if you have a case of the monday's ;) then try this diversion. http://www.efrogz.com/ like the old frogger game. See if someone can beat my top score. Let me know if you do. Good luck though, youll need it. EDIT: sorry guys, didn't realize I hadn't made that a link.

I coined this phrase in the past few weeks (it may have already been used somewhere for something completely different, but I think you'll see where I got the name in a minute). I think it adequately describes a situate that comes up oftentimes in the web development community, especially in the intranet business. When I design and develop an intranet application for a company, it is often an alternative to another type of application that the businesses could go with. They could easily use a custom made app from another company built in java or c# or something of the like. But building an intranet website has many advantages over the competition for many reasons. Some of those being the ease of updates, the ability to work from a single datastore, the lack of need to install anything on a workstation, and the list goes on and on. But most of my clients up until this point have been clients that have no software like this. They are often novice computer users and do not understand what it is like to work with a software development company, or to work with custom made software. When they see any kind of bump in the road, or something they see doesn't work exactly as they expected, it reflects on the company. What they don't realize is that any software they were to receive would not be without bugs. And oftentimes if something they see doesn't work exactly right, it is because they didn't adequately explain their needs. But this would happen with any software, and usually even more so with standard software that wasn't web-based. My average time to fix any problem no matter how serious is less than a day. While this may seem like a long time to people who have no perspective of software development, I know that a compiled application like one made in java for example would take much more effort to change even the slightest problem. Then there is also the perspective of novice computer users. Many times I find that these users expect the software to behave in a certain way. Why they think this is somewhat up for debate, since most of the time they have no experience with any other software the does this action. Of course they don't understand databases or records or anything like this, and they shouldn't need to, but as developers know these are things we have to be concerned with, and so may not be able to develop an app that does something specifically. It may take two steps to do something they would love to see in one. But we know this isn't possible. What the real problem most of the time is that these people don't try something different. They hit a bump, slam the brakes and say its broke. Or sometimes they even hit a wall, an actual problem even receiving an error message, and they keep on going like nothing happened, only to break things further. In the end, because they have no experiences to compare these things to, they have no perspective of what they are working with. We must, as developers teach them how to use the software, but we will never be able to tell them how good they have it, until they use something that is undeniably worse than what they have.

I almost hesitate to post this for a few reasons. But google has now created google video. You can read about it here. The reason I hesitate to post it yet is because it is so new. A few test searches yeilded nothing actually usable. But stay tuned, Im confident this is going to turn into a great thing in the near future.

Anyone that reads this blog with any regularity knows that I am very interested in all that is google. I have reported about many of their products and services and there are only a select few I haven't tried, and of the ones Ive tried, only a few I haven't liked. I tried Picasa, google's digital picture manager a while back in version 1, and honestly I wasn't all that impressed. It was slick, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't very intuative, and it took longer than two seconds to figure out how it worked. Now that being said, I will admit that I didn't really spend that much time with it either. Now I just noticed on google's blog that they have come out with a version 2 of picasa. So, just for kicks, I have downloaded it, and at first impressions it is a significant improvement. Again, im sure it was a great product before, but it really seems to have matured a lot since version 1. Its fast, very fast, and only a 3 mb download. It does take up quite a bit of memory when running, but not as much as Photoshop. Now before I continue, please let me explain why I just made a connection between the two programs that is somewhat apples and oranges. With this picasa (im not sure if this was in version 1) you can now do several effects and edits to your digital pictures, like croping, rotating, resizing, and several artsy fartsy effects. Very nice stuff that is very easy, very clean and effecient. And I don't have to load up photoshop to do it in. Of course this is by no means a photoshop replacement. But it does do some of the lower level stuff that I can use instead of photoshop. Im sure I will be writing a bit more about this in the future so stay tuned. And if anyone has tried it out let me know what you think of it. But I definately recomend the download and upgrade.

I guess I could also explain a little bit of what got me on the topic of yesterdays post. I meant to do this in the post, but it turned out to be longer than I had intended. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6823880/ Well, we landed a probe on Titan, saturns largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere as far as we know. Its so substantial in fact that we haven't ever actually seen the surface untill now. The scientists say that the composition of Titan may be what earth was like millions and billions of years ago and what lead to it spawning "life". This of course is a crock, but still. Its interesting. Then there is the other article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6826412/ This talks about whether science leaves room for E.T. Its an interesting read, although very high level in some places. But you can pretty much get the drift. Ill probably post more about this later on.

I can remember a long long time ago I climbed up on a roof with a friend of mine with the help of a radio antenna. We sat there under a clear sky in the middle of the night pondering all kinds of questions. We were nerds as it were, there was no mistake about that. And of course, we were discussing things that most people would consider nerd talk. But as someone once put it, "first it will be the nerds that inherit the earth". Just look at bill gates. Well one of our discussions that night came upon extraterrestrial life, if we thought it existed. And I can remember clearly thinking, "that would be an awful waste of space if it was just us". continue reading...

Its only been a month and a half, but www.sbtyouth.com is now available and live. It is already being received and used quite a bit. click here for more information.

Maybe I really am in a minority here, but somehow I doubt it. There are all kinds of people out there, especially lately in the coldfusion community talking about oo. I feel like I have a pretty strong grasp on the basic OO principles and ideas, like encapsulation, polymorphisms, inheritance and the like. My main problem is that these things aren't directly applicable to my projects. Let me explain. continue reading...

A long time ago I used to get lots and lots of mail order catalogs. For lots of things, bikes, clothes, sharper image, all kinds of things. One of my friends at the time even suggested that I get a wife from a mail order catalog, as surely there was one in there somewhere. (I looked, no wives for sale). Anyway, I just found a new Google site, I'm not sure how it slipped past the radar. its is http://catalogs.google.com/. Search mail order catalogs to your hearts desire.

hey everyone, sorry no post yesterday. Wel'll sbtyouth.com is up and going strong, the only thing its really lacking is the content that we are waiting on. So it shouldn't be long now. My post on RAD the other day was specifcally aimed at this project. Its been rather fun, and a very quick process. Its already getting some traffic in its unfinished state, I hope that means there will be a lot of interest in it. Some of the areas include forums, prayer requests, student spotlight, calendar of events, and much more. It features a Content Management System built on my BLAIR framework, the first of its kind, so we are really excited about that. So head on over there and check it out, and let me know what you think!

The converstation seems to come up regularly. Why is one programming language better than another? Historically programmers are emotionally connected to their programming languages (you spend that much time with something/someone youre going to start to get attachted) and so the discussions often become heated. But by far, one of the strongest cases for coldfusion as a web language for me is Rapid Application Developement. You just cant get something out any faster that is as robust as a CF application. Why am I mentioning this now? I just created a standard features Forum in cf in a little less than 6 hours. Maybe if you really knew your language you could do it faster than that in something else, but I would really be surprised. I know I couldn't in anything else.

What better job could a Police Officer have than investigating Krispy Kreme?

Hal Helms has some articles about OO in CF as well as other articles about OO in general. This year I plan to learn OO further (in cf as well as Java) and I think Hal is just the man to help me along the way. You should really take a look, this really is the future. I don't see me redesigning things I've already built, especially my main frameworks, but I do believe I can use it well in some new projects coming up.

Adam Polselli has posted his "color predictions" for the coming year. He says he uses evaluations from areas besides just the Internet design world such as other advertising to come up with his forecast. I really like his array of choices, and hope to use some in my own designs this year. And he even gives the hex for each color. Check out Adam Polselli's 2005 Color Forecast here. Thanks Adam!

A little while back, maybe on my previous blog I mentioned grouphug a place for confession. Here is another one featuring macromedia flash with a little better interface, but not quite as easy to read all the confessions. either way, a company called method has released come clean which will wash your confessions away. Neat idea. btw, I found this on favourite website awards. They are voting on the best site of the year, so get over there and check out the nominees.