ricardocabellov5.5

Months ago everyone was speaking about Wii. Wii was everywere, everyone was hacking it, a lot of videos of people using it. I even thought it was the best idea of the year. But now, it looks like it was released 5 years ago. Everything has a BOOM, but I didn't expected to be like that. Does anyone still speaks about it? What was the problem? Too childish games?

Now is time to see what Spiderm... sorry, Playstation 3 have to say about all this, and maybe its because they sell it very well, but seems that they're also doing something really cool. Although I don't think I'll buy it, in the same way I didn't want to buy the Wii, and I didn't.

Sorry, I had to do it!

Finally reaching the 6th month mark. Seems that is going well.

I still have to get better on delivery times, but I think i'm good enough dealing with clients, answering emails and stuff.

There is some stuff you would need if you want to go freelance. The first one, I called it Econodoob ;) and its money/invoice/time tracker. I just implemented the time tracker today. So you submit the amount+time spent, and having all the info then you only need to do some nice Graphs. I'm afraid I don't think is a good idea to share those graphs, but I've done something like..

Cashflow (real)
Cashflow (theoric)
Time spent
Invoice value (input)
Bills value (output)

Yeah, it's cashflow because I include the bills I've to pay to see what goes in and out. If you want to make sure that the 'business' is going well, you need that kind of visibility. And to be honest, doing a tool with PHP to record/track/report all that info is a matter of 1day of work. Isn't it cool to have the knowledge to develop your own little apps so you don't depend of other BIG apps that you will use only a 1% of them?

The other thing you will probably need to do is to move to an office. Working a home gets very annoying at some point. You need some place, some environment that makes you think: "Right, I'm at work, I should be working now". Right now, I watch a movie if I feel like, it's too easy to get distracted.

So the idea is renting a desk in an office, so I would end up sharing the office with other people, freelancers, companies... By now, the best place I've found to look at is at the gumtree. I should be going tomorrow Friday to watch a nice one, see how it goes

We didn't have time to learn enough about this country yet, but we have seen that they have in some maps ghost symbols to consider the zone doomed or something like that. This place is weird and small. Very small.

And to show the ghosty thing, all the pictures we've done today got lost when I connected the camera to my laptop :O It formatted itself somehow! Well annoying because apart from some pretty cool pictures I did a video of the plane landing, the terrain with snow was simply great, and the video was superb. But somehow, all lost.

Weird

Is it just me or these days Microsoft are "sending" a lot of updates and which forces you to restart the system almost everyday?

I'm tired of moving the window of 'Restart now' to outside the screen so it stops asking me for it :(

I'm gonna be a mac fan here... I don't remember the last time I had to restart MacOS.

This is how the calendar looks like this year... I'm afraid that Barcelona won't be on the list this year.

February 22 - 26:  Reykjavik, Iceland
March 31 - April 8:  Sevilla, Spain
May 4 - 7: Dublin, Ireland
June 6 - 13: Menorca, Spain
August 2 - 5: Helsinki, Finland (Assembly)

So, If you have ever been to any of these places, I'll love to 'hear' some recommendations and tips for places to go :)

PS: Mum: hope you like to be aware of the travels before I do them instead of after this time ;)

http://www.beatport.com/

This is probably one of the best flash website ever done. Very good example of how Flash can make the user experience much better than a fully accessible website. Compare it to any other online store, and compare how's you listen the previews of the tracks and how many clicks you have to do. I guess this is a good example that sometimes is better to not concentrate on accessibility and concentrate on doing a good service which then ends in a good business.

I'll probably buy some tracks there :)

Edit: I forgot to say iTunes sucks!

"Bustamante se acaba de comprar una casa de 500 ks. de las antiguas pesetas en solo CUATRO AÑOS DE CARRERA MUSICAL."

Pero que super fuerte me parece!!! Hace falta que diga que todo esto es gracias a la television y un claro ejemplo de como saben mover a las masas como si fuesen becerros para ver lo que ellos quieren. Si Bustamante tiene todo ese dinero en 4 años, cuanto tendran los de Gestmusic? Si es que ni siquiera se preocupan de hacerse una web, pa que?

Asi que, compañeros... Sigan viendo la TV, sigan hablando de lo que sale en la TV, sigan marujeando/criticando de los que salen en la TV, hagan publicidad gratis para ellos. Y luego quejense que España esta mal y quejense de que no tienen dinero para pagar un piso. Claro, se han pasado la vida trabajando gratis como simples postes publicitarios moviles en vez de preocuparse por sus propios negocios. Sigan viendo la TV.

Well, looks like yesterday Windows Vista was finally released. I thought it was already released, I guess the amount of beta's and RC versions that were out there confused me.

So, I woke up yesterday at 6pm or something (having a really weird sleep times these days) and after looking a bit the news I saw somewhere someone talking about it. it was shocking, after all the time that they were talking about the new version, I didn't saw too many people talking about it, I mean, again, probably it was because all those leaked versions and there was no real news at that point.

However, I was like, ok, let's see how Microsoft do the presentations nowadays. So, after checking the really bad usability of the flash on windows vista site, I went to see the video of Bill Gates presentation. And, oh boy... how can they be that bad? how can they be that ugly? how can they be that so boring? It starts with a rock band playing a reversion of a known tune. The singer is weird and is not always singing with the microphone on his mouth, so the sound goes on and off. Annoying!

Then, a very American voice introduces the Bill Gates (hilarious how american that voice sound ;D). So, Bill start speaking and it gets even more hilarious, didn't realised the voice he has, looks like he is still on the puberty years. What a voice, what a voice! Whatever he says can't be taken seriously. I can't believe how he managed to do all what he did just with what his presence inspire to the viewer.

Anyway, let's leave the little guy alone and concentrate on the show. Oh dear, who the hell is working on the style on Microsoft? Everything looks really wannabe. All those glows, looks like the found the glow option on Photoshop there! And now, just to see that I'm being serious with that I'm going to talk about a little detail that really looks bad but you don't usually see it.

It's called Kerning.

Check this screenshot out:





So, are you telling me that these guys spent a lot of years working on this new product, and probably spent a lot of money doing the slides for this presentation, and they didn't have time to fix the kerning? Whoever did that slide, he was able to put all the blending modes that photoshop offer, glow, shadows, and even inside gradient for the text. But, what about the kerning? In case you're wondering what Kerning is:






This is just another example of how Microsoft cares about little details. And there they are, talking about digital and showing how bad they use the digital resources. Kerning is something that you don't have time to fix, the fonts usually have the kerning fucked up (I don't know if that's because limitations of the format), so when you do any design, at the end you have to spend a bit of time fixing the kerning of the texts, specially if it's something for print. And you may say, that's just a little detail, it doesn't matter. Well, you think it doesn't matter, it matters for the designers, and it matters in your brain too, but you don't realise.

Well, that's it by now, I'll keep watching the presentation. It's the second time I try to watch it, looks like they're not able to stream the video on a decent speed. And as I say the content/presentation is extremely boring. Hope to don't have to write anything else about it.

I remember years ago, when I did threepixels' site. It had a oneliner, anybody could write there whatever they wanted. It was all so cool, and clean, no spam at all. By then I almost didn't know what spam was.

I wonder what would had been like if threepixels's site was done again, with the same code. How long the spammers would had started to fill that tinny box with url's and crap?

This site was starting to be like that. Looks like internet is becoming as dangerous as the real life. Having a inputbox on your site is like going out at night naked, walk a bit, walk a bit, and someone will use you, as the sapmmers try to use that inputbox.

Oh well, now, after cleaning the 500+ spam comments from the database, it was time to stop trying to figure out antiSpam systems by myself and use a package that other systems use: Akismet. With a bit of Sole's help and with this great Bret Kuhns class I had the system up and running in a couple of minutes.

Now I just have to wait and see how everything works. Sorry for everyone that submitted a comment to the site the last couple of months and that had to wait a lot to finally see it online! I hope this is over now.