It so happens that one of my good friends manages the Forbidden Island Tiki Lounge in Alameda, CA.

In a stroke of marketing genius, Suzanne Long is running a 13-week event she calls The Black Orchid Club, wherein every Wednesday she unveils an all-new cocktail of her own creation which is served that night only and never again at Forbidden Island. For showing up and ordering the drink, you get a limited-edition collector’s card, and if you have enough of the cards at the end of the 13 weeks, there are prizes to be won.

Sounds fun, right?

Well Paul and I went over and filmed her making the week 6 cocktail—The Bavarian Yule—and it turned out better than just about anything else you can find on YouTube when searching for “cocktail”. Check it out:

For Full HD you’ll want to watch it on YouTube directly. It’s embedded at a lower resolution here.

The video was shot on Paul’s Canon 5DmkII camera with the kit 50mm f1.8 lens, and was  lit with two 600watt halogen lights diffused through reflectors.

This was only about an hour’s effort, and we’re quite pleased with the image quality. We may even shoot all 13 drinks to be released as a series.

We’d love to shoot more things of this sort, so if you have ideas, please let me know!

I meant to write this article about a month ago, but I’ve been too swamped to get it out.

Long story short: I’m done with AIM.

A part of me is amazed that the protocol has stuck around as long as it has, and another part is surprised I’ve stuck with it.

In truth, I hardly know anyone who’s signed up for AIM in the last 10 years. The only people who have are mostly under the age of 20.  Most of my friends have had their screen names since they were 12, and for some of those screen names, it shows (what you thought was funny back then isn’t really funny anymore).

And yet multi-protocol messaging clients like iChat, Adium, Digsby, and others made it so easy to cling to AIM. It was more work to get rid of it than to just keep it around.

Then Lifehacker came out with a SCATHING article about Digsby’s revenue model, and Digsby responded with their own explanation… but in the end it left me with a sour taste in my mouth, since Digsby had been my app of choice.

And it got me to thinking: all but about 3 people I talk to regularly use Google Talk, and those people all have GMail accounts anyway… I really don’t need AIM anymore.

AIM had become a collection of people from the past that I never talk to and don’t need to be keeping track of anymore. That’s what Facebook is for…

So it’s official, I’m no longer going to be using AIM whatsoever. The protocol is overdue for demise, and Gtalk offers far better features as it is.

So if you don’t see me on AIM anymore, then come find me on Gtalk.

Hi folks!

I’m wrapping up my personal portfolio website, and have one piece that I really want to create, but need some awesome photos for. I’d love it if they came from my friends and family rather than stock photo sites!

Criteria:

• High-res (bonus points if you have a copy in RAW format)
• Color (no b&w)
• Landscape orientation (and even then, I need WIDE shots)

And of course they have to be AWESOME! This is gonna be a permanent fixture in my portfolio and I think it’s gonna be really stunning.

So here’s what I’m looking for:

1. Rocky California desert landscape
2. A long shot down a road, street, pier or spit of land
3. Fire-breathing or fire-dancing
4. Aerial shot of a cool landscape
5. A person doing something joyful or heroic
6. Close-up of interesting eyes, possibly winking

I’m surrounded by tons of artistic (and well-traveled) people, so if you think you can contribute any of these, leave me a link in the comments!

Thanks to all of you!

The title of the post has a double meaning.

First off, I wanted to share the funniest error message I’ve ever gotten (from years ago). Its redundancy made me laugh so hard I actually to a screenshot of it. Click the image to see the full-size version of it.

Adobe Updater Fail

I hope you found that as funny as I did.

Second, I just wanted to give a brief update on what I’m working on:

1. My new personal/professional site will be up very soon. The design is just about done, and the backend framework is complete.
2. Speaking of that backend, Paul and I reached our version 1.1 milestone for Valhalla, our awesome CMS (powered by the gods). It was a major achievement, and we’re both very proud to have gotten there. Valhalla currently powers ramdassmusic.com and andrewheringer.com with 3 more sites coming online with it very soon.
3. My job with UC Berkeley is coming to an end at the end of the month, and I’m working on my options for what to do next. I’m looking forward to finding something new.
4. Ashley and I will be celebrating our 1 year anniversary on August 1st. Yay!

I’d say that’s enough for the moment.

I’ve decided to start adding rel=”designer” to the little “Designed by” links that go into sites I work on. That’s right.

As the whole XFN movement continues to grow (slowly), I can’t help but notice that there’s no place in the spec for businesses. Identity is just as crucial for businesses as it is for individuals, and if anything the relationships are even more complex.

Long story short, I’d propose an extension to XFN’s adopted set of tags to allow people to define their relationships with businesses and organizations. EDIT: XPN as a concept does (sort of) exist, but it seems to be nebulous with no active development currently.

A few examples might include:

• Employer – To indicate where you work
• Supplier – Who you get your products from (could matter to eco-friendly folks, for example)
• Partner – For groups that work together towards a common goal

And the there’s my personal favorite, one which any web designer could appreciate:

• Designer – Indicates who created this website

Best case it catches on. Worst case, nothing breaks and the world goes on its merry way!

I’ve known about stackoverflow.com for a while… anybody that uses Google as their reference for coding lands on solutions there pretty regularly.

I signed up as a user two days ago after learning more about them at Google I/O and I have to say, there are are some excellent design features at work on their site.

1. They support an extremely streamlined OpenID login, so you can just click the icon of Google or Myspace or any other provider and be up and running on stackoverflow in a matter of seconds.
2. The entire site is community-driven; part wiki, part forum, part code repository. The social aspect is built in from the start.
3. There’s an entire system of “reputation points” that work a lot like points in a video game. You earn more priveleges and get “badges” for achievements  by participating on the site. Posting good questions or helpful answers get you points. What’s considered good and helpful is at the whim of all the other users.
4. When new events occur (like your question being answered or new badges being earned) a very clean notification bar fades in at the top of the window. It makes the site feel much more alive when you get information in real time like that.

There’s lots more to it beyond that, but those are a few of the notable items that stand out on their site. Things to be aware of and to emulate in future designs.

At the keynote this morning, Google announced a brand new product that they’re calling Wave which is flat out amazing.

Imagine combining gmail, chat, and docs and turning them into one all-encompassing real-time collaborative tool. Yeah, that’s just the beginning.

Everyone invited to the Wave can edit simlutaneously without conflicts.

All the changes appear on everyone’s screen in real time. Text appears on your screen as the other people type.

You can embed all sorts of media: photos, videos, files, google gadgets… the list goes on.

“Robots” can be added that behave like active participants in the Wave, to do anything from context-aware spellchecking to translating text in realtime between user languages to publishing the wave content to the web.

Oh, and if you publish the wave to a blog or other web location, it embeds all the wave functionality and comments from the web page appear in the Wave client in real time for anyone that has it open.

They can be  threaded, branched, split, merged, made private, integrated with outside systems… the potential is nearly limitless.

And it’s all based on an open protocol and nearly open source code for the client. You can set up your own private server and have it play nicely with Google’s servers and everyone else’s, still in real time.

You want to write an extension for Wave? Just have it update the local XML and the Wave protocol takes care of the realtime updating for everyone else.

As Google puts the finishing touches on Wave and the developer community gets to work with it, odds are this will become something really amazing.

In a day or two the keynote video should be up on the web, and seeing is believing. It’ll be up here: [EDIT]: The Keynote video and demonstration are now available at:

http://wave.google.com/

The service itself should be up and running for the public in a matter of months. For technical-minded folks you might also want to check out:

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

and

http://waveprotocol.org/

I’ll have more info on all the amazing things at Google I/O later on, but this one was so amazing that I had to get it up now.

Enjoy!

Eric’s band Links (formerly a Zero Coordinate artist and always good friends of ours) is doing really well for themselves and down in LA.

Check out the review of their latest set (with videos and everything) here:

http://talesfromthepit.net/2009/05/21/links-prove-to-hollywood-why-its-better-to-be-a-knight-than-an-idol/

Leave ‘em some love if you’re so inclined!

MySpace fans are meaningless, while Facebook fans represent real people ready to support you. Yet industry executives are still looking at MySpace to see who’s popular.

Facebook and its core user base has always been about real identity. Fake profiles on Facebook are a minority and are only tolerated for the sake of either celebrity or humor. Bots are nearly non-existent.

MySpace, on the other hand, cultivated a culture of representing yourself however you want, and spawned droves of friend-bots that auto-add people meaninglessly all day and night.

And yet MySpace became the place for bands. So much so that record execs look at MySpace friend counts before they’ll even talk to you. So all the bands got out their friend-bots and the problem just got worse.

It’s a totally different story in Facebook-land, though. On Facebook, people only become fans of things they actually like. And they’re all real people. You may have 10,000 friends on Myspace, and only 50 fans on Facebook, but those 50 people are a hell of a lot more likely to listen to your music, come to your show, or buy your CD.

So if any industry executives are listening out there: Stop watching the numbers on MySpace and start looking at Facebook if you want to know about real fans. Bots don’t buy CDs.

I got tired of having to upload every little change to the code of my web designs to the server to see if they even work at all, so I decided I’d run a local web server with PHP on my computer. If they ran Linux, this would be extremely simple. Unfortunately, I run Windows XP on both my development machines.

Apache was a snap:

1. Download whichever version of Apache you prefer from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. I chose version 2.2, which is the most recent as of this writing.
2. Run the installer and choose a directory, such as C:\Apache.
3. Open up the httpd.conf file and set things like the DocumentRoot and any directory options you need.
4. [optional] edit your hosts file (located at C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc) to point specific domains to 127.0.0.1 and create different VirtualHosts in Apache for each of those domains. This is useful if you want your local sites to behave as if they’re at the root of the site.

Getting PHP installed isn’t too much worse, except it’s got one big caveat as noted below:

1. Download the latest version from http://www.php.net/downloads.php (it was 5.2.9 for me)
2. Run the installer, and select any plugins you know you need to be installed. In my case, I selected CURL. (You will have to manually install and enable the plugin DLL file from the PHP binary zip file later if you don’t).
3. Here’s the catch: selecting the plugins to be installed by PHP there DOES NOT install all their dependencies or automativally make them work! It only puts the plugin DLL in the PHP extensions directory and adds a line in php.ini to enable the plugin! You still have to do whatever else it takes to make the plugin work on a plugin by plugin basis.

In my case, I needed CURL, and that was somewhat tricky. I owe credit to Tony Spencer’s article for getting me on the right track here.

1. Download the Windows XP build of CURL from http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and you can also grab Win32 OpenSSL to go along with it. [Note: You may need to download the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables in order to make the OpenSSL installer work]
2. Copy the extracted CURL directory to your programs directory, and copy the libssl32.dll from the OpenSSL directory to your CURL directory.
3. Check to see if you have c:\windows\system32\msvcr70.dll. If you don’t, then search for it and download a copy because you’ll get error messages without it.
4. Copy php5ts.dll from your PHP folder to your Apache bin folder. There are other solutions to give Apache access to this DLL, but this is the simplest in my opinion.
5. Lastly, make sure you’ve got these two items set in php.ini:
   1. register_globals = On
   2. sessions.save_path uncommented and set to a directory that exists
6. You’re basically all done now; just restart your Apache server to update all these changes, and you should be good to go.

All this worked on my system, and didn’t even require a restart. Most of the troubles I ran into involved my lack of understanding how to configure Apache VirtualHosts. So if you run into issues, I suggest you start there. If you’re seeing the local copy of your site in your browser but PHP or CURL aren’t working, check Apache’s error logs in Apache\logs\error.log to see what it has to say.

If that helps you, please let me know in the comments!