Memos from August 2005

Don’t Sleep on Late Registration

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Kanye West - Late Registration

I have to admit, Kanye “did it again” (as Jay-Z would say). Another one for the record books. A CD that you can actu­ally buy and not stress if its worth the money or not. I had the oppor­tu­nity to lis­ten to it, and was impressed and amazed. Each track… each track, OMG… its really hard to describe the feel­ing that you get when you’re lis­ten­ing to this album. The only solu­tion is for you to lis­ten to it on your own. Bot­tom­line, go cop it in-stores tomorrow.

If you are look­ing for books and order­ing through Amazon.com, its $10.99 there… click here to add it to your cart.

Here’s the com­plete track-listing:

  1. Wake Up Mr. West (:41)
  2. Heard ‘Em Say fea­tur­ing Adam Levine of Maroon 5 (3:24)
  3. Touch The Sky fea­tur­ing Lupe Fiasco (3:56)
  4. Gold Dig­ger fea­tur­ing Jamie Foxx (3:27)
  5. Skit #1 (:33)
  6. Drive Slow fea­tur­ing Paul Wall & GLC (4:32)
  7. My Way Home fea­tur­ing Com­mon (1:43)
  8. Crack Music fea­tur­ing Game (4:31)
  9. Roses (4:05)
  10. Bring Me Down fea­tur­ing Brandy (3:19)
  11. Addic­tion (4:27)
  12. Skit #2 (:31)
  13. Dia­monds From Sierra Leone (Remix) fea­tur­ing Jay-Z (3:53)
  14. We Major fea­tur­ing Nas & Really Doe (7:28)
  15. Skit #3 (:24)
  16. Hey Mama (5:05)
  17. Cel­e­bra­tion (3:18)
  18. Skit #4 (1:19)
  19. Gone fea­tur­ing Con­se­quence & Cam’Ron (5:33)
  20. **BONUS TRACK**Diamonds From Sierra Leone (3:58)
  21. **HIDDEN TRACK** Late (3:50)

Movable Type 3.2 Free from Beta

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OK. So this might sound some­what geeky but oh-damn-well… this involves technology—a part of me. Any­ways, Six Apart’s Jay Allen announced last night that Mov­able Type 3.2 will be released on 8/25/05 in the AM. That was cool.

I mean, for those of you that have been fol­low­ing our blogs (Kelly, Juan, Ryan and I), you may notice the “Pow­ered by Mov­able Type…” text-link some­where. I have been using their great soft­ware since 2002. After all these years, through all the hack­ing and cus­tomiza­tion, if I have to do it over again and pick a blog­ging soft­ware… it still would have to be Mov­able Type.

Yah, it might sound bias (I know) but MT has proven itself (IMHO) after numer­ous ver­sions that it adapts to new and un-forecastable changes in the Blo­gos­phere, and most impor­tantly on the WWW. “What changes?” You might say. Well, first of all, I have to give credit to Blog­ger for mak­ing me curi­ous enough to start and express my thoughts on mostly about any­thing, as I was “bored as hell” one day dur­ing a pro­gram­ming class back in UCI. I remem­ber back in the days that I wanted to do more stuff with my first-ever blogsite. I felt con­stricted to what I was offered, and just need a new solution.

So after Yahoo!-ing (no Google yet in my vocab) and con­fer­ring with var­i­ous peo­ple on what stand-alone blog­ging soft­ware, a cou­ple of names came about. I remem­ber James using b2, so that made it on top of my list along with other ones from hotscripts.com. But alas, after a lot of think­ing, test­ing and research­ing com­mu­nity forums of the respec­tive blog­ware… I found Mov­able Type’s to be the most active, inno­v­a­tive and solution-driven group of invidi­vid­u­als. This was the decid­ing fac­tor in mak­ing my leap-of-faith to switch from Blog­ger to a stand-alone blogware—thank god I made a good choice.

Mean­while, I can tell you a lot more of my his­tory with MT and how it affected and helped my career in Tech­nol­ogy but that can go on for­ever. I’ve seen it evolve from a strict blog­ware, to a CMS, to a publishing-platform, …to who-knos-what with this new release. It has:

  • helped me share my day with friends and fam­ily (vice-versa),
  • keep my design-skills stay creative,
  • pushed me to increase my knowl­edge of new web-technologies (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
  • and… type faster, to say the least =)

So whats in it for you, I don’t know. Its really an open-ended ques­tion that has no right or wrong answers. But I do know this, it proves that it is a “small world.” And every nano-second, new ideas are being thought of to get peo­ple to inter­act with each other more. After all, we’re only six degrees apart.

PS. Thanks to 6A-fam and MT-dev com­mu­nity for their great hard­work in pro­duc­ing another prod­uct (that I feel) will have an immense effect on the inter­net and how peo­ple inter­act with each other.

PPS. Thanks to 6A-fam for pro­vid­ing us who beta-tested 3.2 with this badge haha =)

I beta tested Movable Type 3.2

Flickr Yahoos!

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Signin to Flickr using Yahoo account

Stew­art But­ter­field, one of the smart peo­ple from Flickr, announced early this morn­ing that you can now sign-in and have the option to inte­grate your Yahoo! account with Flickr. This is great stuff for those with Yahoo! accounts in that they don’t have to remem­ber another login, for those that do that kind of stuff any­ways. The only down­side, a tem­po­rary one, was that for peo­ple using third-party Flickr API-based pro­grams (like myself) have to wait for the devel­op­ers to update them with the new authen­ti­ca­tion API.

The pro­gram that I use a lot would have to be by Jon Gilk­i­son called Flick­rIm­portr. I use it to do my uploads and set man­age­ment. I would say that its 10x bet­ter than Flickr’s own Uploadr tool, at the moment.

Mean­while, as I keep say­ing, if you blog and recently start tak­ing more and more pics with your dig­i­tal cam­era (point-and-shoot, phone and/or dSLR)… then Flickr is the way to go. Not to men­tion the great com­mu­nity that it has. If you ain’t sold, then check out the qual­ity of pics Flickr pho­tog­ra­phers take via the Explore page.

Any­ways, good morn­ing and go Flickr!

PS. I won­der if Flickr would be adding that damn excla­ma­tion mark like Yahoo!‘s. Look­ing at it, it’ll be hard to be gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect when you write about Flickr, specif­i­cally when you describe some­thing from Flickr like Flickr!‘s web­site… its just plain wrong but so right with the cur­rent news. I need to wake up. Sorry for the non­sense early in the morn­ing. Good times =)

10 Best Resources for CSS

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Looks like CSS has been slash­dot­ted. I guess this is not a sur­prise, for me at least, since CSS is like milk for a choco­late, webpage-cake… Yah, you laugh now… “Geek”, you say…

…I know man, WTF?!

But hey, its a hobby; its part of new media design; its my pro­fes­sion and pas­sion … its my Life—Welcome! Any­ways, just to sum­ma­rize what this arti­cle links to, here they are… the 10 Best Resources (as of July 20, 2005):

As they say, prac­tice makes per­fect. Good luck on your quest to geekiness.

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