Ames and I returned late last night from our week long vacation/househunting trip to South Carolina. We took a detour on the way up for a full-day of Class IV white water rafting on the Chatooga River, and camped out 4 of the 5 nights that we were up there to save money. Two of our nights camping were spent at Chau Ram County Park, where our site (#3) overlooked waterfalls on the Chauga river and had one of the most spectacular views in the park. The other two nights of camping were at Sesquicentennial State Park in Columbia...which featured shotty bathrooms and the sounds of the highway at night. We had planned to stop for a day in Charleston on the way home, but by last night, we were ready to get back to Gainesville.

We had a lot of fun, hit up a lot of our favorite places to eat, and probably saw about 75% of the houses for sale in Columbia. We bought a book entitled 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask to read on the ride up and thought we were going to be able to do it all ourselves. After ending up in a few bad neighborhoods, finding houses that were already sold, and realizing that buying a home remotely was going to be really tough, we ended up deciding to get a buyer's agent. Although we haven't bought a house yet, our agent has a pretty good idea of what we're looking for now, and will check out anything new that pops up on realtor.com and fits our needs.

It's crazy to me that Amy will be starting her PhD in August and that we will be moving as early as mid-July. It doesn't seem like we've been here in Gainesville for two years, but our anniversary is coming up on July 16th, and we've been planning this for a while. It feels good to be headed somewhere new but there's so much to do before we get there.

Ames called me on Tuesday to ask if I had heard “the big news”. I think I surprised her when I said that I had heard of the Adobe/Macromedia merger the day before. Since I hadn’t ranted to her about it Monday night, she wanted to know what my opinon was. I’ve been kind of quiet about the whole thing because I half-heartedly agree with Greg Storey in that unless you’ve got a huge investment in Macromedia as a company, it’s not that big of a deal. On the other hand, Ames is right too. It is big news. In one $3.4 Billion swipe of a corporate credit card, one company owns most of the software that I use for work.

OK, so now I’m somewhat interested (not jamming my eyes back into their sockets interested - just interested). As long as I have the tools I need to do my job and they’re not going the jack the prices through the roof, I’m happy. The problem is that there is a lot of overlaps in the products of these two companies and it will be interesting to see which flagship products get the axe. Take Dreamweaver and GoLive for instance. Dreamweaver is the much more trendy/popular app, and I would only assume they would keep it. Aside from Flash, I think Dreamweaver was a key acquisition of this deal. Then there’s Freehand and Illustrator. These are both GREAT products, but if it’s Adobe’s call, I would think they’re going to snip Freehand right off the Studio MX package and banish it to never be upgraded causing it’s sales to dwindle till it dies a slow painful death in Adobe’s dark dungeon.

I guess that’s the thing that makes this merger so tragic to some people. It’s not a case like Google’s purchase of Blogger, where they are strategically putting themselves in a new market. These are two popular companies that have been expanding a thriving industry with their competition and now there is only one, and no competition to be found. I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see what the fallout will bring. In the mean time, be sure to check out John Gruber’s: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s “FAQ” Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia

I've been doing my geocaching the old fashioned way. I login to geocaching.com, search for the zip code I want to cache in, browse through the results, printing out the ones I want to go find, and manually key those coordinates into my Magellan SportTrack Map. This unit actually comes with an uplink cable to download cache info straight to the receiver, but I've never used it. For a tech-savvy person, sitting and keying in GPS data, knowing that there is a better way is frustrating.

It's time for a change. I downloaded the highly acclaimed EasyGPS program to transfer waypoints to my GPSr, which will probably cut my Geocaching prep time by about half. That's a decent improvement - But Wait, there's MORE!... I also found an open source command line program called GeoToad that actually queries all the info from geocaching.com without ever having to visit the website:

GeoToad lets you perform on-demand queries against the Geocaching website, and export the matching geocaches to numerous devices and over 20 file formats. You tell it what you want to see, such as:

Geocaches that I have not found within 15 miles of 27513 with travelbugs.

or if you are a little more demanding, something like:

Geocaches in Texas with a difficulty of 3 or higher that have never been found, match the keywords river, or stream, but not any caches owned by Elvis.

You can then take these query results with you on a nice long print-out, import them into EasyGPS, transfer them to your GPS unit, or even save the results onto your cellphone!

GREAT! ...but I don't like the amount of delay time they specified between grabbing cache information. No Problem! The source code is on the same website and it's written in Ruby. So, I downloaded a Ruby editor, popped open geotoad.rb and changed the "Sleep" value (line 406) to a much lower value than 15, and BINGO!

NOTE: Although you can set this value to 0 (and I did for fun) this is not such a good idea for getting say, all the caches in Florida. It's fun to watch it go, but I'm sure it puts a major strain on the Geocaching servers - especially if there are a lot of people out there using GeoToad.

In talking to Ames the other day, I think we’ve agreed that OSX Tiger is worth the upgrade. Partly because she’s eligible for the student discount, and also because of our unquenchable desire for widgets. Sure, there are other great reasons to upgrade to 10.4 like automatic font smoothing, the image slideshow, spotlight - but the REAL reason we want the update is so we can get Dashboard with it’s myriad of nifty mini-application widget thingys.

Any mac users out there NOT planning to upgrade?

In scrolling through my bloglines this morning, I came across Jon's Hicksdesign family album - a screenshot history of his personal site. At the end of the post was a call out for all designers to bring their skeletons out of the closet, so to speak. "Ok," I thought, "I can do this." So I remoted into "The Box" at home and started browsing through my archives. Like Jon, I managed to find all but 1 of the previous incarnations of my personal site...and it wasn't pretty. In particular, the homepage that I created during my senior year of high school is REALLY BAD. So bad in fact, that it might make you wonder how I ever became a normal adult, much less a website designer. In the interest of inspiring the young, and preserving historical accuracy, here is the homepage that was once hosted on Geocities and the Pegasus servers at UCF from sometime in 1998 through about the middle of 2000:

This homepage came only a few short years after I discovered the internet in the form of dial up BBS servers and telnet. Back then, I dove head first into the web, starting my own BBS in Jr. High school and spending hours "on-line" playing ASCII and ANSI games like Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, and Kyrandia. These were the days when the whole world existed on Geocities, and Angelfire. Way back when my only real connection to the internet was through Net Zero (which I hacked to hide the ads), and when I was searching for the latest and greatest filters for Photoshop 4. Man, was I a nerd. A high school wrestling, grocery store bagging, Airwalk wearing nerd.

I loved doodling and creating digital artwork. I just didn't know a thing about art. When I started college at UCF, something changed in me. I got a proper education in art history, painting, drawing, ceramics, graphic design, and somehow the light bulb came on. I went from creating website designs like the one above and MSPaint doodles like that nice Spam image to producing gallery worthy artwork and website designs like the one below which I registered the name jasongraphix.com with in 2001:

I said before that I found all but one of the previous designs for my homepage. The missing link was a design that I came up with after the one above while I was trying to learn css. Inspired by meyerweb, stopdesign, and zeldman, I worked hard to merge my knowledge of design and color theory with this "zen art" of css design. After a short time, I gave up on that design, toyed around with blogger for a while, and eventually merged the structure of the layout reservoir's 3 column layout with my newfound skills with php and mysql to create my first blog in December of 2003:

I stuck with that design through graduation, and blogged with it for about a year. In October of 2004, I decided that I was starting to grow out of that shell. I had a much better knowledge of css, design, and programming, and my home brew blogging software was so under featured that it wasn't worth developing. I actually got to a point where I was too embarrassed to even post my domain on other designers blogs. That was when I started working on Jasongraphix v4, the 1900's theme you see below. Even though it was recently featured on CSSVault, I've had the design up since November of 2004. I really love the look, but as a designer, I'm cursed to always seeing where it can be improved. I would introduce it as the design you see here today, but I'm sure change is coming. Definitely not today, and probably not for a few months, but I'm itching for a redesign already. For that reason, here's a screenshot:

So, what kind of skeletons are hiding in your closet?

Gmail has been doing a great job in keeping my inbox free of spam, however as I purge my Spam folder every few days, I’ve been noticing a trend. A majority of my spam has very creative and clever names. I’ve continued to delete these as usual, but I’ve been saving up a list of the better ones for a post like this. Enjoy!

• Amperes C. Dulls
• Archaeologist A. Comm
• Bier F. Stupidly
• Censures F. Turncoat
• Checkup F. Billy
• Clapeyron F. Pueblo
• Clump H. Arachnids
• Confides E. Ferocious
• Contradistinction B.
• Converging U. Unsold
• Enthused M. Posse
• Estuary I. Swimmer
• Hubcaps H. Islamabad
• Jovial C. Turnaround
• Lavishly V. Pursed
• Mockingbird B. Playth
• Mushed J. Retina
• Prejudging O. Assassi
• Roving G. Vault
• Ruefully A. Input
• Salud Langston
• Scratched M. Muddiness
• Selling G. Corruptness
• Tramp Q. Envelope
• Winteriest O. Gooses

When Ames and I decided to buy the Civic, we wanted to try to sell our 1997 Camry outright instead of trading it in. The one thing we forgot was how picky people are when looking at used cars. The paint is not in the best condition, but the thing runs good and has less than 100k miles…and it’s a Toyota - so it’ll run forever, right? Anyway, the biggest complaint we’ve had from test drivers is that the gas pedal sticks. Yea, well…we’ve known that but never thought it was worth getting checked out. When you go to press the gas pedal, the initial touch of the pedal sometimes requires a little force, sometimes you almost have to stomp on the gas to get it to go. A while ago, I tried squirting some WD40 wherever the wire was exposed thinking it was a friction issue…but no dice.

Amy and I both ended up Googling for a solution on the same day (after our last potential buyer decided he wasn’t interested) and found that the solution was simple. According to the forums and websites that we found, the problem was that the butterfly valve that allows air into the engine is gunked up by carbon deposits and is getting stuck. Sounds complicated to fix, but it really, REALLY isn’t.

Here’s what you’ll:

• A can of Carburetor Cleaner
• An old Toothbrush
• Some Paper Towels
• Phillips Screwdriver
• Metallic Chewing Gum Wrapper
• Titanium Bike Frame Pipe
• A friend (or spouse) who’s willing to sit in the car with their foot on the gas pedal for about 5 minutes.

If you can park your vehicle so that the passenger side is higher, than the the driver side, great! If not, no worries, you’re just going to make a lot of smoke. I’ll explain later. Turn the car off, open up the hood, and look for the large black flex pipe that runs from your air filter to the top of the engine. There should be a metal wire on a pulley near where this pipe connects. When you press your gas pedal, this pulley turns, opening up the valve that lets air into the engine. This valve is what needs to be cleaned. To remove the hose, you’ll need to loosen up the hose clamp with the screwdriver. Once the clamp is loose enough to move around, pull the pipe off of the throttle body and push it to the side like the picture below. Then, push a wad of paper towels under the opening. This is not a picture of our Camry, but is mechanically very similar.

This is the part where you need someone to get in the car and hold the gas pedal down. DO NOT start the car. You’ll notice that when they press the gas, the circular butterfly valve inside the throttle body will be open like the picture above. With this valve open, you’ll want to attach the little plastic straw to your can of carburetor cleaner (which is about $3 at an auto parts store) and saturate the inside of the throttle body. Be sure to get the entire surface of the valve flap as well. This should loosen up some nice black gunk around where the valve usually touches the walls of the throttle body. Use your toothbrush to scrub the walls and the flap as thoroughly as possible. If you can still feel grit around the edges of the flap, or the groove where the valve touches the walls, keep scrubbing and squirting carburetor cleaner as needed.

When you’re done scrubbing, wipe up as much of the carburetor cleaner as you can. Push the black hose back on to the throttle body, and tighten the hose clamp. Now this is the fun part. Crank you engine and let the car sit running for a few minutes. Depending on how much carburetor cleaner is still in your throttle body, your car exhaust will put off a nice steady flow of white smoke. We must have had quite a bit of cleaner left in ours because it made quite a spectacle. I’m talking voluminous puffy white clouds. I think everyone walking or driving by felt bad for us - like our car was dying or something…but it WILL go away. After about 5 or 6 minutes I ran up to the apartment, grabbed my camera, and took the picture below. This was nothing compared to the opaque gases we were making at first though.

The result: The acceleration on the Camry has never been smoother. Instead of having to stomp on the gas, it responds appropriately to the lightest touch. Ahh…I love do it yourself repairs when they actually work.

Remember that reading program from when you were a kid where they bribed you into reading books using Pizza Hut pizza? I do. I was a pizzaholic, and would do anything to get that fifth frickin’ star sticker on my pin so I could have pizza for dinner. My brother and I would stagger our reading so we could sometimes go out for pizza twice a week. Well it still exists! I can’t wait to have my own kids so I can con into reading too!

On a completely different note, an Amazon box showed up on my porch yesterday. In it were three books. One of them I’ve been told I need to have since college, the next one looked like it would be useful as well, but the third one is the reason I made my order in the first place. Sound familiar? This is about how every book order I make goes. I don’t order books all that often, so you won’t ever see a “Currently Enjoying” list in my sidebar but I thought I’d give you a rundown of each book and why I bought them.

• Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines - During my senior year Graphic Design classes at UCF, Chuck Abraham would have made this book his textbook if he could have. Most of what that last year of classes was about was going freelance. He taught us everything we needed to know about doing contract work. This book (currently on it’s 11th edition) is a must have for anyone doing freelance graphic design work. I thought I really didn’t need it since I planned to find full-time work, but even with the full-time job, I’ve got more on-the-side freelance work than I can keep up with. This book has everything I could ever need to know from copyright issues to pricing guidelines, contractual issues to project planning. I don’t know why I didn’t buy it sooner.

• Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers - I bought this book for the same reasons that I bought the first. Freelance work. I made my own home-brew contracts and invoices when I first started taking on extra work, but was starting to wonder how sound they were legally. Since I really can’t afford a lawyers time to check them over, I thought this would be a great initial checkpoint. I think this review was the clincher for the purchase:

  Our small graphic design firm had been relying on the legal forms and contracts from this book for about one year. Finally, we decided that perhaps we ought to visit with a lawyer to make sure we were doing it right…$560.00 later for an initial consultation, we realized that this $29.95 book was the best business investment we’d ever made! The lawyer confirmed that the contracts that we had been using were airtight and were great (he had a few other pointers…but, none worth $560.00).

• The Zen of CSS Design - …and this one was my present, the one I WANTED, my PreCioUs! I’ve been a fan of Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden for some time now. I never have created a design for it, but it definitely opened my ideas to the possibilities of XHTML/CSS webdesign. I’m no standards Nazi, but if you have ever doubted that CSS layouts could stand up to (or knock the socks off of)traditional table-based webdesign you should check out the garden…and buy the book. It’s chock full of tips, tricks, and designs from the likes of Shaun Inman, D. Keith Robinson, Jon Hicks, Ryan Sims, Mike Davidson…and over a hundred other influential designers and developers. Because of the examples, and new perspective on website design Fresh Styles for Web Designers used to be my favorite book. I’m surprised to find that this book has that same independent designer feel, and is sure to become my new current favorite.

I'm sorry to inform you all, but I will no longer be maintaining this blog or taking part in the web design community. An opportunity has come up that I simply cannot pass over. For all my life (or at least my sleepless college days) I've dreamed of one day becoming part of an elite group. It will take hours upon hours of training, hard work, and dedication, but I've just heard back from the local office and they say I've got what it takes.

Jason Beaird
Barista Extraordinaire^(tm)
http://icednonfatmilkextracaramelcaramelmacchiato.jasongraphix.com