I met Moru years ago at a WordPress meetup West of Toronto, in Oakville or something. We were both programming geeks of a certain vintage, and shared various other cultural touchpoints, so it was all but inevitable that we should fall into a pretty serious bromance.
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My good friend Ray got me wise to this new photo editing software called Affinity Photo. Well, it was “new” to me. It’s been around for a while, judging from all the videos about it on YouTube.
I’d been grousing about how much it was costing me to have Adobe PhotoShop on my computer. I use it maybe once every 2 or 3 months; but I have to pay $15 every month for my subscription.
Affinity Photo (AP) isn’t a subscription product. You buy it once (currently U$50), and you own it. Well, until they put out another major version, I imagine. But, I’m OK with that. So bye bye PhotoShop!
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On more than one occasion, while struggling with some squirrelly SCSS I went a-lookin’ for a SASS REPL, and I came up empty. So I decided to write my own.
Here’s the thing though: a SASS REPL is an obvious thing. It’s something anyone who uses SASS (or SCSS. I use SASS to mean both.) would need at some point. Of course there’d be one online somewhere. I was bemused and befuddled as to why I couldn’t find such a beast online.
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My friend Mariann has been an avid promoter and attendee of Toronto’s HotDocs festival, lo these many years. So it was no surprise when she called to recruit me to be part of her entourage while attending said festival. I had, in fact, discussed one of this year’s selections with colleagues at my new place of employment (well, perhaps not so new any longer: I’ve been there about six months now; but more on that another time), and was keen to attend a screening of The Internet’s Own Boy: Aaron Swartz. But not just any screening: one of the several screenings was to feature a panel discussion with Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, Gabriella Coleman and the director, Brian Knappenberger.
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My friend Hugh was recently let go from his job supporting IBM Java, WebSphere and DB2 technology. He’s looking at this as an opportunity to reorient his career, and turned to me to help him get familiar with the latest social media trends. It occurred to me that others may be interested in heading in that direction; so here’s what I told him. Continue reading
So Myplanet Digital, my new employers as of Nov 2011, have sent me, and a small platoon of Myplaneteers, to Denver, the mile high city, for DrupalCon 2012. This is my first DrupalCon; but hopefully not my last.
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few days poring over the 3 day schedule, trying to decide what sessions I want to attend.
Well, the website is very good. They list everything you could possibly hope to find about the sessions. PLUS: you can even put the sessions in your “shopping cart” to construct your own schedule. Then you can view your own schedule. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Print Schedule view. But hey, Denver wasn’t built in a day.
I had breakfast with our BizDev in Chief, Dustin Walper. I was busy telling him about my attempts at losing weight and getting into shape (Dustin is something of a Greek god), when he jumps out of his seat and says he’ll be right back. After about 10 minutes it became evident he *wasn’t* going to be right back. So I paid the cheque, and went exploring the lobby in search of Dustin. I found him with a bunch of Acquia folk, including (gasp) Dries Buytaert.
OK, I’ll admit it, I was a little star-struck. In my defense, I’ve been working my hind-most parts off for the past 5 months trying to get my head around Drupal. And here was the guy who started it all. In his dorm room. A whole industry. (Did I mention there were going to be 3000 attendees at DrupalCon this year?)
So I had the temerity to ask for a picture. Dries was very accommodating, and even suggested we take a few. A real mensch.
Also, today, I decided to show my commitment to Drupal:
More to come.
My friend Ian just purchased a Nexus S phone from Wind Mobile. So I thought I’d put together a list of useful apps to get him started on the joy of Android.
There are thousands of apps for the Android platform; so, as if it needed to be said, this is just a personal compilation of apps I find useful and/or fun. I hope you’ll find in it, one or two apps you didn’t know about before, which you decide you can’t live without.
Oh yeah, also should note that these are all free. Continue reading
How Tucows feels they can unilaterally take your domains.
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JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
I’ve been giving my mom my castoff MP3 players. Recently I bought my parents His & Her’s iPod Nano’s. New ones even. And that’s when Mom discovered the joy of podcasts. She’s got her own faves, but they’re mostly (all) French, which doesn’t really jive with my readership (yep, the same three dudes). So I thought I’d tell you about some of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.
(BTW, if you’re not clear on the whole “podcast” thing, don’t sweat it. Check out these resources:
Tucows: How to Listen to Podcasts
Tucows: Tell Me About… Podcasting
butterscotch: Tune In: A Novice Guide to iTunes)
But first a quick rant about why podcasts are important, and should be part of your life. You’ve got limited time to expose yourself to content. You can choose pre-packaged, pre-digested, top-40’s content, or you can consume interesting, thought provoking material. You are what you ingest.
We’ve spent the greater part of our lives consuming content curated for us by others. The promise of the Internet was that we could assemble our own content feed. Is this good or bad? If you seek out content which agrees with your opinions, you’ll have no challenging opinions. No counterpoints. That’s probably not a good thing. So, I recommend finding content from a wide spectrum of sources. You may disagree with some of the views, but at least you’ll have exposed yourself to challenging opinions, and will be better able to articulate objections to those views. (OK, rant off.) Continue reading