September Randoms
Some items of interest from this month:
- Keith, Matt, Nick, and Brian just launched BlueFlavor tonight. Head on over and check out their new shop.
- Andy, Richard, and Jeremy launched ClearLeft last week. Very check-out-worthy as well.
- I just won my fantasy football match against Scrivs tonight and am quite happy about it. In all fairness, my linebacker injured his wide receiver on Monday Night Football so it should have been closer. In other news, the NeinRüLz network continues to grow impressively.
- Finkbuilt is having a ketchup label design contest. Enter and win yourself some two-dollar bills.
- The 6th Monthly iPod Giveaway doesn’t have a ton of entries yet but has raised over $1600 so far for the Red Cross in the first week.
- I’m at the end of my rope with this Comcast HD PVR, and let me just tell you once again how badly it sucks. If you want to start watching way less TV, this is your device. If you like watching TV, however, definitely stick with your Tivo or another alternative.
- Speaking of annoying TV-related things, Rita Cosby, MSNBC’s new correspondent has a very annoying way about her. Am I the only one who is totally creeped out by her voice?
- Stan pointed me to the Leo Burnett site recently. It’s one of the most creatively designed and produced sites I’ve seen in a very long time.
- If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale. I just found out the Black Keys played in Seattle last week. Slipped right past me, as these things sometimes do. I know there’s Upcoming.org, but for some reason they seem to miss a lot of stuff and aren’t very timely either. Is there anything better out there right now?
- I am liking Flash 8 quite a bit so far. The built-in components are still bloated as all hell though. I needed to make a simple MP3 player the other day and using the built-in media controller, it was 80k. I ended up hand-rolling a player instead and got it down to 3k including the skin. Hand-built components are still apparently the best way to deploy media in Flash… for audio at least. Also, with regards to Flash 8, we’ll be releasing a new version of sIFR pretty soon which takes advantage of the new Saffron text-rendering engine. I wouldn’t call this a mandatory upgrade at all, but it will provide crisper text — especially at small sizes — for people who have Flash 8 installed.
- One of the best articles I’ve ever read on electronic media evolution is Seth Goldstein’s Media Futures. It’s a five part piece with the fifth part itself being five parts, so make sure to read the whole thing when you get a chance. I first read Seth’s essay a few months ago but have re-read it a couple of times since. Great stuff. Seth also led an interesting discussion at Foo Camp on Attention Trust.
- Bananas Foster ice cream from Haagen Dazs is very, very good.
- Trimming your blogroll can be quite therapeutic.
- Crest Vanilla Mint toothpaste tastes a lot like a Captain & Coke.
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You have no idea how good it makes me feel to hear someone else wants a *good* concert feed. I want to type in my zip code, enter in a radius of travel, and get updates of bands / genres I like and have it tell me about the concerts. I’ve missed far too many shows because I’m not keeping up with the 10 different venue sites on a daily basis.
That Leo Burnett site is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
You are so right about Rita Cosby. Who the hell hired her?!??! Every time I hear her (right before hitting the Mute button) I think
of the old saying he’s got a face for radio but in this case she’s got a voice for newspaper.
“If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale.”
I’m working on a project that will offer this soon. Email me if you’d like to try out the beta when it’s available.
The Leo site is nice.
My parents actually live in his former domain outside of Chicago. An occasional grandkid drops by to relive the memories of growing up and visting there. (Probably one of his several homes though).
I’ll second the comments made about the Leo Burnett site. That’s probably the most creative site I’ve seen in a long time. I love the navigation and am especially impressed by the alternate navigation methods.
Are we going to need an intervention to get you to put the toothpaste down?
I’m with you on the Leo Burnet site. I could spend hours there trying to find everything.
Damn if I don’t open my own shop soon, all the CSS properties would have already been taken as names.
If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale
Perhaps Eventful would meet the need?
Crazy I know, but that Leo Burnett flash extravaganza featured on WebPagesThatSuck recently – just goes to show, you can’t please all of the people…
I’m with you on Rita Cosby. She’s like a bad SNL skit.
Mike, try out bandnews.org. They crawl official band sites and are able to serve you up some nice RSS feeds of concert dates and other official news.
I found the Black Keys for you. Black Keys
Leo Burnett – Everytime I see work like that it reminds me of how much more learning I have to do. That was beautiful.
I love it when people come up with an interesting way of presenting a lot of information in a way that is impossible through HTML, yet usable.
Hollobaugh’s lucky he got out when he did and doesn’t have to listen to her asthmatic smoker’s cough voice at work.
Oh, sure, the Leo Burnett is cray creative. BUT, it’s incredibly frustrating to use. I get sick of it rather quickly.
As much as I hate them, Ticketmaster.com is probably the best place to get concert notifications. They have more invested in advertising the shows. I guess that’s what the “Convenience Charge” is for.
Rita Cosby and that Nancy Grace on CNN, too! I can’t stand either one of ’em. It like every cable news network has to have their distraught female host to cover the Natalie Holloway, the Runaway Bride, etc. I guess Greta van Sustren fills that role for FoxNews.
Mike, I can’t really talk about it on here, but I have a service that’s in the works to squash the whole “dammit, I missed another show” problem (which is the whole reason I started the project). A little digging and you’ll understand.
Perhaps I could consult you at some point in November? Say, two-three days hire.
I’ll e-mail privately – I could really use an interface/usability/design eye to help kick my team into high-gear.
Maybe you should try to Build Your Own PRV.
Seems we’ll have a lot of feeds for concerts soon :D
Mike,
I completely understand what you mean about that Comcast POS PVR. The more we use it, the more we want a TiVo. The small hard drive, the fact that it clicks over to a new recording regardless of what you are watching, the fact that you can’t change recording times of shows if they start at 9:59, the fact that it stops working if you fill up more than 80% of the hd space.
Oh, and did I mention that they make it nearly impossible to get the information off of the thing to any format other than VHS?
Me, I’m looking seriously at the TiVo with a DVD-R…
Thx for the Eventful plug James! Seriously, you can set up a smart calendar that will notify you when specific artists or concerts in general come to your town. Check it out and let us know what you think.
I was just searching the net to see who Rita Cosby was related to. How else would she get a job as an anchor? Is MSNBC hard up or something? “Irritating” is the word that comes to mind. She’s like a stressed-out, unattractive Barbie doll with a scratchy voice. I hope everyone writes MSNBC and complains!
I can’t stand her voice either, why do they have her on the air. I just change the channel if I hear her voice. It kind of sounds like a sick person with a hoarse smokers voice who just got a asthma attack. Very hard to listen to.
I think if they would have someone on the show with her regular that has a speach problem making it hard for the viewers understanding them it would make Rita Cosby not be noticed as much with her voice.
Leo Burnett Refurbished
Got to be one of the most creative sites I have come across in a long while, it is refreshing to see Flash being used to enhance the “Web” experience. With CSS designs almost everywhere ~ not a bad thing ~ there is still a lot …