Mac – Page 4 – Chris' Site

Kill -9

These guys are uber nerdy! I love it!

Hmm, I’ve been out every night this week. Although not really _out_. Hung out with Erick again and we watched Ellen’s Stand up. Good times. Thursday I went out with Ben to The Gabe Dixon Band. Really good band. I enjoyed it. After that we met up with Will and went to a couple bars to just chat and hang out in Weho.

Thursday I also had an interview with the University of Chicago – Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. There were 5 people on the interview, 2 of which had heavy accents and I couldn’t understand them and they kept asking me questions. I really enjoyed talking to them. It sounds really cool. But we all know I’m afraid of that sort of major move so even if I do get the job I’ll probably stay here.

Remember that house that we put an offer in on back in Jan? Well we didn’t get it back then, but it’s still on the market and my Realtor just told us that the owner is going to pay for all the upgrades that we wanted. So were putting in another offer soon. Not exactly sure when, as I’m also looking at a few houses here in the LA/OC area.

This weekend is very busy. 70 miles tomorrow, then a comedy show if I can get the free tickets. Sunday is 30 miles and then perhaps another comedy show with Ben.

I really need money people. PLEASE donate! I’ve sent some of my readers e-mail cards, but they keep getting sent back (Spam filter). Every dollar helps!

My cats got a hard core combing today, they hate me now.

Lets sue someone!

So on my way into the office the other day I had a brilliant IDEA! Lets SUE all the SUV/Truck drivers for polluting the air! It’s for the KIDS I tell you! Who’s going to think about the kids!??!?!

Furniture from Airplanes! Some very cool stuff on that site! Really neat idea!

Ever wanted to merge PDFs? For a while now I’ve just been using PDFMergeX. Which has been very useful, but today I learned another GREAT built in MAC OSX feature… How to easily and quickly merge PDFs without an added application!

Launch Automator. Click on Finder > Get Selected Finder Items and add to the right. Add “Sort Finder Items” too. Click on PDF>Combine PDF Pages and click “Appending”. Then add “Open Finder Items”. Save it as a Plug-In called “Combine PDFs”.

After all that, select your PDFs with Contro-Click, then in your menu, you’ll see Automator>Combine PDFs. Click that and you’ll see your combined PDFs. Again, I doubt windows can do that!

Thursday night we went out and saw 300. Verrrrryyyy good. I’m going to have to start the 300 workout soon! lol.

That is all.

Big Brother State

All Employers should really read this:A Note To Employers: 8 Things Intelligent People, Geeks and Nerds Need To Work Happily.

JDub does it again. I wish I had the guts to just drop my life and get out there and do something like this. If only…

Do you own a Mac, use iPhoto? If you don’t use the photobook functions in iPhoto you should follow these instructions to save 300 megs. I’ve also found that it saves RAM when running iPhoto:

Here’s how to get rid of said folder:

Right click on iPhoto.app

Select Show Package Contents

Navigate to Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Themes

Delete it, burn it to disk, or offload it to external drive

Not much else really going on. I had a really annoying day today. I get in and have this meeting. I get assigned to do something. I had JUST got in, so I go back to my desk, read my e-mails and what not and then finish up another project, this all takes me about 1.5 hours. So then I go and start on this thing I was told to do. It takes me abot 20 minutes and then I run into something that i have a quick question about. So I IM the guy only to find out that he had already just gone ahead and done it. how very annoying! UGH!

I’m also getting REALLY sick of my friends/co-workers never inviting me anywhere. VERY annoying.

Random, creepy messages terrorize bisexual college students. REALLY interesting read! Who knew things like this happened!

Digg Me! I totally want one of these!

Look like a spartan. How the stars of “300” got that Greek statue look.

Oreo Cookies

Did you all see Ben and Jerry on the Colbert Report the other night? Well check out this Oreo demo:

Very funny stuff.

So I was just at the Grocery store just a couple minutes ago… And this is how a checkout SHOULD go. The guy in front of me didn’t have his Albertson’s card.. The cashier, turned to me, and said. ‘Do you have yours?’. I told her that I didn’t have it with me, she pulled hers out of her pocket and scanned it. No hastle, no stalling, no nothing. Just did it. Clearly she knows what’s going on! haha.

I’ve been using Macs for a while now, but every once in a while I find a new built in App that I just love. Two examples have come up in the last week. First, is DigitalColor Meter. I’ve been doing TONS of webdesign over the last couple months. Everytime my boss came to me and said. “You know I really like this color from such and such website” or “here’s a graphic can you use the primary colors from it”. I’d have to either digg through the CSS or open up Fireworks and use the color picker to figure out what color it was. Well with DigitalColor Meter, it’s very easy to open it up and just hover over it to get the color I need. Amazing. And the best part is, it comes built in. I really don’t think that your Windows box has something like that!?!?!

The second thing is FileMerge. I’ve been using Differences Examiner for years, and it’s a great utility, however it doesn’t let you see what parts of a line were changed, it’s written in Java so it’s slow and you can’t compare whole directories. So today I started to look for a new utility. And amazingly enough. Apple includes this amazing app called. “FileMerge”. Let me tell you it’s great! Apple you’ve done it again!

I can’t remember if I mentioned it before or not, but I did my taxes last week. I had to pay $500! Fuckers! :'( Soooo annoying.

This weekend is packed with things to do. I’m really looking forward to it!

Laters.

A New Company Site….

Well as some of you know, two weeks ago I was given a HUGE project of redesigning our company website. This is a huge undertaking for any graphics designer. And well, since I’m NOT a graphics designer, it’s an even bigger task for me. I was given 8 days to complete the task and handed a book of mock ups from our CEO as to what he wanted it to look like. The first round was in black and white…

I really didn’t like the looks of it. But I’ve learned that when the CEO gives me something like this, I don’t have much ability to change what he wants. When he says to design something new, with no mockups, I can do whatever I want. But when there’s mock-ups. He wants them to look identical.

So I started… I worked two whole days on the layout, the specific div tags, the placement of menus, etc. Then I got the color printouts. I HATED it.

But I followed it. I created the headings, the graphics. Everything. Hating each and every bit of it. I tried changing little bits here and there. It started to look better. Then we got into the review sessions, and they all got changed back. “Trebuchet” size 16 font for the main body, horrible. The placement, etc. I just couldn’t deal with it. But my input was falling on deaf ears.

Two days before it was to go live, the VP came over and asked to see it. He came up with some changes to make it look better, a couple new headers to try out, stuff like that. But it still looked horrible. The giant font on the body tags, etc. I just couldn’t deal.

We’re now 3 days past due, still working on content, etc. People have been working thier asses off on it. Trying to get it to look better.

Today at 1 I was getting ready to leave when some of the developers stopped over and asked how I felt about it. I said I hated it. They said they hated it, we brought in the VP and talked to him. We spent the next hour, the five of us frantically changing things, adding colors and graphics and trying out new headers.

I was amazed at how fast it came together. How quickly such an UGLY site could change to something so much better. Below is the version the CEO likes and the (close to) final product (that everyone else likes). Sadly, it still has to go through the CEO approval. Hopefully with 5 of us in there telling him this is what we like. It’ll get pushed through.

This is a project I would NOT put my name on…

This is a project, I’m happy to place my name on….

Some of the other projects I’ve been working my ass off on include a new mock-up site for McKesson… This is a site I was given by the CEO and told to have complete creative control over, yet make it “professional” looking as doctors/pharmacies, etc would be using it:

And lastly here’s the other latest website I did. There was a much better looking version of it that I liked better. Sadly it got scrapped.