• Midnight Cassette System
  Another good source of free music!
  (tags: free music royaltyfree)
• Incompetech
  A nice source of free music!
  (tags: music royaltyfree mp3 media audio resources)

Mike Witmer Pointed this article out. Very fascinating thought on the importance of presentation when it comes to displaying your work for a client or a customer.

We all know presentation affects consumer perceptions of quality and value, and people will frequently assign one of two identical items as being proportionally better than the other simply based on more attractive packaging or presentation.

This same concept not only applies to consumer products, but for services and art as well. No matter how great your talent, Delivering your message to the wrong crowd will get you nowhere fast.

Check out the article here.

I love web standards, I do. I teach a class on them at a local university and extoll the benefits of everyone using them to create an open and accessible web. Why? They allow us to publish to an audience that is larger than any other ever assembled by man. Without them, the web would be a fragmented mess and it would be far less useful. Now, they also allow us to do some fantastically cool stuff, like the latest video from one of my favorite artists, Arcade Fire. Have you tried it yet? It’s worth a viewing, for sure. Check out the overview from Mashable, too.

But when I see things like this (which accompanied the aforementioned video):

I wonder… what are we doing? Sure, I know it’s a cool demo. Yes, it’s a fun and innovative use of technology… and hopefully we are learning things by creating these experiments… They’re lovely. But at what cost? Are we fueling some sort of Browser War II? Is rich media in this “post-flash” world (which I’m not really sure we are in), bound to ghetto-ize the cool sites and and force us to revert to the “Best viewed on a…” web mullet bumper stickers of 1999? Dude, I’ve been there… I have the scars to prove it and the burnt weekends and late nights of many a browser debugging session to recall not so fondly. Remember this? Am I detecting shades of it here, or what?

So, the next time you bash Flash or any other tech for not being open or taking too much CPU or whatever is the complaint du jour, take a look at this CPU output from my pretty much new 15″ MBP with 8GB ram… This was what was happening while that beautiful piece of open content was playing…

…

Yeow. Every piece of tech is capable of eating up processors, standards compliant or not. Just saying.

Oh and by the way, I did write a postcard to myself. Check it out.

The piece is going to work to bring students into a new services building and allow them to submit content via a mobile webkit application or standard web platform. The corpus of content will be cumulative and build over the life of the piece. Elements will move from one iMac to the next via a visual simulation that will be built on a combination of software platforms.

Planning has been ongoing throughout the summer with the first build prototypes and programming proof of concepts moving ahead nicely as we push into fall. The installation will have a variety of presentation modes and be based upon use cases that are in development with the university.

The piece will be installed late this year and unveiled with the building opening in the new year. Additional updates to follow.

• CSS3 Gradient Generator | Display:inline
  A sweet, easy to use and powerful CSS3 gradient generator
  (tags: css3 gradients generator tools)

The final project will be running on CentOS 5.5, so we wanted a development server to match the final environment. The only problem is that the versions of PHP that come with the standard repositories wasn’t current enough for our needs. That meant I had to go old school and figure it out myself. There’s nothing quite like having to find source code, figure out all of the development libraries you need in order to configure and make the package and get it installed.

I probably sound like a cranky old neckbeard now, but there’s some value in having to dig into the workings of the system in the command-line. It isn’t just the DIY mentality–there’s value in knowing what it takes to make your server work. It will give you a better appreciation of how much better we have it now with the GUIs and wizards and automated methods.

I have been really busy on another of my blogs, Float Learning. This year, my company has dove right into mobile, and specifically the world of mobile learning. I’ve been buried because of that, in case you couldn’t tell here.

We’ve been writing a ton of great stuff at that blog. You should check it out when you have a moment.

I promise to get back to posting here, and have a couple drafts nearly ready, but for now, I’m going to be mostly active on Twitter and may have some delicious links to post coming soon.

That said, I do have a couple milestones to share… It’s been 1 year since my URL shorteners went live at fnaweso.me and fnla.me… go use em and say hi, if you haven’t recently.

Also, this is my 500th blog post. Sweet.

• 5 Small Biz Web Design Trends to Watch
  Here are five current design trends that most small businesses can utilize to great effect.
  (tags: trends inspiration)

• Fonts for iPad & iPhone | Michael Critz
  A list of iPad fonts. The news isn't that great… there needs to be a way to install fonts on these devices.
  (tags: fonts ipad)