Pause from Aaron Sjogren on Vimeo.

Cindy and Jason invited us to go camping with them at Lake Sonoma CA. We had a brief visit of the camping site a week and a half ago. It was a trial run for Lola to see if she could handle the water and being off leash. It all went so well we decided to go for a three day trip. We even bought a tent on Ebay!

I’m pretty excited even though my first camping trip back in Portugal wasn’t a great success. Leaking tent and an air mattress that couldn’t hold it’s air was enough reason for me to move from the camping site to a four star hotel. I sure it won’t be as painful this time.

I’m actually looking forward in buying a camping knife!

click to enlarge

Mozilla’s firefox is trying to break a record: most downloads within 24 hours. Shouldn’t be too hard since no entry in this category has ever been submitted. You can pledge to download Firefox 3 on the download and help establish this record.

There are a couple of reasons why  use FF as my default browser. One of them are the add-ons and for me foxmarks is the most useful. The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. It also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com. An easy-to-use wizard guides you through the quick startup process. Then Foxmarks works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks up-to-date on all your computers.

You should try it!

OMG! I just found out ESPN2 will broadcast all the Euro 2008 games! Four years ago I purchased the soccer pack with Directv. Setanta Sports was responsible for the broadcasts and it was just plain horrible. The sound was out of sync and the camera movements was almost like Cloverfield. It was embarrassing. The price tag of almost $200.00 was kind of steep too.

So there ya go. The US can tune to ESPN2 to see what real ‘football’ is about…

All is up and running. A few more things need to be added but the major parts are working. One of the main reasons to switch to a new layout was a conflict with certain Wordpress plugins. The all-in-one-seo-pack was conflicting with the Kimili Flash Embed plugin. Irony of it all is that the two plugins mentioned are conflicting with this template as well. Since I’m to lazy to figure out a work around I decided to move my flash based pages to a static page.

For now only my Santa Rosa Bench Project page is moved to a new url. Next will be my ‘photography’ page. Probably this afternoon.

Still on my things-to-do list is an update on the footer, blogroll and sidebar. The comment section needs some work too. It doesn’t display that your comment is being held for review. Instead it throws you in a loop making you think you didn’t comment. Very frustrating…

I’m changing the templates again. Bear with me since only the front page is kinda done. Click on any other link and you’ll be horrified. I dare you. So please be patient as I try to solve all of this the next couple of days.

The reason I’m changing things is that my previous theme had a few flaws. I’m aiming for flawlessness this time! Keep tuned and hang in there with me. It’s gonna be really nice…

Update: for the time being I reverted back to the previous version. You might see a lot of back and forth going on. I’m too lazy to pull this site off-line and relaunch it when it’s finished. I don’t mind if you can see the mess…

I’m a big fan of RSS and it shocks me that the majority of my friends and family don’t know what this is or use it. Hopefully this post will explain what RSS is and how to use it. Let’s look at the wikipedia definition first:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

Doesn’t make sense? Watch the movie about ‘RSS in plain english’:

So far the best explanation on the web about what RSS is and how to use it. Let’s talk about the RSS Readers.

RSS Readers

As you could see in the video you need a RSS Reader to ‘read’ your feeds. There are two type of RSS readers, the web-based readers and the desktop readers. It’s all up to you which one you want to use. Myself I use the desktop reader Newsfire. Here’s a list with RSS readers (Mac):

• PulpFiction
• NewsMacPro
• NewsFire
• Shrook
• NewsFan
• NetNewsWire
• Safari RSS
• OmniWeb

Snackr

Lat night I stumbled upon a new kind of RSS reader. It’s a ticker running on the bottom (or top, left, right of your screen, depending on your settings) of your screen.

What’s Snackr? It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

What’s this AIR thing? Snackr was built using Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. AIR makes it really easy to build cross-platform desktop apps using web technologies like AJAX, Flash and Flex. The Adobe AIR runtime will be installed when you install Snackr.

Get Snackr here

Let me know what kind of RSS reader you are using if any!

In case you haven’t noticed: scroll to the bottom of this page to see my Twitter updates (below the cute little blue bird). I recently started using twitter again just because of the ease of us. We are even setting up twitter accounts for our clients! You can also follow me here.

Yesterday I had a conversation with my ex colleague John N. He got me all excited again about the semantic web. A while ago I ran into twine.com, signed up but never got an invitation for their beta program. John got in and will send in invite instead! Sweet…

For those not familiar with the semantic here here is wikipedia’s definition:

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.[1][2] It derives from W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.[3]

At its core, the semantic web comprises a set of design principles,[4] collaborative working groups, and a variety of enabling technologies. Some elements of the semantic web are expressed as prospective future possibilities that have yet to be implemented or realized.[2] Other elements of the semantic web are expressed in formal specifications.[5] Some of these include Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.

And here is the future: