Brian Sweeting

Jeff Han from NYU demonstrates a touch interface at eTech that makes Minority Report pretty much reality. This is pretty amazing stuff. Watch the demo: Quicktime | MPEG

On Saturday, we had some plumbing problems at our rental property. I called Brent at Utah Valley Handyman Services, and he was there within a couple of hours. This guy has the handyman skills that every wife wishes her husband had. He is very thorough, and really explains what he’s doing as he fixes the problem. This is the second time I’ve called him in a pinch, and he saved the day both times.

If you’re in Utah County, and need a handyman for rental properties (or even your own home), I highly recommend calling Brent at Utah Valley Handyman Services (801) 830-0068.

I have been using del.icio.us for about a year and a half, and it has been a great way to save links to things that are interesting to me. I recently started subscribing to some of my friends link feeds, because I find that what is interesting to them, is also interesting to me. I also subscribe to the del.icio.us popular feed to see what everyone is linking to. The problem I had is that to find other people’s link feeds, I had to guess at their username.

Enter Ma.gnolia. After finding the site through a link on Jeffery Zeldman’s website, I had imported my del.icio.us bookmarks, added some contacts, and joined some groups. It took about 10 minutes to make the switch. I also changed a single url, so the recent links section on my site was pointing at Ma.gnolia instead of del.icio.us.

I tend to be fairly loyal to a web service once I start using it, mainly because I become accustom to the way they work. With Ma.gnolia, I was able to easily make the transition and see that it has more to offer that del.icio.us ever has. Ma.gnolia does a much better job on the “social” aspect of “social bookmarking”. So go try it out and make sure to add me as a contact.

This post is from the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo. KayeLynne just got an epidural and the contractions are about 2 minutes apart. Everything is looking good. Fortunately the hospital has public Wi-Fi, so Dad’s all set too. More news after the event.

Update: Elin Ivy Sweeting came into the world at 7:17 PM MST, weighing 6lbs., 6oz., at 18in. long.

Guy Kawasaki, entreprenuer and author of The Art of the Start has started a blog. He only started it at the end of December, and I’ve hardly found a post so far that isn’t worth linking to. Great posts on entrepreneurism, venture capitalistism, innovation, Apple Computer, presentations, and life.

I caught this on Digg this morning. How diabolic! Beware website owners, this is a common exploit that all browsers are capable of executing.

Back in the old days, which for me was about 1998, I remember how much of a pain it was to set up a web development environment on a computer. Go get this package, install this component, build with these options, etc.

That pain has been completely eliminated for me now. I use two standalone applications that give me a robust environment for developing with Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Apache/LightTPD on my PowerBook. For Rails I use Locomotive, which gives me a quick way to get a Ruby on Rails Environment up and running with LightTPD and FastCGI. I also use MAMP, to get a Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment setup quickly. MAMP even has a dashboard widget that lets you start and stop the servers.

If you’re on Windows and need a good Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment, I recommend WAMP. For Rails you can use: InstantRails

Update: Randy recommends XAMPP for Windows. I tried this today, and I must say it seems quite a bit better than WAMP. Thanks Randy.

I love my webhost. They are constantly giving me stuff that I don’t have to pay extra for. Just this month they doubled the diskspace quota and quadrupled the bandwidth quota for all of their customers. They have a page of features where their customers can suggest (and vote for) new features to be added. And they reward their existing customers through a generous rewards program, and by increasing your diskspace and bandwidth every week that you are with them.

This company really has a formula for success: Cut costs and be smart to reduce your costs, and then pass that benefit on to the customer. And then keep adding value at no extra charge. The funny thing is, I doubt ‘ll use 1.6+TB of bandwidth per month, but it’s the goodwill of them just giving it to me for free that solidifies my loyalty to them. I only wish the insurance companies, financial institutions, and other organizations I do business with regularly took the same approach.

Internet Archive has 26,097 public domain movies that you can download for free. I especially recommend the classic cartoons section.

I’m back! Okay, so I didn’t really go anywhere, but I might as well have given the sad state of this blog. I have had a change of heart (and mind) as to what the purpose of this blog is. Several months ago, I redesigned, and changed the format a bit to more of a professional topics only sort of blog. I’ve decided that is not what I want this blog to be. The problem was that I would rarely update my blog, because I felt like I had to have something well-thought out, and poignant to write. Now this blog is going to be about me: what I like, don’t like, am thinking whether it is something about web design or how much I enjoyed my wife’s Chicken & Spinach enchiladas last night. I don’t expect this to make my subscriptions numbers go up…they might even go down, but that’s okay. I want to follow the same kind of formats that seem to work quite well for Dan Cedarholm, Todd Dominey, Jeffery Zeldman, and others like them. This means that a large portion of the content on this blog will be about things related to web design and usability, but it will also include more observational and personal-type stuff as well. My goal is to write a blog that is indicative of the type of person I am. It’s time to “get real”.