Every election I remember to check out jib jab and this year Nate reminded me .

So, check out this vid, especially starring yours truly.

I checked my google analytics today and apparently 42% of my readers are morons. Please, look in your browser right now, look in the top right corner, if you see an ‘e’ then you are who I am talking to.

It is 2008. Use Firefox. Firefox 3 is out. It is the fastest downloaded piece of software in the history of the universe. No really, it has a guiness record. Mozilla.com

It is faster, more secure and better than what you are currently using. Remember those tabs that Internet Explorer ‘invented’ for you? Firefox had them first, and IE followed, just like its following in compatibility with internet languages and usability. Firefox is the standard, use IE and you are behind. Get it now.

Lewis Black’s famous comedy central stand-up routine had a part in it where he commented on the end of the world. He said he knew it was upon us because one time he went to a starbucks and then when he walked out of the first starbucks saw a second starbucks directly across the street. And that is the end of the world.

In the same light, I was just browsing when I went to cnn.com (normally a mistake anyways) and found their feature story’s picture to be a screenshot of another online news sites frontpage. It was a conundrum. Was I in a parallel universe? Thats the best you can do!?! Well, I guess its better than them forgetting to cite their sources.

disclaimer : i know the subject of the article isn’t funny. just the presentation. the article itself is worth noting

full article here : http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/19/british.hostage/index.html

Last night I spent a fun-filled 30 minutes on the phone with ATT tech support. First off when all tech support for phone, internet and cable is under one umbrella and handled by the same guy you know that its not going to be a good experience. That means hes not specialized and just reading off a prompter.

My problem is strange. Internet works fine via wireless, but not via ethernet from the att router. So I called to see if there was anything weird with their system I needed to have on my desktop. (system worked fine with time warner less than 24 hours before)

Told him from the start I was computer savvy so we could skip the basic crap. Then he asked me if both ends were plugged in. I said yes, he asked me to double check. After saying I was competent with a computer this killed me. Then we troubleshot quickly and he made me reboot. MADE ME even though I said I had already tried that multiple times. Then I told him that my computer was getting an ip address from the router but nothing else. His response : well, ip addresses are assigned by Microsoft so your gonna have to call them tomorrow. My Reponse : No, an ip address is assigned by the router. His response : Well,no, your problem is with microsoft call them tomorrow morning. I hung up.

He talked down to me for 25 minutes on that phone call and had no idea what he was talking about, had to be reading a script. Also didn’t know how to access my network settings without clicking the “two computer monitors in the bottom right of your screen” after deciphering he meant the network icon in the taskbar I told him they weren’t there and he was speechless. I told him I would go through my control panel and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

So, still no internet on my desktop. Lovely.

As promised here is an early review of ATT’s U-Verse offering. I share with you so you may have the knowledge of a non-partial non-hater. I plan to review both good and bad things about services online, not just the bad, thereby offering a better reviewing base.

Disclaimer : I have only had this for 24 hours so my review is a quickshot, any changes good or bad I will post a new post if they are earth-shaking otherwise i will just edit this one and annotate it.

Sign-up :
Super-easy. Convenient. All-online including install appointment making. ++ For whole process, good first impression.

Install
6 1/2 hours. What you say? You can’t be serious? No. I am. When you make your appointment they tell you it can take 4-6 hours but who actually expects that? I give them props to warning us, and don’t mind the install time EXCEPT the roommate had to take a half day off to come home and be there. You can’t work much from home without the internet. Installer : Really nice guy, very helpful and informative, ATT debunked their myth of bad service with this one guy.

Internet
They took my trusty LINKSYS WRT54G offline. That thing has served me well for years with Tomato running on it. I was kinda sad. Instead they have their own wireless router they turned on, which is massive (3x size of my Linksys) and does put out alot of power. Back room used to max out at 40-50% signal on good days and now gets a solid 99%. I’m also pretty sure you can’t stack another router on top of it, which is weird and I haven’t tried, but we got weird errors at first saying a 3rd party router was installed. I’m always adding a new temp router when running out of spots so this could be a future problem, but I’m not sure if thats the case yet, one thing to ask if you decide to sign up. Much faster over wireless, I didn’t get to play around with the desktop very long before passing out.

My Speed Test Results :



TV
I have the U200 package which includes the good stuff minus the movie channels and the really extra channels like CSPAN12. I’m gonna split this part up :

Reception / HD : Looks very good. On roommates HD TV everything is stellar on my SD same situation. One thing to remember is to not put your router next to your tv. Yeah, not so good.

Remote / Controller : Eh. It looks and feels like an upgraded xbox dvd remote that was painted white. Its very light in the hands and feels cheaper than Time Warner’s monstrosity. A little on the sluggish side for a couple of channel switches. Hopefully I get used to this. Is meant to be universal, can be programmed for up to 4 devices, but the devices I care about were not on the list. I think if you can fit the list onto an 11×17 sheet of paper, its not big enough.

Display / Onscreen : Much improved over TW. Its clean and very blue. I actually do really like it but as a designer I find faults with the little things. 10x improved over competitors. Real nice things are the channel changing options. When you go to your guide you don’t lose the show your watching but get an overlay guide that is partially transparent. The guide is also useful in that what shows are in HD on different channels it tells you and it has alot more functionality than the basic cable system you are used to. Also when flipping channels you can obviously just preview by going up and down, it shows the channel and show name, but also a Picture in Picture box of whats going on, like a real preview should. I find myself using this already. There are near misses also : ATT’s U-bar which accesses the internet for sports scores / stocks / weather etc… could be useful at times but for some reason it takes up too much real estate and doesn’t match the cleanliness of the rest of the system.  I could go on for a while picking apart all of this but I will just say it passed the majority of my tests I give it 4/5 stars.

DVR : The downfall of my entire set-up right here. When I signed up the website made it pretty clear I was getting 4 dvr’s one for each tv. Instead the installer said I get one DVR with access to it from the other ones since they are networked together. So I can watch stuff on the main one through the non-hub ones. Eh. Not happy about that, we’ll see. Then he tells me that the software to watch it on the other dvr’s isn’t up yet, and he doesn’t know when it will be (and ATT’s site doesn’t want to tell me) which means I have one DVR without anything special. Big difference from4. Where is my extra money going? This leads into support….

Support
ATT has a history of not caring. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they have one of the worst support records in the history of the world. Anyways, I went to the website to shoot them an e-mail, it wasn’t important enough to warrant an hour on hold. A great paraphrase :

“We honor you so much we aren’t going to give you the ability to email us but you can call us and waste your time listening to shitty elevator music if you want….. and by giving you this offer we hope you don’t call support so we don’t have to help you. kthxbye.”

How do you not have e-mail support ? HOW? I think TW had e-mail , online chat and telegraph support because at least they wanted to hear your issue. That ticked me off. Instead of calling I used their worthless online FAQ and manuals to achieve nothing and then decided it was the worst website ever…

Website
Why would I review their website? Because the Tv’s are all networked to the internet and interact with the site. You have the power to control your DVR through the site and a host of other things.

Did not know : Integrated with Yahoo. I should have known that I just had forgotten it. Should have known right there it was terrible. Its like a yahoo start page on acid. I logged in 3 times to access my account settings. Its all actually under my roommates name, so he set up a sub account so I could have one and access the DVR functionality etc… that we were told was easy by our tech. I’m a web-designer for a living and I could not for the life of me figure it out. Then apparently I find I can’t touch the DVR only the home account can but it should be super simple to turn it on for me. Its not. An hour later . nothing.

I gave up and maybe will try again, maybe not. Like I said before the TV has a ‘U-bar’ with stocks and sports etc… but some of that has tobe configured to your personal tastes through this devil they call a site. I don’t know how . I also looked for that for forever. How hard is it to build a control panel that lists all my options for my tv service. I don’t want a new landing page for my browser, I want a control panel.

Website and support get a 0 out of 5 for me. I shouldn’t have to call support within an hour of the tech leaving and then to make it so difficult.

So remember, the top half of my review was positive, the bottom half not so much. Hopefully this changes over time (like today) but we’ll see. I will say a good host of these problems could not be compared to TW simply because they don’t offer the service, but at the same time, if you pump up my expectations for something you better deliver and not have so hodgepodge service thrown up there. ATT better get on their act ASAP or I’m going back to TW.

Bo Burnam is the man. This may not be his funniest song,  I also love his raps, but listen cause the lyrics are legend-ary. Check it :

Winkflash.com is your new favorite website for printing digital photos. If you have some time to spare and don’t need your photos this instance, skip the run to your local Walgreens or Kinkos and fire up firefox.

Normal 8 cent 4×6 prints are 6 cents until the 15th of July. Use the code JUNE256. I thought 8 cents was ridiculous but 6 is insane. Also has every other size but the only ones I tested were 4×6. I am interested to see if 450 dpi images (new high resolution photo prints they just released) improve the pic that much, but thats just curiosity; the prints I got look great.

Hit it up, great tool to remember to save some cash.

Microsoft’s big day at E3 was today, which if you don’t know what E3 is, its a giant geek-fest.

Anyways, I’m not a huge gamer, I have my one game I am obsessed with but beyond that I’m not into all that hip jive the youngsters be laying down these days. However, I use my xbox 360 alot. Dvd watching, Tv show downloading through Live’s marketplace etc… and I enjoy the heck out of it as the center of my entertainment system.

Today Microsoft announced a complete overhaul of the dashboard software that runs the 360. This was somewhat unexpected. The current system is nice but kind of extremely geeky and not that pretty, hopefully the new one can function better as a media center. Its design is somewhat tame, and cartoony, more wii-like but I think thats the point and I am OK with at as long as it brings more functionality. This download is scheduled to hit in the fall.

The big announcement (at least for me) is that Netflix and Microsoft have finally teamed up . Rumors have been going on for a while now about this but if you wanted to watch Netflix on a tv you had to have a dedicated box or semi-hack some things to make it work. Now we get an integrated product on the 360 that will allow you to stream from Netflix’s instant queue to your tv. Its still only SD quality but when Netflix switches to HD so will Microsoft most likely.

I think its awesome. I honestly feel like I have a new piece of equipment at home ready to be played with (albeit in the later year) but its like getting a completely new device. At the time of purchase I never expected the 360 to have this capability, it wasn’t one of those things you know they will add in later, so its making my money even more worth it.

So thats my 2 cents. There were a couple other smaller things MS introduced you can find those at www.engadget.com if you are further interested.

This is a new project I am working on that I need a little help with. At this point in the design I am just looking for some outside input… I have been staring at it for too long right now.

The temporary site is located at :

Site Name : YellowWagon.com (testing address)

This is just the beginning of the skinning process so some things don’t work at all (like the navigation) its just an example of what I plan to do.

A couple things I need help deciding on are :
a) The Product Boxes : too many? I have tried 9 and 12. 9 looks too sparse, 12 looks busy IMO.
b) My cart / comparison boxes on the right : too modern? I haven’t skinned them and actually think they work as is. Should I take the time to skin them or do you agree?
c) Too much going on ? I am trying to create a very refined site but at the same time infuse color. So far I’ve heard they like the background but I’m not sure I’m feeling it 100%. Any ideas would be appreciated . Just realized I used the same background effect as on this site. Man I’m stuck in a design rut or something!

Here is a product page with practically no skinning but allows for another view of how everything interacts : http://www.tylerjameslee.com/yam/a-lamp.html

Let me know in the comments or drop me a line. Have a fan-tastic monday.

I just wanted to spread some dreamhost love. I got a couple of people to sign up for it this week and they are loving it. It really is the best hosting company out there IMO. I know there are some lovers of mediatemple out there but for a site of this size really there is no comparison. I have a stupid amount of overkill with my ten bucks a month. I’m currently using 200mb out of my 600 available gigs of space. Yeah, and 200 of that is backed up crap, I think the site itself is 50mb.

So, go sign up, and don’t forget to tell them I told you about it. capty99@gmail.com Remember that. (I didn’t tell the other 3 I got going on it so I get no rewards, they love it though so I guess thats a reward.)

Also, you should do a google search for dreamhost promotion codes. There are always good ones. I think right now its 50 bucks off which negates the set-up fee that accompanies all accounts. Then you have a fully functioning site with everything you need for 5 bucks. WOO HOO.