Memos from February 2006

When You Lose Something Special

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So I have been busy these past cou­ple of days. I don’t even think I got out that much dur­ing the week­end, oth­er than to play soft­ball on Sat­ur­day noon. Besides that, it was pret­ty much spend­ing day­light in my room and being deviant with some projects both for work and for free­lance. Any­ways, I just want to share some­thing with you all… I lost some­thing spe­cial to me. Some­thing that has kept me dry at times, as well as kept me safe when I have to walk late at night—my umbrel­la, Tim­ba.

Timbaaa… Nooo…

I got her dur­ing Tim­ber­land’s 40%-off Friend & Fam­i­ly Sale this past year. She was great. She did her job well. It was just unfor­tu­nate to have lost her due to strong 18mph winds blow­ing south-south­west ear­ly tonight.

Any­ways, I just had to do an “obit­u­ary” per­say and share it with the great peo­ple over at Tim­ber­land. Here’s my solemn note:

RE: Mini Vent­ed Arc Umbrel­la

To whom it may con­cern,

“This umbrel­la fea­tures a clas­sic, vent­ed arc design that can hold its own (and hold its shape) even in strong winds.”

I real­ly love the com­pact­ness and built, but the winds tonight over at SF test­ed its build,

Pho­to of the umbrel­la

SF’s weath­er fore­cast

I got the umbrel­la through your Fall Friends and Fam­i­ly sale. I was won­der­ing when you guys are gonna have anoth­er one so I can get a hold of a new one. This sucks. Please help. I look for­ward to your reply.

Regards,
Sher­win “My vent­ed-arc-designed umbrel­la broke”

Box.net Relaunches

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I was for­tu­nate enough to get invit­ed by Aaron Levie to test Box.net’s “Ear­ly Adap­tor Pre­view” this past week­end. I could­n’t blurt any­thing till after the 22nd about it. But yah, I almost for­got as I’ve been busy enjoy­ing my Mon­day off from work.

Any­ways, so far so good. Here’s a cou­ple of my find­ings from the get­go:

  • Sooth­ing and attrac­tive col­or palette
  • UI upgrad­ed to be 2.0‑friendly
  • Right-click (after log­ging in) pops up a Box.net menu. A dis­ad­van­tage I guess, at least for me. Your browser’s right-click menu options won’t work. For exam­ple, Screen­grab FF exten­sion to take a cou­ple of screen­shots. Note: I men­tioned this to Aaron, he said that they might give an option to have it enabled/disabled lat­er on.
  • Upload­ing. At first, I thought the Upload-tab was going to change the actu­al page (com­ing from the Browse-sec­tion). It actu­al­ly just pops up a lay­er onto the view­port with its con­tent. If you are com­ing from any­where else oth­er than the Browse-sec­tion and clicked on Upload-tab, you are actu­al­ly redi­rect­ed to the Browse-sec­tion first and need to click on Upload-tab again to do the actu­al upoad. Note: As Aaron point­ed out through email, this is more of a “usabil­i­ty” thing and should be addressed lat­er on.

    Sec­ond, I thought the “drag-and-drop” was actu­al­ly func­tion­al so I test­ed an image file and dragged it to the brows­er win­dow, only to be greet­ed by the pre­view of the image itself. That is, the brows­er chang­ing its URL to the local files. “Oops.” Did­n’t know the “drag-and-drop” text was a link which pops up a win­dow (Java applet) for the actu­al drag-and-drop.

    Besides the above, I found that rel­a­tive­ly easy and intu­itive to upload your files. Grant­ed it ain’t there ain’t no Win­dows file-trans­fer ani­ma­tion, but its direct to the point—to get your files as fast and as safe as pos­si­ble from your hard-dri­ve to their server(s).

I’ll post some screen­shots lat­er today. It’s so pur­ty believe me. As for now, you may get a glimpse through this Box.net shared-fold­er, or via Box.net’s blog entry about the relaunch.

Note: Here are some pod­cast inter­views with Aaron Levie: a) by Gear Live, and b) Ven­tu­rus.

Who Said Yahoo Doesn’t Share for Free?

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Just last week, pre-Valen­tine’s Day, Yahoo! shows it love to the pub­lic by launch­ing User Inter­face Library and Design Pat­terns Library. Not to men­tion, the crazy cats over at the Yahoo! UI depart­ment have start­ed a blog as well. Dang, they seem to be grind­ing and shar­ing great tools with every­one. I like that. You may read more about inter­est­ing tech­nol­o­gy via Yahoo! Devel­op­er Net­work.

Spe­cial thanks goes out to Blingo.com, that I came across Peter Fre­itag’s blog entry about it. It’s just too bad I did­n’t win any­thing =|

The New Canon 30D

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Canon 30D

As I was doing my late-night news roundup, I stum­bled upon some inter­est­ing new Web 2.0 apps. The top two that are on my list to beta-test are Fold­era and Fly­spy. I can’t wait to see how Fold­era works, it seems that it’ll be use­ful at work and at home. As for Fly­spy, this thing should make it eas­i­er for those of us “remote­ly” work­ing from home. I hope it saves me a ton of cash so I may have some left for some oth­er good­ies lat­er this year. Not to men­tion, a cou­ple of expens­es dur­ing my big trips (Hawaii, Japan and P.I.).

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