SilentGap

Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names. » Read the rest of this entry «

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

I usually don’t get into cars very much, but this one on Jay Leno’s Garage is pretty sweet.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Through a little bit of research, I found a few Agencies / People who i thought were interesting that they were using twitter. Below are a few.

• http://twitter.com/CitySiouxFalls
• http://twitter.com/SenateFloor
• http://twitter.com/USAgov
• http://twitter.com/HouseFloor
• http://twitter.com/NRSC
• http://twitter.com/TheWhiteHouse
• https://twitter.com/Drudge_Report
• https://twitter.com/rushl (maybe rush limbaugh – not sure)

Can you think of anyone else?

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

So, at 5.30am I was trying to get my kid to fall back asleep (and my swaddling skill’s have yet to improve past the point where he doesn’t get one arm loose), and in the process found myself waking up, wandering over to check my email and my reader. In it was a post recommended by boagworld from A Beautiful Web titled “Time to stop showing clients static design visuals“

The post brings up a few good points, the first one being:

Demonstrating our designs to clients as XHTML/CSS pages rather than as static Photoshop or Fireworks has streamlined our workflow and helped us to set and manage a client’s expectations better than ever before.

And as an example the post points the reader to http://forabeautifulweb.com/demo/2008/09/21/index.html.

I love the idea and agree with the author that a working mock up is extremely handy, and leaves a lot of un-answered questions, answered.

But for sites mock’s that are complicated or too time consuming to turn a static mock into a working build, how practical is this? And when the site requires some Ajax work, how far do you take it if the ajax has to integrate with a database?

Andy Clarke brings up some other good points about having a working mock up, read the full article at http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/time_to_stop_showing_clients_static_design_visuals/

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

Jeff Atwood had a good post on protecting your site / blog from being hacked. » Read the rest of this entry «

Ok, so i came across this site in a magazine (yeah, that’s right, i was reading something that wasn’t online – it had ton’s of art and pictures in it) called http://www.mono-1.com/monoface. If you’ve never been there before, i suggest you stop by when you get a break in the action. You can spend an endless amount of time trying to come up with different faces. Below is a screenshot of one that i came up with.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

I’ve been amazed at the amount of spam i’ve been getting on my Instant Messenger program. Both in Skype, AOL & MSN. What’s funny in this story is the fact that the spam was targeted to a windows user – when I’m clearly on a mac. Take a look at my screen shot

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap