up a brand new Dell Mini 1012 for a good price. I’ve been wanting a netbook to carry around for quite a while; but just hadn’t found the right one for the right price. (more…)

It’s been a while since I’ve logged into Brizzly, having been using Pip.io recently to manage my personal Twitter account. Today, though, I needed to monitor both of my Twitter accounts for part of the day, so I decided to pop in to Brizzly to do so.

I was a bit surprised when I logged in. The interface has an entirely new look. Everything is still basically in the same place as it was before, but the color scheme is drastically different than it was the last time I visited Brizzly. In fact, there are now four themes available within Brizzly, allowing you to sort of personalize your experience.

It seems that this change, among others, was made a little over a week ago.

Over the last few years, there has been a huge movement (and rightfully so) away from using tables to organize the layout of HTML pages. However, some seem to be taking things a bit too far.

The main reason for moving away from tables was to help make page layouts more semantic. Tables do still have a place in Web design and development, though, when they make sense semantically. Tabular data should be displayed in tables. Some designers and developers seem to forget that from time-to-time. (more…)

The official “Call for Proposals” has been issued by edUI. If you’ve got something to share with a group of Web professionals from colleges, universities, libraries and other educational institutions, please consider submitting a proposal. Following is some information about the call for proposals.

We seek dynamic speakers willing to share their knowledge and expertise about Web design, user experience design and development. Preference is given to presentations that offer practical methods and ready-to-use techniques and tools.

• Have you completed an innovative Web project at your institution that you want to tell others about?
• Are you enthusiastic about introducing new technologies and techniques to other Web professionals?
• Do you want to share your ideas about user experience design and development?
• Are you ready to add something exciting to your CV or resume?

A few weeks ago, I found I needed a few icons for a project on which I was working. After a little bit of Googling, I came across the “All Free Download” Web site. Be forewarned, it is kind of a minefield of advertisement banners, but there are some great images to be found there.

Many of the images are available as vector files, allowing you to save them at basically any size you choose without worrying about degrading the visual quality of the image.

If you find yourself in need of imagery or icons for any projects, you might want to pop on over to All Free Download and see if they have anything to fit your project.

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I am stuck with a satellite Internet connection at home. DSL and FIOS are distant fantasies, cable comes to the end of my driveway and stops (they refuse to run it any further, and won’t let me run it myself) and a T1 line is just way out of my price range. So, I’m stuck dealing with huge latency and bottom-of-the-barrel “high speed” Internet service.

For everyone else that moves out to the boonies and might have to make the switch to a satellite provider, I thought I’d provide this quick list of five things you shouldn’t (or can’t) do when you’re using a satellite connection. Still, I am thankful that I’m at least able to get some sort of “high speed” connection, as going back to dial-up is not something I want to even think about. (more…)