Mother Jones [via Bradley Fitzhenry]: “Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge, even after all the warnings, looks worse than I imagined. Pools of oil black and deep stretch down the beach; when cleanup workers drag their rakes along an already-cleaned patch of sand, more auburn crude oozes up. Beneath the surface lie slimy washed-up globules that, one worker says, are ‘so big you could park a car on them.'”
Man. I just don’t know what to say about this stuff. It’s tragic on so many levels.
Seattle Times: “So it was Wednesday as Griffey — the greatest player in Mariners history and one of the greatest in the history of the game — said goodbye to baseball.”
We lived in Seattle during those early Griffey years, it was an exciting time in Seattle baseball history, THUNDER DOME! I’ll always remember the run in 1995, and that team. First class guys like Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez. It was a great time in Seattle. Too bad they couldn’t manage to win a World Series with that group.
Happy retirement Junior.
“Hey rookie! You were good.” — Shoeless Joe Jackson (from the movie Field of Dreams)
Good morning movie liners. It’s been a strange week, let’s get the show on the road. Good luck!
Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.
Hat’s off to all who served.
Apple Core Labs Blog: “When we released RxCalc 1.0 we felt the need to focus most of our effort on making sure our math was correct. We felt if the standard user interface was good enough for Apple, it was good enough for us. Since that time we’ve collected a bit of feedback, some great, some not so great, and a couple of really horrible comments that made us cringe”
It felt good to finally get that release out the door, and to celebrate we started working on the next release. We’ve made some great progress.
If you have a request please feel free to drop me a line, rob@applecorelabs.com or rob.fahrni@gmail.com, I’d love to hear what you have to say. You can also get it touch with us via one of our contact addresses.
Good morning!
We have a winner! Congratulations to Mr. Chris Ledoux.
The correct answer was…
See you next Thursday.
Justin Williams: “After a week of using Android, I’m conflicted. If you had asked me last Wednesday what phone i’d be using a week from now I’d without a doubt say the iPhone. Now that we’re here, however, I am sticking with Android until the new iPhone ships. Widgets, home screen customization, background processes and the notification system are things that I’ve grown incredibly fond of and would miss if I went back to the iPhone today. I’m also eagerly waiting the release of Froyo for my Nexus One, which will offer a lot of new features I’d like to toy with in the near term.”
Go read the entire post, it’s very good. Justin actually likes some of the stuff I find interesting about Android, home screen customization and the notification system in particular.
Parting shot, from the post: “Where Android shines in some areas, it really falls apart in others. Things that are ridiculously simple on the iPhone such as taking a screenshot involves installing an SDK and going through a 15 step tutorial to do on Android.”
Kim and I are becoming empty nesters. Yes, it’s true, our little girls are all grown up. Haileigh is just about to graduate culinary school, and Taylor has just finished her first year in college. When the reality of it all set in Kim and I started thinking what’s next?
Question is, where?
It wasn’t so much what’s next as it was where? We’d been discussing a move out of the great San Joaquin Valley. Lots and lots of places came up; Boulder, Ft. Collins, Seattle, Austin, just to name a few. Yeah, we were open to a big move. In the end we settled on San Luis Obispo as a destination.
Finding a way
How do we get there? Well, you gotta find a great place to work, right? Yes, of course you do. I started looking for work about a year ago. I spoke with four different companies, one I thought I had, the other three were small and didn’t work. So I started looking around the Twitterverse for folks in San Luis Obispo I could connect with and found a great design community, much like Fresno’s. I reached out and found the folks to be quite friendly and helpful. I shared my skill set and asked who in San Luis Obispo might be a good fit. I was given a name.
Hello LEVEL
LEVEL Studios. That was the recommendation. So I decided to check out their web site, and found they’re a bit mysterious. It was hard to tell what they were up to. I found that they work with folks like Apple, HP, and RIM. They also ship a CMS, Switch. Given that, I thought I might find something that fit, so I applied. Lo and behold, I got a call! After a couple of phone interviews I traveled to San Luis Obispo to meet them in person. I went into the interview not knowing what to expect, and was extremely excited about what I heard. These guys do some very serious work, no I’m not going to say what, suffice it to say I was sold, and hoped I’d get an offer. I did.
Tomorrow, Friday, May 28, is my last day with Pelco. It’s been an interesting five years. I’ve see a lot of change during that time; acquisition, layoffs, and re-orgs. Pelco is on the right track. They have strong technical leadership in place and are making bold moves to become an IP company rather that a metal bending company. I have no doubt they’ll be quite successful. I’ll miss the people I worked with on a daily basis, but isn’t it always like that? Onward!
Monday, June 7, is my first day with LEVEL Studios. I’m really looking forward to it. The folks I’ve interacted with are super bright and friendly. The company has that old Visio-family feel I’ve been missing, I can’t wait to experience it first hand. Oh, yeah, and I also get to work on cool stuff, it doesn’t get much better than that!
Hello LEVEL, it’s very nice to meet you.
Adobe Digital Publishing: “Created with Adobe InDesign CS5 and additional Adobe publishing technologies, the WIRED Reader is the first in a series of steps for Adobe to enable magazine publishers and retail catalogers to deliver groundbreaking experiences across tablets, smartphones and other devices.”
Lots of hubbub about this app. Why? The above paragraph says it was created with Adobe InDesign. Doesn’t that violate section 3.3.1?
No, it doesn’t. WIRED Reader is basically a document running inside a host application. The host must be a Cocoa application.
Pretty snazzy.
I had to share this. Kim put this little picture together, I’m on the left at the age of 18, our youngest daughter, Taylor, is on the right at age 18. It’s a bit eerie.