Jim Barraud

Last night I experienced my first Nine Inch Nails concert and what an experience it was. This is a band I’ve wanted to see perform live since high school, but just never did. Well last night more than made up for lost time.

Mr. Sykes and I traveled up to the IZOD Center (or the Brendan Byrne Arena as we old school Jersey folk remember it) in East Rutherford, NJ for the show. But to call it a “show” would be an understatement. It was more of an audio/visual juggernaut sending your auditory and visual senses into overload. There were signs posted around the arena warning that “Strobe lights are in use” when they should have said “your mind may explode”.

Being a long-time fan and this being my first time seeing NIN live, I was extremely happy with the setlist. Sure, they played the big standards “Closer”, “Head Like a Hole” and “Hurt” which are to be expected (and rocked). But they also played some great non-standard tracks off past albums. “The Big Comedown” off The Fragile was one of the best performances of the night. But the best? “Reptile”. Fucking Reptile. I can’t tell you how excited I was to see them perform this, and we were only 8 songs into the performance.

The first third of the show consisted mostly of a wall of synchronized lights and strobe lights for the visual effects, which in itself was amazing. Then three screens were lowered to stage level and basically encased the band. The front two being essentially a mesh LCD screen (not sure of the exact technology) allowing you to see the band behind them. These screens created the illusion of the band playing in the desert, a swamp, the rain and even a wall of static that gave the appearance of being controlled by Trent. Amazing stuff.

The musical performance was top notch. The band really seemed energized and hammered through each song flawlessly. Midway through the show they performed three tracks off the recently released instrumental album “Ghosts I-IV” with an electronic/acoustic twist involving an upright bass and Trent playing a xylophone. The songs were more down tempo then the rest of the set which provided a nice change of pace. But were back to rocking in overdrive with “Wish” in no time.

Overall I would have to say this is one of, if not the best show I have ever seen. It’s possible they’ll be playing in a city near you. So if you have the opportunity, go check them out. Even if your not a fan, it could turn you into one.

Unfortunately my little point and shoot was having a hard time capturing any of it so I didn’t really get any quality photos or videos. But I’m finding plenty of other people did, so I’ve included flickr slideshow below of shots others have gotten. You can also find plenty video goodness from the show on YouTube

I’m always excited when I find a solution to a problem that works within my existing workflow. For example, I’ll be attending the Nine Inch Nails show at the IZOD center tomorrow night and I need to remember to bring the tickets. Because for one I’ll be leaving from work so I need to grab them first thing in the morning and two, my memory is crap. I’ve tried various reminder services in the past, but since they don’t fit into my existing workflow I always forget to use them. Ironic, I know.

Since I’m an avid Twitter user and Twitter is a notifcation/messaging service, I thought it would be great if I could tell Twitter to send me a reminder at a particular time to remember the tickets. A quick Google search later and I discover timer. A Twitter bot that serves this exact purpose. Add timer to your following list and send it a direct message with the minute count of when you’d like to be notified and the message you’d like to receive in the following format “d timer 30 Remind me about that thing”. You’ll then be reminded of that thing in 30 minutes via a direct message.

This really shines if you setup Twitter to notify of direct messages via SMS. This allows you to both set and receive reminders from anywhere via your cell.

One downside is you need to set your reminder time via minutes. So if you want to be reminded the next day at a particular time you need to figure out how many minutes that is. It would be great if you could set the units of time. For example, if you wanted to be reminded in two days of an event it would be cool if you could format it as “d timer 2d Do that thing you need to do”.

Other downsides revolve around the fact that this is done through Twitter (which as I’ve said is also the advantage). And Twitter is known for having it’s share of outages. So if Twitter is down, so are your reminders. There’s also no way to edit existing reminders or view the reminders you’ve set. But for me those are minor gripes.

Here it is, yet another redesign. Although I think this one will last a while since I’m getting a little burnt out on doing them. I’m going super simple this time. A single column layout with a clean aesthetic design.

I’m going to try and focus and posting more of my own content and less of the video embeds and random links that I’ve been posting lately. Which was a bit of an experiment on my part.

Anyway, here it is. I’ll be making tweaks here and there as I grow into the design and start adding content. Oh, and that photoblog I was all hyped up about a week ago? Yea, that’ll probably be taken down and supplemented with this new design. I’m not liking the feel of my content being spread on several sites so I’m bringing it back under one roof. Well, as of this week I am.

I’ve just launched my new photoblog called Nothing But Flowers. The subject matter itself has nothing to do with flowers, it’s just my old domain from my previous tumblelog. But the metaphor still fits. Nothing but the good stuff.

I wanted a more formal location to display some of the photos I’ve been taking. Flickr is great, but I wanted to be more in control of the presentation and more selective about the pictures I’m posting up.

Anyway, take a look and let me know what you think. http://nothingbutflowers.net

This past Friday (August 8th) I had the pleasure of attending the first day of the All Points Festival at Liberty State Park, NJ with the wife and Mr. Jon Sykes. I haven’t been to a festival (much less a concert for adults) in quite some time, so I was pretty excited to go. Of course that excitement level was cranked up a few notches since both Underworld and Radiohead were playing, back to back no less.

APW was being promoted as a sort of “green” festival. Attendees were encouraged to use mass transit and if you wanted to drive you had to obtain a special carpool permit. We had opted for the ferry route. But since we were coming for southern Jersey, our trip consisted of 1 hour car ride, 40 minute ferry ride and yet another 15 minute ferry ride. From what I’ve read by other attendees, the ferry was the way to go.

Aside from a couple 5 - 10 minute rain showers, the weather was perfect. The view great as well with both the Manhattan skyline and Lady Liberty in the background. Since it was a “Music and Arts” festival, there were various art installations and performances scattered around the grounds.

The festival itself was well organized, but there was one aspect that felt a bit too restrictive. In order to purchase alcohol you needed to get your special “over the age of 21” wristband. Your wristband had 5 tabs on it and that was your drink limit. Each time you purchased a drink a tab was removed. I actually thought that was a good idea and it seemed to work because I didn’t see anyone acting out of line all day. The downside was you weren’t allowed out of the designated drinking areas. Which I can sort of understand since they were probably trying to prevent you from passing out drinks to your underage friends. But the issue was the drinking areas were fenced in and the view of the view of the entire festival and performances were blocked by the fences. You started feeling like a second class citizen for drinking a beer.

We had opted for the more expensive VIP tickets which included access to air conditioned lounge, more beverage choices and special VIP viewing platform in front of the main stage. But apparently the VIP viewing platform access didn’t include Radiohead since everyone with the special VIP bracelets got kicked off after Underworld for the “real” VIPs with orange bracelets. While the walled off beer area irritated me, this angered me. What’s the point of buying “VIP” tickets if you get access to the VIP area for only select times?

Because of our (early) access to the VIP viewing platform, we stuck mostly to the main stage performances. The Go Team!, who I’ve never head of, were pretty awful. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by Michael Franti and Spearhead. They had a great sound and energy. Next was the New Pornographers. I had just gotten acquainted with their music before the festival, but their live performance blew away anything I had listened to previously.

I’ve never seen Underworld live but I’ve been a fan for quite some time. While I was super excited to see them, I was a little disappointed to find out their set would be during the daylight because of everything I’ve heard and seen about their light show. But guess what, it didn’t matter. Their sound was tremendous live and their visuals carried through despite the daylight.

Then there was Radiohead. As great as all the other performances were throughout the day, they all seemed like opening acts compared to Radiohead. Both their visuals and musical performance were spectacular. The setlist was comprised mostly of their In Rainbows material with interjections from their back catalog, which was perfect. The only downside was that I had to leave before the encore in order to make my second ferry home.

Overall I felt the festival was great (even if I only went the first day). It was well planned, not over crowded and the bands had decent set lengths. I’m hoping it does really become an annual event and based on the other reviews I’ve read, they should have no problem making that happen.

I’ve put together a flickr set of the photos and videos I took throughout the day. I didn’t get any of the Radiohead set because I was too enthralled with the performance to take out my camera. But my cohort Mr. Sykes got some great photos and videos of the performance.

1. iPods and cell phones don’t take kindly to being submerged unexpectedly in a pool. Even if the submersion is with the best intentions of saving a life.
2. Even though a funnel cloud isn’t officially a “Tornado” unless it touches the ground, if you see one form in your rearview mirror, it’s a fucking Tornado.
3. Knowing how much gas is currently contained within your automobiles gas tank is apparently a privilege, not a right. At least according to Hyundai.
4. It’s legal to purchase fireworks in Florida, yet illegal to actually use them.
5. Alligator tastes like a combination of fish and chicken.

Dateline: Mario from Eric Grissom on Vimeo.

I’ve always been a fan of the Food Network show Good Eats with Alton Brown. I like the simple and straight forward approach to explaining how the cooking world works. And recently, I’ve become a big Tea fan. Here’s two great videos of a good eats episode where he explains the nuances of tea.

Weezer cover Radiohead’s Creep, live in Portland from Dave Allen on Vimeo.

One of the touted new features of Firefox 3 is a more native look within your operating system of choice. I’m a Mac guy, so lets focus there. The new Mac theme is called Firelight. While it is a huge improvement over the Firefox 2 default theme, it still falls short of feeling like a native Mac app. It feels more like a Windows app pretending to be a Mac app. Gray gradients do not in itself make a Mac interface. While well known Apple pundits have given excellent Safari vs. Firefox comparisons, I figured I’d take a slightly different approach.

I’ve been a Safari fan for a while. I love it’s simple interface and think the webkit rendering engine is top-notch. But most of my day-to-day work involves working on web applications that are predominantly internal facing. And the ones I work on usually don’t have official support for Safari (as much as would love it they did). While Safari’s web development debug tools have made great strides, they still don’t compare to Firebug. That being said, my default browser for the past year or so has been Safari. Firefox 2 was just far to buggy to be considered any more than a development browser. Normal browsing and “getting things done” tasks were left to Safari. Firefox 3 on the other hand has made tremendous leaps over Firefox 2. I’ve been using it since beta 2 and while I still run into the occasional bug, I run into them far less often (days to weeks apart as opposed to hours). Now that Firefox 3 is officially released, I’ve made it my default browser (we’ll see how long that last though).

Default Firefox 3 Theme

Now that I’ve made Firefox 3 my default browser, how do I get around the not so native feeling of the Firefox 3 interface? Turns out there’s a wealth of options to paint your brand spanking new Firefox 3 with a coat of Safari. Lets check them out.

GrApple

This is the foundation to your Firefox Safarification. GrApple if a Firefox theme by Aronnax that pretty much mimics Safari in any way possible. You have two flavors to choose from, Yummy or Delicious. The difference between the two are the placement of the tabs in the tab bar. If your going for authentic Safari, you want Yummy.

Fission

One of the nicest safari features is the integrated loading bar into the address bar. Fission is a plugin that adds this useful feature to Firefox. You have the options of changing the color of the loading bar or adding a custom image, but the GrApple theme takes this into account adds that for you.

Stop or Reload Button

The stop and reload buttons are combined into one button in Safari. This cleans up and simplifies the toolbar a bit (or adds room for even more buttons depending on your taste). Use the Stop-or-Reload Button extension to combine these buttons in Firefox.

firefox-mac-pdf

One of my favorite Safari features is the built in PDF viewing support. The day I don’t need to load up the Adobe Acrobat Plug-in is a good day. The firefox-mac-pdf extension adds this same built in PDF viewing support to Firefox.

Tab to Window

Sometimes you need to pop out a tab into a new window. This often happens to me when I’m referencing content in one tab to fill out a form in another. Surprisingly this isn’t a built-in feature, but here’s an extension to fix that. Safari makes this easy in that you can just drag a tab off the tab bar and it’ll turn into a new browser window. This solution relies on good old contextual menus. Not as fancy, but it’s functional.

Color Management

Safari has great color management support since it reads the color profiles that can be embedded into images. Browsing a site like flickr is different experience in Safari then in any other browser because the colors are displayed “correctly”. Firefox actually has built in color management, but it’s not enabled by default due to performance issues and other small regressions. But the Color Management extension will enable this feature for you if you want to try it out. And I say try it out because I personally don’t recommend using it full-time since I did experience some noticeable performance issues when I had it enabled. The other issue is you need to define your system default color profile and no matter what I did I couldn’t get the colors in the browser to be correct. All colors in the browser, including the toolbar, were dark and over saturated. I’m not an expert on color profiles, so maybe I’m missing something. But the color and performance issues didn’t seem worth having this feature enabled. Which of course is probably why it’s off by default. I only list here as another weapon in your Safarification arsenal. Use it with caution.

Firefox with GrApple Theme and Stop/Reload plugin

Now these add-ons will get you most of the way there. But there will still be things you come across in your day-to-day Firefox use that reminds you of Firefox’s non-native Mac roots.

• There is no integration with the operating system wide keychain for password storage. I’m fully aware of Firefox’s password saving capability (and I use it), but this is functionality that should really be utilizing the system wide keychain. It gets real annoying when passwords are saved in multiple locations and there’s no way to keep them synced. This is probably my biggest Firefox pet peeve.
• Contextual menus have squared off edges and not round. It’s a little thing, but it gives you that “something’s not right” feeling.
• The form controls are not native. They’ve done a lot of work in trying to make them look native, but they still feel a bit off.
• There’s no support for the system wide dictionary. Command+Control+D has to be one of the most under used OS X keyboard shortcuts. I use it constantly, but whenever I mention it or someone sees me use it, they ask “what’s that?”

I know there will be the usual “Just use Camino” comments. I’ve used Camino and I think it’s a great browser. But I rely on Firefox’s web development extensions too much to even consider it.

If anyone has any solutions for the above issues, drop me a comment. I’d love to hear them.

Fred - My First Spore Creature from Jim Barraud on Vimeo.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Visualizing the commit history of the Python scripting language project. (via Chris Glass)

I’m a big flickr fan. It’s a great service for sharing and discovering interesting photos. But I’ve always felt browsing around flickr to discover new photos could get a little tiring. You have your standard single page with a photo, previous & next buttons, or a page of paginated photos. Presented in a very basic way that’s similar to the majority of photo-sharing services out there. I usually prefer to view photos in flickr’s slideshow mode because of it’s darker background and larger photos, but this isn’t a great method for discovering new photos or browsing around.

I’ve just stumbled upon a nifty little app called DestroyFlickr (via). DestroyFlickr provides alternative methods to viewing, downloading and uploading photos on flickr. Photos are presented on a dark gray background in a casual format. The app divides itself into several workspaces. You can load various content into each workspace and easily switch between them. For example, you could have you’re photos displayed in one workspace and various contacts photos in the others. The app is built with on the Adobe Air platform, so it will run on either windows or mac provided you have Adobe Air installed.

DestroyFlickr succeeds in making it seem as though browsing flickr is like browsing photos on your own hard-drive. A desktop native feel is given to content that exists entirely online. At times it feels as though I’m using a kind of “Lightroom Light” app for browsing photos on my computer. It’s the first Air based app that I’ve used that doesn’t feel much like an Air app (and that’s a good thing).

DestroyFlickr is still in the beta stage of development and the developer has stated that there are plenty of other features he wants to add, but currently can’t until June 30th because of its submission to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. It’ll be interesting to watch this app as it develops because there’s a tremendous amount of potential here.