If you were to come over to the Schaap’s house (the Schaap writing this) sometime within the next two weeks you’ll be surprised to see that things are being torn apart and construction is underway.
After a couple months of having our Entry way/Laundry room sitting in an unfinished state, we both decided to hire someone to just come over and remodel the room.
Having a small house, it’s important to have usable space and even more important to have usable storage space. Right now we’ve organized and reorganized in order to fit everything into our small house but it’s come to the point where we need more room and the best way to get that is to redo a room.
So we started construction yesterday and the mess will continue for about 2 weeks. After that however, we’ll have a newly constructed Entry way that will offer a great new feeling for those coming over and the 2 people that live there.
posted on October 29, 2003| 9:06 AM EST
Last Friday I came home from a long day at work and saw a small package sitting on my porch. I’ll be honest and tell ya I already knew what it was because I’d been tracking it from the second it was shipped from a warehouse in PA. It was my Panther (OS X 10.3) upgrade.
Grabbing the package and running inside to my PowerBook G4 laptop, everything I had in my arms just dropped to the floor as setting things in their place would just take too much time.
Installation was easy and I was up and running within a good 45 minutes.
My first reaction was - “This is amazing!”. There are so many new little features with Expose & Fast User Switching being my favorites.
Overall I like it but there is one thing Apple changed that will take a bit to get used too. They made everything with a brushed-metal look and feel. Now, the brushed-metal was great when used for applications (Safari, iPhoto, iSync, iTunes, etc…) but when they moved it to the normal file managing windows - some sort of window distinction/usability rule was broke. I know I’m not the only one with these feelings and if history has shown us anything, someone will come out with a hack that will allow the end user to change styles back to their desired state.
If you haven’t upgraded to Panther - it’s nice and definitely helps me work faster in areas but if you’re just a casual user that surfs the web and checks your email, I’d save your $129.00 for a little bit.
For more information, read Mark Pilgrim’s words on Panther.
posted on October 27, 2003| 9:21 AM EST
Last week at this exact time I came home to find a brand new PowerBook G4 Apple notebook computer sitting on my porch. I had ordered it quite a while back and now that it was finally here - I couldn’t contain myself.
I quickly ripped all the packaging off and looked at it’s beautiful silver body. Still closed, I decided to start her up and spend hours customizing every little setting I could find. First setting up email, PhotoShop and various little downloadable programs. Over the span of an hour or so things were beginning to come together.
A couple days later I pulled up Apple’s website and to my disappointment - OS X (10.3) was being announced for soon arrival - sigh.
I’ve had my laptop for no more than a day or so and a new OS comes out for it. If I would have only waited for a couple more days I wouldn’t have to pay for another OS. For a good week I sat looking over the new features now available and saying to myself, “That would be a rather handy way to do things.”.
However, As luck will have it - I found out my computer is available for a $19.99 upgrade and all I had to do was enter in some information about my computer and boom, OS X.3 would be sent to my house.
So I lucked out and I will be receiving OS X.3 sometime next week for only $19.99. I couldn’t be happier and greatly owe Lady Luck a moment of praise.
posted on October 17, 2003| 5:39 PM EST
Over the past couple of months I’ve had quite of bit of people asking me how to write some basic HTML tags. Some needed to know for classes they’re taking, some wanted to know because ebay allowed some HTML, and others are various clients of mine.
After various types of request for this information, I decided to make up a quick page that helps newbies with simple syntax. The page only took me a half an hour to whip together and I had a lot of fun doing it. Possibly later I’ll do a couple more articles and explain the basics of some other languages. It’s a great way to really learn something when you have to organize it for others.
So for all those people out there that have been begging me for this information - here is your very own HTML Cheat Sheet
posted on | 2:59 PM EST
A couple of months ago we got a call from a company called - J Carter Marketing. They called us, at the Sentinel, because they’ve (supposedly) noticed our creditable website and high page views.
The deal they offered was something like this - “Let us put advertisement on your site and we’ll give you X about of dollars every time someone views/hits the ads.” The ads that they will be putting on our site aren’t ads for J Carter Marketing but for their clients. You see, they get clients and call places like the Holland Sentinel to place their clients ads.
Now that we’re all caught up on what J Carter Marketing is - I can explain my problem with them.
First of all, they have these ad types called interstitials. That means the ad interweave with our site and make the viewer think the ad they are seeing has something to do with our company (the Holland Sentinel) or the story they originally clicked on.
This creates all sorts of problems, starting with reader confusion. The reader will often take the ad to seriously and act upon it as if it were serious. Of course this is exactly what advertising is supposed to do - it however begins to lower the Sentinel’s online credibility.
Take for example the below ad. This is an ad many of our viewers come across when viewing our website. They see the front page and when clicking on a local news story, they are quickly shown this ad for 15 seconds, and then directed to the story they originally wished to see.
For some, this ad seems ridiculous and we would never act upon it’s action statement by clicking to find out more information. We are considered, a knowledgeable group. However, many other unknowledgeable people also view our site and think that they really are the one millions viewer and have won a prize. They will try to find out more information and end up being another statistic on how online advertising works.
Mean while… Aaron Schaap at the Holland Sentinel is receiving various phone calls and emails from people wanting to claim their prize (example below). I have to explain to them the idea of advertising and that they are not really one-millionth viewer of our website (which was viewed years ago) and we aren’t affiliated with the company that says you are.
Real email from viewers:
Just asking - I checked out your web site today looking for an article about our company working in Holland. A screen popped up and said I was the 1,000,000th person to log on this web site and to click below for my prize. I clicked and nothing happened. What’s up with that??
As I said earlier - I have a couple problems with all this. The second problem is the fact that it doesn’t work in the Safari web browser - Apple’s main Internet browser. You see the ad but stuff gets messed up and your redirected to a page that doesn’t exists. It makes it really annoying to view our website.
posted on October 6, 2003| 2:00 PM EST
