The Open Dispatch » Coding

Living Social

shlampe — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:20:08 +0000

As facebook et al are becoming more and more popular we’d been thinking about developing an app that would allow people to generate reviews of beers, music restaurants, whatever. Well… someone beat us to the punch (yeah this was the original plan for melonchoice…) oh well, moving on to other things, but take a look at http://livingsocial.com/ It seems to be a pretty cool tool. I’ll be looking at it a bit more and see how it goes.

Interesting article

shlampe — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:39:53 +0000

It’s amazing how far we’ve come in 12 years.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4276344.html

I remember the first full site that I designed in ‘95. Earliest one I can find is http://web.archive.org/web/19981111190731/http://www.babylon-honda.com/ from ‘97 (the first one I did for RNCI). BTW, the wayback machine is always a pretty fun thing to check out.

yeah yeah yeah, it’s been a while…

shlampe — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:01:04 +0000

So here’s what’s been going on. Working like an idiot but getting good things done. In the last 2 weeks, we’ve launched, http://www.savannahtech.edu and http://www.ccls.org both sites we’re really happy with, have a look through.

On another note, SWG has a new bass player and we’re working on new music so hopefully we’ll be playing out shortly.

And another other note, the Choral Arts Society is singing this weekend and I’ll be singing with them (provided my clothes have arrived by then, have to call the Tux shop and make sure they’re there…) It’s a pretty cool program so check it out if you’re free saturday night or sunday afternoon.

And finally, something for the creative in you, Nike’s new ad campaign is pretty sweet. http://www.youtube.com/nikefootball

The Computer as a Learning Tool

shlampe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:46:14 +0000

When I was a kid, I didn’t have an atari, or a comodore 64 or any of those things. I had an Apple II+ (or was that an E?). Anyway, there weren’t a whole lot of games for the thing, I had a favorite named Sneakers, which was essentially space invaders with giant sneakers with feet (yeah, a little odd now that I think about it) instead of space ships.

The first programming I ever did was on that thing as well, i wrote a little GI Joe game, that was basically a choose your own adventure. I learned however, that it’s not that fun to play games that you wrote, because you always know the ending…

I also had a typing game where you were given a word to type and if you typed it fast enough, you’d kill the spaceship coming at you. If you didn’t, the space ship would kill you. I actually had a really good time with it and appreciate the skills that I learned with it even today. So I’m sure you sitting there asking yourself, “what the hell is Josh going on about now”. I’ll get there, keep yer skivvies on…

I know that there have been a number of games out there for people to learn piano via the computer in a similar way as the typing game. And then there’s the popularity of Guitar Hero (which is a hell of a lot of fun). So then I see this: http://www.guitarrising.com I’m REALLY excited about guitar rising. Not only does it make things a little more interesting (and useful) for the people that play guitar hero and the like, but it also I think will be VERY interesting for people that know how to play guitar. Having something like that could really “improve the chops” as they say.

The Sixty One

shlampe — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:38:28 +0000

Check out this site. Very cool idea for music and musicians. It’s kind of like Digg for music. Easy to use (a little cluttered at first but once you get used to it, it’s pretty easy to navigate around).

http://www.thesixtyone.com

Adobe Max

shlampe — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 07:25:30 +0000

I’m finishing up at Adobe Max 2007 in Chicago and it’s really gotten me excited about design again. So of course I ran back to my hotel room (ok, took the bus) and decided to finally do something with the open dispatch. Basically that included getting pluggedout blog installing it and making up a pretty crappy header. I’ll do more with this when I’ve got time, but I really wanted to just jot down some of the things that I took away from the sessions that I went to. This morning was one of the best sessions all week. It was with Big Spaceship (http://bigspaceship.com/). What a MFer of a design company. They do some simply incredible things (check out http://www.hungrysuitcase.com as an example). This is the type of stuff that reminds me why i love the web. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the every day stuff and lose site of the fact that you can really love working for a living. A couple of things that I learned and/or had re-affirmed at a number of the sessions that I went to:

Design for design sake can be fun, but it’s not always that useful
While the adage that the client is always right works, it’s also really important to help the client get to the point where they’re making informed decisions.
Personally I need to keep learning, every day, as much as possible. The more I learn the more I remember why I do this and the better I am at my job.
Have fun. Just friggin’ have fun. You can make your deadlines and still enjoy what you’re doing. It’s so easy to get dragged down into day to day, lose your courage or whatever other crappy metaphor I can come up with (wow am I sounding new agey…) I have to remember to just take it as it comes and more than likely it’ll all work out in the end.