A call to action for NASA, the United States Government and the rest of the world
Recently, I was watching an older episode of Top Gear UK, the episode where James May visited NASA and took the latest iteration of the moon buggy out for a spin (first half featured below). Watching this segment, you can clearly see that here is a mature adult who made a career out of driving million dollar super cars, driving an incredibly awkward vehicle at a top speed of 10 miles an hour who has suddenly become a kid again with a dream that he too could someday be an astronaut again. This dream is nothing more than the sheer manifestation of immense inspiration obtained from pure technical and scientific achievement; only, to be met with the utter disappointment when he realizes that this vehicle will never actually be able to make it to the moon because the United States Government suspended funding for any future moon missions.
First Half of the Top Gear UK Moon Buggy Segment.
In an attempt to keep this very dream alive, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has been trying very hard to breathe life back into the spirit of discovery and how it will help to fix the many economic issues society currently faces today but also, give the younger generations something to strive towards and dream about once again. Dr. Tyson’s analysis of history shows that there is a direct correlation between scientific achievement, economic stimulation and revolutionary entrepreneurship through public missions like the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. These missions not only give us insight into how our species came to be so we can help to predict our fate and future and ensure our continued existence on earth but, they also pave way for generations of inspiration and technical/scientific advancement to come.
Video of “Neil deGrasse Tyson – We Stopped Dreaming”
Where am I going with this? Scientific discovery is not just a United States mission. It is a mission that any person can feel empowered and make a difference. James May of Top Gear in Britain shouldn’t feel let down because of the lack of priority by the US Government. A child should not stop dreaming because he/she will not be able to experience the joy and excitement of watching another moon landing like my parents did about 40 years ago.
We live in a bureaucratic society. By the very definition of bureaucracy (according to Merriam-Webster), is “a body of nonelective government officials.” After watching a TED Talk from Jennifer Pahlka, I realized that we are going about this all wrong. We, as citizens of the world, have an opportunity and an obligation to keep those dreams alive. We shouldn’t be waiting for the government to properly prioritize NASA’s funding. If we waited, it would probably never happen. Let’s do what the government is failing to do.
Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a better government
While Dr. Tyson’s awareness campaign have been very enlightening, a call to action is required if we really want to move forward. I propose, we breathe life back into our dreams, stop waiting for the government, and let’s start awareness conferences and non-profit organizations’ where we can get the entire world to be able to donate and jumpstart another lunar mission and put NASA back in its rightful place of enabling us to dream again, and fulfilling our mission to send our society into the next unknown.
Over the past few months I have been slowly but, surely been chipping away at a new idea I had. I wanted to create a website that could motivate and energize people purely based on the content provided on the website. I thought that this could be a catchy concept which, was intuitive enough that anyone could pickup and understand easily, without much thought; yet, it was unique enough so it is not just a copy of everything else on the web.
What is it about?
In order to intuitively express this concept I decided to implement different degrees of energy based on familiar concepts. I broke the site out into 3 degrees of energy: Tea, Coffee, and Energy (drinks). The tea section, is the lower of the energy intakes. It will provide content that is more intellectually stimulating or laid back mental stimulation. The energy (drink) section, is the highest caffeine intake. This section will contain action sports, some MMA fighting, etc.; content, that will be “balls to the wall” crazy. Then, you have coffee. This is a middle of the road energy intake. Here, I will have content that isn’t exactly intellectually stimulating or high impact energetic content. Instead, you will find funny, shocking, and just randomly cool, stimulating content. Additionally, I intend to incorporate news about the various beverages; so, you can stay on top of the latest news and concepts surrounding your favorite caffeinated beverage.
The Design
My aim at the design of this site is to be welcoming, innovative, and stimulating on its own. The header is busy because I feel it really expresses all the aspects of the site in one illustration. As previously mentioned, there are three sections to this site. Energy, Coffee, and Tea. This way, a user can filter the content on the site by a particular energy level and get though their afternoon crash, while sipping on their favorite caffeinated beverage. The comments engine is built using the Disqus comment system (which, you can read about here). When developing, I thought for the future. I applied a lot of CSS3 design concepts. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you use a modern browser. The latest Firefox, Chrome, or Safari are preferred. IE6 will not be supported. Have a look at Redesign: My WordPress Journey for my reasoning behind dropping IE6 support and coding with CSS3 concepts.
What are you waiting for?
… Go on over to http://AfternoonCrash.com and check it out! All feedback is welcome, and you can use my Contact Form and let me know any questions, concerns or comment you have. All feedback is more than welcome. Finally, don’t be afraid to get involved. I would love to generate a community who helps steer this site. So, go on and comment, share stories and, even submit them to me and I might just use it!
Over the past month or so I have visited a few sites. I commented on various articles and I couldn’t help but notice, they all had a pretty cool comment system. Normally, I wouldn’t have payed much attention but, I started noticing it was giving me statistics on my comments from other websites. After researching, it quickly became apparent that this comment system should be everywhere. It equally benefits the site admin and the site viewer.
The Admin’s Perspective
The Disqus team really thought about the user and the admin with this product. Without exaggeration, I was able to apply for a Disqus account, configure the settings and install in under 10 minutes. Disqus supports the most popular blog platforms. My perspective will be from WordPress. After installing, all there was left to do was, add some styling to fit my theme a little better (not that there was much to change because the system is very clean and simple). Disqus even includes a custom styling section where you can add CSS of your choosing, with a built in preview. Unfortunately, the preview only seems to show positioning. Integration with the website is seamless. So seamless, it exports comments from your old comment system and imports it into Disqus with an automated system. Want your site to be mobile friendly? Disqus is now automatically enabled for it’s mobile version. Afraid of getting spammed? Disqus integrates with Akismet. From comment moderation to following discussions away from your site, about your site (reactions), this system has it all.
The Commenter’s Perspective
As you go from blog to blog, you may become more and more involved in discussion. However, that discussion usually ends after you move onto the next article or you have to remember the page and go back to it. Not with Disqus. Disqus is a system that stores your comments in their system, as well as, each individual website. Don’t worry because “Disqus does not make any claims to the ownership or control of the comments.” This means that you can create a Disqus profile and then check out all of your comments from http://discus.com/username. Here you can reply to your comment discussions to continue the discussion for all of the comments in once place, without ever having to go back to the individual websites. Even if you don’t want a profile, you can comment using your Twitter, Facebook and OpenID accounts. Disqus adds to the social by allowing other commenters to vote by “liking” your comment. This, in turn, allows comments to be sorted by popularity. Earlier, I mentioned that Disqus has an import feature. When sites import old comments it enables another useful feature. As a commenter with a Disqus profile, Disqus will search through comments from those old systems and allow you to link your old comments into this system.
Room For Improvement
Now that I have Disqus setup, I see a few issues that I would like to check out. Looking through the Knowledge Base, it feels like a glorified FAQ and is not very search friendly. I also wish there was better documentation surrounding how to properly handle your old comment system. As previously noted, the custom code preview doesn’t show your theme and doesn’t appear to show pre-CSS3 code like -moz and -webkit. Yeah, I know, I am nitpicking.
In Conclusion
In my opinion, this is a great product. As you can see this is an incredibly useful tool which is going to revolutionize the commenting systems available today. There are too many features to list here and I am still digging through them all. What are you waiting for? Get over to Disqus.com and let me know what you think in the comments!
Decided to play around with abstract art in photoshop. I hope you like it, as always let me know what you think in the comments. Feel free to download a copy as your computer wallpaper.
As noted before, when I created this site I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to take it. My decision is to make primarily a Design portfolio showcasing my work with a blog component. It is not that the blog isn’t important to me but, I wanted to show equal emphasis on my design work and capabilities.
When I set out to redesign this site it quickly became clear, I had a lot of work to do. I wanted something simple, clean, usable, creative and stylish. The landing page is the most important part of the site. I set out to welcome guests with the entire site experience in one place. After some thought, I found that I wanted to create a static page with dynamic content. Researching WordPress, I realized this was harder than previously thought. During my research, I kept reading about pages vs. posts and how there is a hierarchy of pages. Determined to understand this hierarchy, I consulted my previous theme’s template and Google. I only became more and more confused. People were talking about widgets and different pages that have specific semantic meanings. My template seemed to be missing something. The confusion lasted until I saw a forum post, where someone was trying to use these WordPress features and couldn’t figure it out. They posted their confusion on a forum and received the reply, “you probably have an old theme.” I then consulted the default WordPress theme and saw template php pages to take advantage of these new features. It was clear at this point, I had to abandon the old theme and plan for the future. I decided I was going to utilize the templates of the default theme to build my site.
Now that I had some ideas down I knew I had to act on them. When I was first putting this site up, I found a theme and just improved upon it. I did this with the built-in WordPress theme editor. This presents its own challenges, including, every change saved gets applied to the live site immediately. In a proper development environment this is less than ideal. After some more research, I came across xampp. Xampp is an application that turns your computer into an offline Apache web server. This was the perfect solution because I could export my current site and database information; then, built a new theme around this established content.
The design was created completely by me with Photoshop; then, sliced up for this website. I chose a dark theme because they are said to be among the most difficult to create. You are limited to the colors, lighting, and textures you can use. With lighting limitations, depth becomes difficult. This then became a challenge I had to complete. I feel I successfully embarked on the journey through the dark side to create a complex design that somehow has an elegant simplicity.
Looking good only works, if it’s functional. I paid particular attention to layout and the future; two concepts that are seemingly unrelated but, have more in common with each other than one may think. That commonality is functionality. In terms of layout we can look at coding. The coding is heavily reliant on CSS, PHP, HTML and JavaScript. This combination of coding delivers a fast, clean and flexible environment. This will lead to a platform that is ready to take on whatever the future has to offer. These do play a role in developing for the future but, not as much as out next topic, the browser. At this stage in the game the browser has become the most talked about part the web. The term “modern browser” has become a popular term; a term that refers to the ability to support web standards and enable the ability to understand HTML5 and CSS3. When deciding how I would code this site I chose not to fully utilize the features of CSS3 because support is still scarce and require hooks like -webkit (safari and chrome) and -moz (Firefox). The final version will drop those hook causing me to rewrite a bunch of code. Planning for the future has some serious decisions.
One of the biggest decisions you have to make now is whether to support Internet Explorer 6. I decided to take the same stance as big companies like youtube.com have taken and not support this site on Internet Explorer 6. Aside from the coding horror of trying to make IE6 render properly, Microsoft even seems to indicate that they support the browser for the lifetime of the operating System it was shipped with, by saying:
The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.
Since Microsoft has decided to drop mainstream support for Windows XP, they will therefore drop support for Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft will only continue to offer support for XP over extended contracts. This is not something the general consumer will buy into and is mostly for corporations who need an extension to upgrade hundreds, if not thousands of computers. My site’s users are generally consumers without extended XP contracts. Therefore, I have dropped my support for IE6. IE6 is not one of the aforementioned “modern browsers.” There is little reason for any consumer to continue to use IE6 because you can get far more features, security, and usability enhancements from any of the later released web browsers. Internet explorer 8 was the first Microsoft web browser that didn’t seem to break any of my websites when using stylesheets from Firefox, chrome and opera.
Thank you for taking the time to stop by my site. I hope you enjoy your stay. Feel free to comment on posts and send me feedback. I am always looking for work. If you want consulting or for me to build you a site, don’t hesitate to use the contact form and send me a message.
The guys over at Mint.com often have good articles on their blog. Be sure to read over this infographic because this has been proven time and time again but, people are still getting screwed over everyday.
Recently I purchased an ASUS P5N-D motherboard to replace the one that failed in my Dell 8400. This ended up being a Dell proprietary nightmare and needless to say I ended up with nearly a whole new rig. Since setting it up, I had to iron out a few kinks. One of which was an annoying static that came from my 2.1 speaker system (that came with my Dell 8400 a few years back). After searching the web for a few days I couldn’t find anything helpful. Most everything suggested hardware failure or driver issues. Turns out that it is a problem with the internal speaker volume. Wait… what?!? Yes, the internal speaker volume is what caused my issue.
If you go to into the Realtek audio volume control there is an option for adjusting the internal speaker volume and the following steps will help you fix this:
Right-click on the Realtek icon in the task-bar.
Select “Sound Manager” from the pop-up.
Now select the Mixer tab and click the arrow (highlighted in red below) until the PC Beep is visible. Now lower it until the static feedback goes away.
Canonical has released it’s beta version of it’s first cloud-based operating system synchronization software, Ubuntu One. For anyone who knows me, I love Ubuntu and Dropbox. Although this is making big news, I am not very excited.
Cloud-based operating system synchronization software is a great idea; however, it will inevitably fail as the de facto standard. With the Ubuntu One service plan, you get 2 gig of storage for free and for $10 you get 10 gig of space. Smells like they are taking a bite out of the Dropbox success, right? Wrong. As much as this sounds like a match made in heaven to have a Dropbox like application built into the operating system, it is not. Instead, Canonical is going to add a service that is already provided but, with far less benefits.
Ubuntu is a great operating system and there are many reasons while I will continue to use it; however, the Ubuntu operating system is flawed. There are many problems with this operating system, see Bryan Lunduke’s presentation to get a view of the problems Linux faces on the desktop platform. Basically, Canonical is adding a redundant piece of software that they have to update and maintain; yet, they still haven’t addressed many of the problems that Ubuntu faces on a regular basis. Ubuntu 9.04 is the best version yet. Many improvements make it very stable, fast, and functional but, I still can’t use Photoshop, play mainstream games, and use other proprietary and superior, software that I can on windows. Perhaps Canonical should really be concentrating it’s resources on this aspect instead.
Since, I still have to switch to windows to use most of the industry standard software, Ubuntu One will not cut it. Dropbox will continue to serve my needs because I can install it on my work provided windows laptop, on both Ubuntu and Windows boots on my desktop and even if I had a Mac, I could install it there too.
In conclusion, software which caters to one operating system or oneweb browser will die a slow painful death. Every operating system has their benefits and draw backs. None of them are perfect. Take Internet Explorer for example. Microsoft keeps rolling out new versions of the web browser yet, they won’t create versions for different operating systems. Yes, you can install Internet Explorer on Macs but, there hasn’t been a new version since IE5. Also, there is IEs4Linux which hasn’t been updated since about 2006 with IE6 the highest version you can go and it is really buggy. Look at what we see happening, slowly but surely, alternative browsers like Firefox are taking market share. Even Apple understands this concept, you think the iPod would have had this much success if you couldn’t use it with windows? The era of operating system specific software is dead and gone. The companies that realize this will prevail, the others will fade away.
in the task-bar.
