My laptop died last night.  It was an undignified death, with the loud internal fan wheezing and gasping for air as I attempting to type out a simple email.  The situation was this: mid-word, my computer failed to complete what I was inputting into its innards and like usual, I waited for the silver brick to just catch up to where I left off.  It’s not that I’m a fast typist as much as my Dell Inspiron 6000 has a chronic case of Alzheimer’s.  Last night it forgot to work; it forgot that it had a hard drive.

The so-called blue screen of death appeared, informing me that a problem has been detected and to make sure all of my hardware was properly installed, and if so, restart the computer.  It also had a slew of other PC jive nonsense at the bottom of the screen that no one but the Vicki robot from the Small Wonder 80’s sitcom would understand.  I restarted it, hoping it was just another case of whopping cough that she gets, only to find out that my state of the art Windows XP operating system circa 2005 wouldn’t boot up like it normally does; something it preventing it from functioning properly.

Starting to panic a little, I tried a few times to have it boot from the other boot options that the blue screen menu was giving me to see if that helped: it didn’t.  I hopped on the still functional iMac upstairs to see if any online tips would pull me out from the blue PC abyss but nothing seemed approachable; all the helper websites would tell me to re-install windows via a USB drive but there was just one too many abbreviated tech words sprinkled in the instructions for my liking such as NTLDR and NTFS.  I’m not exactly certified in this area so I call Dell tech support; well Dell is of no help because my warranty is years past expired and I would have to pay them $60 to have someone of questionable command of the English language walk me through over the phone, a checklist of things that could possibly, maybe, semi-probably, help with the situation.

No dice Dell.  Additionally, Dell’s tech support web page is also woefully inadequate to handle issues such as these.

Now, at this point I’m starting to panic good and well, because though I lost that loving feeling for my Inspiron 6000 years ago when I cheated on her with the sleek, and modern and whisper quiet iMac (silence is golden, am I right?), I am also an idiot; the vast majority of pictures that I’ve amassed over the last five years or so are on that laptop and not yet transferred to the external hard drive that’s been sitting in my living room for the past eight or so months.  I need to be strung up and stoned for this lackadaisical oversight, and I’m not talking about an herbal remedy.  All 28 gigs of my music are also trapped on malfunctioning machine, but I’m not as concerned about that since there are ways to get those MP3 files off the iPod’s themselves.  The pictures are what’s important, as well as some documents that I’d like to recover, but the computer itself is worth little to me or anyone else.

After calling a few local places, I ended up hiring a local computer repair guy based on a friend’s recommendation - Phillip Bishop of computer repair of Greensboro - to come out and see if he could get past the blue screen of death and retrieve my files.  He came out to my house this morning and did everything he could but in the end, the hard drive was corrupted and not able to open up on any other computer despite multiple attempts at doing so.  We both felt like it so was close to working, like the beating heart of the patient was there, it simply was unable to pump out enough juice through the computer to open up and save any data.

Flatlined.

Yeah, I’m not happy about any of this:  Dell’s shoddy computers/ customer service, the Hitachi made hard drive, my lazy, forgetful ineptitude.  My options at this point are limited to sending the dead hard drive to a data recovery center and shell out a few hundred to save my pictures and files or much like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club after Tyler Durden kisses his hand and pours lye on it, let it all go.  Regardless, one thing I know for sure, I’m done with PC’s for the time being.  No more BIOS or FAT32 or Windows based anything; I’m out.  No electronics product is infallible, especially not these days, but PC’s seem especially prone to these types of destructive events, as they enjoy a life expectancy of a goldfish.

In the end, as a consumer you pay a premium for Apple products up front, but you pay a much higher premium, one way or another, as a PC consumer on the backend.  And that’s with or without consumer incompetence as exemplified by my not utilizing a perfectly good external hard drive.

Over the past few months we’ve had the opportunity to work on another web app with the Schakra GoGoStat team, GoGoStat Parental Guidance.  This is a Facebook application which allows parents to monitor the social activity of their children on Facebook - so for example, parents are notified if their kids post personal information, or if bad words are flagged in status messages.  Parents can also see what photos their kids have been posting, who they are befriending (and where those friends come from, and how old they are).  As an added bonus, there is an Emergency Report feature, which allows parents to quickly print out a report of all of their kid’s activity over the past month.

For this particular app, we worked very closely with the development team at Schakra, and were responsible for UX, design and front end development including HTML, CSS, Javascript and ASP.NET.  This was a very challenging and rewarding project for us, and we are grateful for the opportunity!

Check out GoGoStat Parental Guidance today >

We’re happy to announce the launch of the new Yerba Buena Engineering website.  Yerba Buena is a prominent San Francisco-based engineering firm, and they needed a website to match.  Check it out today >

Now, for better or worse, I don’t generally like to be without Internet access for too long. A day or two…okay, I can live with that, but more that that and I start to get twitchy. For whatever reason, I just like to be connected to what’s happening out in the world, or with work, or with my inbox, and I’d rather not let all that stuff linger around all untended to. Some might think this is really a thinly veiled Facebook or Myspace or Twitter addiction, but believe me that it’s not. While I frequent those social stops, I don’t feel any habitual need to drop anchor multiple times a day for hours at a time to go Facebooking (new verb?).

But the Internet has become a sort of necessity for me, and thus on this New England road trip I had to bring along my laptop for when we’re not out attending wedding booze-cruises or taking pictures of Paul Revere’s grave. Being that it’s mid-2010, I hoped that our pre-booked rooms all came with in-room wifi.

Not too much to ask, right? Well, yes and no.

Turns out, all but one of the rooms we stayed in had access to free wifi (the exception was a motel in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, but that’s OK because the scenery up there was fantastic and the place was essentially a quaint older person’s getaway motel) but only one of the rooms complementary in-room wifi was worth a darn. And you know what, it wasn’t the nice Best Western in Boston we stayed at or the Microtel Inn and Suites in Philadelphia that flaunts its free wireless access or the Courtyard Marriot in Silver Spring Maryland – all those places might as well have been operating on dial up speeds or worse because they were all slow to connect, slow to operate, and would kick me off soon after I connected, and that’s if I was able to get online in the first place.

It reminded me of the AOL days when you’d listen to the familiar dial up chimes and sort of hope that your computer would establish a firm connection long enough to check your email and visit a favorite webpage or two before the wind blew hard enough outside and you were booted off. How is it, in this day and age that these well known hotel chains can’t get wireless right?

The only place we stayed that had a firm and fast online connection was at a very small and grungy Days Inn in Kittery, Maine that was formerly a Super 8 motel, and before that was most certainly something else. I mean, this place had two doors on either side of the room (a little creepy), a window with a majestic up-close view of the side wall, and a bathroom door that didn’t open all the way because it hit the toilet – but gosh darnit, it had a working Internet connection. I don’t know what’s going on with these large hotel chains and their substandard in-room wireless, but based on many online reviews I’ve read of these and other hotel chains, I’m not alone in my disappointment. It’s 2010 guys, time for a wireless upgrade.

Oh and maybe it’s mere coincidence, but the Kittery Day’s Inn, even with its dark interior and ill-planned room dimensions, ended up being my favorite place that we stayed in. Charm - that’s what it had. And proper wireless.

We’re happy to announce the launch of another medical group site, San Bernardino Medical Group.  SB Med was severely lacking in web presence, so they came to us for a revamp.  What they got was a nice, modern, content-managed website with lots of functionality for their patients, including calendaring, events, news, and much more.  Check out the site »

We’re extremely proud to announce the launch of the Los Angeles Film Festival website!  This has been a really rewarding project, and Film Independent has been a great group of people to work with.  Our challenge for this year’s festival was to take the aggressive new aesthetic and messaging of the festival, and translate that into a web presence that extended the branding and added interactivity.

For this year’s festival, we got the site up and running in content management to allow them to make lots of updates, whenever they please.  Keep an eye on the site, as it will be evolving.

We recently ran into a fairly frustrating little issue on a site we were working on.  This particular site had a jQuery Cycle gallery on the home page, and it was pulling images from individual pages in Wordpress using query_posts().  Problem was, images in IE would appear and then disappear.  This was happening in all versions of Internet Explorer.

Cycle uses absolute positioning and z-index, so we initially assumed that was part of the problem, since Internet Explorer deals with z-index in its own special way.  After a number of go-rounds involving various z-index combinations and changing how our positioning was working didn’t pan out, I started looking at the code that query_posts was spitting out, and noticed that (like almost everything coming from the wordpress editor), it was wrapping content in a paragraph tag.  This in turn led to a little firebug magic which revealed that max-width: 100% was being applied by the stylesheet to images in paragraphs.

It looked like this:

p img { max-width: 100% }

This particular line of CSS comes from the Wordpress default template, and is intended to handle situations where users try to insert images that are bigger than the width of a column from breaking the layout.  So it’s a good thing.  We won’t go into IE’s general handling of max-width here.

Anyway, long story short, a little specificity in our CSS took care of the whole thing.

.carousel p img { max-width: 586px; }

Cheers!

For serveral months now we’ve been working with Schakra, Inc. of Redmond, WA on user experience, interface design and front-end development for a number of new web applications.  These apps all run on top of their amazing GoGoStat platform, which is a very sophisticated piece of cloud-based software and APIs that enable user-centric awareness.

The first of these apps to launch is Sync, which started its public beta phase yesterday.  Sync allows users to synchronize their information between social media services, in a way that is really simple and hands off - just set up sync relationships, and then go off and deal only with the social media services you like.  So say you have friends on Facebook, Twitter, mySpace, Google, MSN, Flickr, etc. Maybe you really love using Flickr for your photos, Google for your contacts, and Twitter for your status.  But you need to keep your friends at Facebook in the loop on all this stuff.  This is where Sync steps in.  All syncs are handled in the background, so once you set up what syncs to where, the software does the rest for you!  You just use the social media platforms you like, sync will do the rest!

We’re excited and proud to be a part of this ongoing project, and we’ve got a bunch of Invite Tokens for our readers if you’d like to try out Sync.

Just go here: GoGoStat Sync Signup »

When prompted to use a Beta Invite Token, use this: 39F34F94

Enjoy!

p.s.  Please remember this is still in Beta - we need your help to find all the bugs.  If you run in to something unusual, please submit feedback through Sync.  Thansk!

We’ve been doing a lot of work for medical and physicians groups recently, and Alliance is a good example.  Located in the High Desert region of Southern California, Alliance Desert Physicians serves all types of patients, with a special focus in Senior Wellness.  Visit site »

We’re happy to announce the launch of the Venture Coast Law site.  San Diego firm Venture Coast is a boutique law firm assisting entrepreneurs, small and mid-sized businesses, and nonprofit organizations through all stages of development.  Visit the site »