My boss asked me this morning if I had seen iconfactory.com lately. Both of us go there often to customize our icon sets and check out their awesome…stuff. Well, as of today, the site is down. In it’s place is a flipflopflyin style animated story. In it, the W3C, represented by a guy in a suit, pulls up to the factory in a black van. He gets out and yells for the staff to come out. He then walks with them around the factory pointing out <font> tags, <br>s, <table>s, and other issues. After mooning the guy behind his back…

…they begin to cry and head back into the factory to make some much needed changes. At least that’s how I interpret this silent movie. There are some 1-6 buttons at the bottom of the page which I assume will be future additions to this ongoing saga. If they are redesigning, I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with. It’s sure to be dripping with awesomeness.

As with Numa Numa, this is a vodcast post in response to a post by Dustin Diaz over at Web Standards with Imagination. Dustin mentioned that he’s been really busy and hasn’t had time for podcasting, so I thought I’d provide some AM entertainment by posting a short lesson on color theory. The reason for this impromptu and low-budget production is because Dustin was told that the green and orange on his site are exact opposites and don’t go well together. I’m fairly horrible at this whole video-casting…thing, but if you don’t mind waiting for the streaming quicktime movie to load, I’ll explain what makes colors opposite and how to balance colors that aren’t quite opposites.

<plug type=”shameless”> I mentioned something about a book in the video. The fine folks at Sitepoint thought it might be fun to have me write a book about design. This book should be handy to anybody who wants to design good looking websites but hasn’t had any formal design training. The real target audience though is web developers (like Dustin and many of my other programmer friends) who would like a quick primer on graphic design from the perspective of a fellow web nerd. I’m only about half way through writing it, so I have no idea what the prospective release date is, but it’ll be a fun read.</plug>

I already posted about Amy and I’s anniversary on amesnjas.com, so I don’t really want to duplicate that post here, but I don’t want to let the day just pass by either. Especially since I have an archive of our first and second anniversaries here already. I can hardly believe it’s been three years since we tied the knot. Even when looking at the pictures from our wedding, it feels like it was only yesterday. On amesnjas.com, I mentioned that we’ve now been married for half the time we’ve been together. So, to celebrate 6 years of being with Amy, I thought I’d share a moment from the year we started dating.

It was the Fall of 2000. Ames had just started taking classes at the Florida Institute of Technology and I had just started my second year at the University of Central Florida. UCF was just an hour or so away from FIT, so we spent most of our weekends together in either Orlando or Melbourne. At the time, UCF wasn’t very good at football, but we had a blast at every home game hanging out with my friends from Campus Crusade and buddies from the crew team. Things have changed so much since then, but I have to say it has been a fun ride. Thanks for so many great memories Amy, and I look forward to making many more with you.

Well, it’s been several days now since the final showdown of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, but the world is still reeling from Zinedine Zidane’s brutal attack against Marco Materazzi. Although many people have been trying to determine his motivation, and whether or not he deserves the prestigious Golden Ball award, I’m just amazed at his method of assault. A headbutt? To the sternum? Now that, my friends, is a signature move if I’ve ever seen one. A move that all the kids will soon be are already doing:

In a world obsessed with sports action replays and funny videos, it’s no wonder why Zidane’s signature move has become a wellspring of hilarious animations. After seeing Anil Dash’s Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival, and the animated gifs on The Register, I was curious to see what could be found at YTMND. You’re the man now dog (ytmnd) is a place where users can create and rate funny webpages that are built using only a background image (or animation), a tag-line, and some music. Creativity abounds there and repeated themes (memes) often get started as people build off of each others ideas. All it takes to inspire ytmnd creation is an offbeat quote by a senator, or a weird personals ad. I thought that surely, this signature sternum headbutt move has inspired some ytmnd creations. I was not disappointed. Here is a list of my favorites:

• NES Zidane - An 8-bit reenactment of the attack inspired by Nintendo’s World Cup Soccer.
• Zidane owns Fidel Castro - Zidane uses his signature move against Cuba’s communist president.
• France Fighter II Turbo - Zidane makes a 6 hit move!
• Zidane GETS Owned - Zidane gets a headbutt to the back!.
• Zidane vs Deathstar - Zidane uses his awesome powers to destroy the Deathstar!
• The reason why Zidane did it - He wanted candy, of course.
• Zidane Saves Materazzi’s Life - He didn’t really do it out of anger…
• Medieval Zidane - It was foretold this would happen.
• Zidane is a Pokemon - ZIDANE gained 1 RED CARD!
• It’s not defective, it’s Zidane - A defective PSP did it.
• Connery has had Enough of Zidane - Sean Connery gets in on the headbutting action.
• O RLY zidane : why he was so angry - You fail at football, lol.
• Zidane and Super Mario - He was just playing the game.
• The ZIDANE Keyboard - Only 3 options.
• Azumanga Daioh vs Zidane? - How do I kick shoe?
• Zidane Has One Weakness - Allergies…
• Take on Me, Zidane! - Aha…
• LEGO Zidane Attacks! - Reenactment with Legos.
• Zidane Headbutt Song - Coup de Boule?
• Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em - No YTMND meme would be complete without an appearence from M.C. Hammer
• Zidane Kills Karate Kid - Akime
• Matrix Zidane - the chosen one
• Epic Materazzi Counter-Attack - This could have worked…
• Marco Materazzi Speaks - What happened to your head when you got hit?

Everyone has always asked me how I got to be so artistic. Ok, well nobody has ever really asked me that, but I’m going to go ahead and tell you anyway. It’s genetics. Yep, I come from a family of artists. I guess that’s kinda like coming from a circus family, except that I can’t do any neat acrobatic tricks or spit fire - even though I try both fairly often.

When I was a kid, I spent many a weekend at art shows and craft festivals helping my mom run her booth. My mom was a crafter. She used to make all sorts of poured ceramic things. She even made her own molds and had a kiln in our garage. She hasn’t done much of the commercial crafty stuff since she hurt her back, but she’s got a lot of skill.

My dad is a cabinet maker, which is an art in and of itself, but he also has a lot of other creative outlets. He can make any kind of animal you can imagine with a pair of scissors and cereal box. Yes, a cereal box. Giraffe, turtle, lion, otter, fish; it doesn’t matter, just give the man a small box and he can make one. He also does a lot of painting. Some of his paintings, like the picture above are traditional oil on canvas or wood. My favorite though, are his 3D paintings. He cuts up small pieces of wood, Plexiglas, driftwood, and rope and glues them on a surface to create river and ocean scenes with docks and boats in realistic perspective. He’s an all around artistic guy and has what I like to call a “popsicle stick” sense of humor. One which my wife tells me I’ve inherited as well.

My sister Jenna is an education major at UCF and wants to be a teacher. On the side though, she enjoys photography and pottery has won a few awards with her art. She’s a very creative person and I’m sure that will rub off on her students someday.

Then there’s my brother, Jered. Jered is a Registered Nurse stationed at Travis Air Force Base in California. Very few people know that he has an artistic side as well. In fact, he just emailed me some of his MSPaint artwork this morning:

Aren’t those great??? Click on each for the refrigerator-door worthy 1024x768 versions. I love my artistic family.

Update 10/2/2006: My issues were probably never RAM related at all. It may have been due to bad capacitors on the motherboard. The first generation of G5 iMacs were subject to a bad batch of capacitors that were prone to bulge and leak causing a while host issues including video and power outtages, and in my case kernel panics. To read more about the conclusion of this 6 month saga, click here.

If there’s one thing I really didn’t want to have to deal with last week, it was “computer issues”. As life usually goes though, when you really don’t want things to go wrong, they usually do. Generally “computer issues” means troubleshooting networking or Windows problems with one of our testy homemade PCs, but this time I was having problems with the G5 iMac. My wife and I originally bought the iMac back in December of 2004 to use as our main desktop computer. A few months after the purchase I switched jobs and started working from home on the Mac full time. Since we bought it, the machine has run flawlessly. I leave it on in the office 24/7 and generally only have to restart it when I install OS updates. This was a far cry from my days of working on Windows machines. I would consider myself lucky to go 3 days without having something freeze.

And that’s how things went. Day-in and day-out my Mac just ran. Until around the middle of last month. I came into the office, sat down and moved the mouse to wake up the computer. As the LCD faded in, there was a little gray box centered on the screen with my desktop and running applications shaded in the background like a Lightbox effect. In the box was a message (in several languages) that I needed to restart my computer. Having never seen this message before, I didn’t think much of it and promptly restarted the computer as the message said. As the computer started up, I heard the familiar OSX statup chime, which was followed by the display of the Apple logo and spinny widget, and then came the Gray Screen of Death:

Click image for detailed view.

At this point, I was starting to get worried. The only thing I had backed up recently was my iPhoto archive and the book I’m working on. I needed to get back into my computer. I jumped over onto the PC to learn that both of these errors were known as kernel panics. From the linked article:

A kernel panic is a type of error that occurs when the core (kernel) of an operating system receives an instruction in an unexpected format, or that it fails to handle properly. A kernel panic may also follow when the operating system is not able to recover from a different type of error. A kernel panic can be caused by damaged or incompatible software or, more rarely, damaged or incompatible hardware.

Great… I thought I had escaped OS crashes when I started working on the mac. I guess not. Everything I read about this problem points to software issue first, and then hardware issues. Luckly, there are a lot of great resources out there that explain how to troubleshoot mac issues. Here are a few of my favorite:

• My Mac Won’t Start - A printable pdf booklet from Creative Techs to keep handy in case of emergency.
• iMac G5 Support at Apple - Perhaps I should have started on apple.com instead of Google. They have quite a lot of support material on their website.
• Apple’s Troubleshooting 101: Startup Setbacks - This is where Google first pointed me when I typed in “osx you need to restart your computer”.

In running through the troubleshooting steps on those guides, I thought I had it figured out. Apple’s Disk Utility reported a few errors when I tried to repair the volume. Disk utility said that it repaired the issues and the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic status said the drive was OK. I was able to reboot just fine and thought I was done. That evening though, the machine crashed again. So I went back to Google and picked up where I left off. Each time I was able to eventually get the machine running again only to have it crash within a day or two. Eventually, I found a thread in a forum that suggested that RAM might be the issue. In researching this new theory, I found the the best way to test the RAM on a Mac, isn’t the hardware checking software that comes with the computer, but a free little utility called memtest. When I tried to run memtest in single-user mode it went into a kernel panic within about 3 minutes of me issueing the start command. I then removed one of my two 512MB DIMMs and ran the test again overnight. The next morning, the test had run successfully. So, I restarted the computer with only the one DIMM and as of this morning it’s been running for 2 days straight…and I’ve been working on my book all weekend. I still need to run the test again with just the faulty DIMM to make sure it’s faulty, and run it once more with the good DIMM in the other slot to make sure that the slot isn’t bad. I have noticed that the computer is running a bit slower with only 512MB but I think it’ll do until I can finish the testing process and pick up a new DIMM from Crucial. Hopefully this solution resolves my “computer issues” for a while.