Midnight Cheese

My Bloody Valentine went very well. A large crowd was on hand for a good portion of the evening. It was also good to see Jim and Emily again. The East Nashville area has really improved as of late.

I was late to post the show photo because I’ve been busy working with Ernie on an update to Candor Gallery. Hopefully later this week the new version will be released. This version will include a Previous button on the widget, but also a gallery on the website that will display all the works and artists with links to their respective websites. All this in a nice browsable setting. So look forward to that very soon!

For all you Nashville folks, I received an email pointing me to iBegin. There’s limited listings at the moment, but the site certainly has potential.

Now I must return to Candor and the world of CSS goodness…

The Plowhaus begins a new exhibit, My Bloody Valentine: Art to Die for, this Saturday featuring photography from none other than my Dad (along with a few other artists as well.) The reception is this Saturday from 7pm-11pm.

Sprint has a special running on their website where you can add a line to your plan for $9.99 and choose between two free phones. Merredith and I want to be on the same plan, so I call Sprint to run through the options over the phone. This way I can ask them a bunch of questions, mainly making sure they don’t charge me a random activation/upgrade fee 4 or 5 months down the line again.

So I talk to the rep on the phone and get everything squared away when all of a sudden I’m informed that they can’t offer me that deal with that particular phone over the phone. “It’s not a tele-sales promotion.” I’ll have to process the order over the web. What?? I ask again, “You can’t process this for me over the phone?” “No,” they respond, “That must be done online. We can’t help you.”

What kind of customer service is this? This is the most asinine requirement. I bet if the CEO or anyone else above middle-management knew this was going on, this would never be happening. I’ve called two different reps and both have said the same thing. That’s twice I’ve called Sprint, willing to give them money for a service, and they’ve denied me because the reps can’t process the order over the phone. Unbelievable.

I designed this banner several months ago for an email campaign. This weekend I came across an ad for bedlam that looks eerily similar. When I see something like this I always wonder if I had seen the other design before creating my design. Then subliminally manifested my version later, based on what I had seen earlier. Who knows. As far as I know, it’s all a big coincidence.

I recently installed a Linksys WMP54G on an Ubuntu box following this guide on the Ubuntu Forums. The process is remarkably easy. The best part is the super simple WPA setup. No messing with the monstrosity that is wpa_supplicant. No hacking around with ndiswrapper, either.

Jimmy’s blog is up and running. He’s flexing his C# skills with some helpful code snippets for the budding programmers of the world. Give jimmy some click love.

The iPhone has finally materialized and not too far off from the sketches in my last post. I’m surprised they packed an iPod into the thing, but so be it.

Ernie mentioned the lameness of the 4 main icons in the bottom “Dock” of the main menu, and I have to agree. He especially noted the mail icon. Here’s a look at the iPhone mail icon and the Vista mail Gadget icon.

The Vista icon certainly has a bit more attention to detail paid to it. In addition, the clouds on the iPhone icon don’t exactly keep with the consistency of the other icons.

The color of the bottom four icons bothers me. Green, Blue, Blue, Orange. The Safari and iPod icons are complementary colors, while the phone and mail icons sit next to each other on the color wheel. I wonder if Apple revisited the icon colors and made the iPod icon a purple color since that sits on the other side of blue on the color wheel, would the icons be more pleasing to the eye when they’re all lined up? Very particular details to think about.

Aside from the iPhone, Bill Gates announced the Windows Home Server. I have a feeling this device isn’t going to be snatched up in any kind of great hurry. Your average computer user struggles enough with a desktop system, and most advanced users are probably more likely to build their own server at a much lower total cost.

Today I’ve spent most of the day trying to get XP running under QEMU on my G5 at work. So far so good. Menus are surprisingly responsive, which is encouraging, but the install is painfully slow. This is my first attempt at emulating x86 on PPC since using Virtual PC on a 233mhz G3 some years ago. That type of emulation back then was just brutal.