Steve Jobs introduced a new device a few weeks ago called the iPad. To sum it up, it’s an oversized iPhone that’s main purpose is to be the best internet browsing experience ever.

That’s cool and all but how is it suppose to be the best browsing experience ever when you can’t view Flash? I find this troubling and weird. Full flash websites seem to be a thing of the past these days, but there are attributes in sites that take advantage of what Flash can offer. So why can’t it be on a Mac tablet device? A couple of days after the iPad announcement Steve Jobs held an employee meeting and discussed Flash…

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Almost a year ago I wrote about the Korg-DS10 making its way to Japan households and how excited I was to get my hands on it. Well, I finally did and so far it hasn’t disappointed at all. I seriously picked this thing up and within 2 minutes I was rocking out to my own custom synth beats. You get a couple of keyboard tracks, drum tracks and an actual mini piano you can pull up at any time and rock out with. You can save your tracks and play them with friends, there’s even a multiplayer mode. I have to commend the genuis’ who made this thing possible. I’m no musician by any stretch of the imagination. Okay, I did play the bass in a college band, but I was terrible at it.

It’s really neat how all these little features are hidden everywhere. You can blast your block-rocking beats while experimenting with all these features. You can even check out the tutorials on the Korg DS10 website. I’m thoroughly impressed by this little gadget. I really wish I wasn’t so damn lazy and actually upload a demo of me messing around with the thing. I opted to YouTube some videos for you to see instead…
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Well, It didn’t take too long after talking about an anniversary of sorts to bring about a redesign of the website. I think I can honestly blame it on PerpetualMemory. It’s all his fault. After I saw his swank new design, I thought that I could upgrade my site a little bit. Adding new plug-ins was the basis of my upgrade and also going from WordPress 2.6 to 2.7.

It was all fine and dandy yesterday evening. Looked into my FTP, backed up all my files and did a One-Click Upgrade with my service provider MediaTemple. It took all of five minutes to move over all the files I had altered in the original theme and I was upgraded, no problem. I looked into some new plug-ins, no problem. It wasn’t until about 11 o’clock at night when I was poking around in my CMS and saw a little upgrade button to 2.71. I was like “sure, why not”. Clicked on that bad boy and all my settings were lost. Crap, butthat’s okay, I have my backup. Little did I forget that after the first upgrade was so smooth I decided to delete my backup. All my CSS hacking, all my PHP page manipulations gone… in a one-click upgrade.

This really motivated me. It was a message to myself that I needed to find something cool, and I did. Browsing around I saw this really neat theme that really focused on images. I thought that was a neat twist and a direction I would like to go in. Once I dived into it I stayed up all night, tweaking things to the best of my non-programming abilities. My wife took a look and said “is that what you stayed up all night working for?” and I replied “YES!”

So their you have it. That’s my story. I still have a few more things to tinker with. Most importantly adding pics to all my old posts. I dont know if I will ever get to all of them. Just a good amount that will please that inner me. Oh, and this site also uses a lot of PNG files so if you get blue or white boxes everywhere you need to upgrade your web browser…. get with the times!

I was rummaging through memory lane and found all kinds of old goodies from this website. Now, I’m not a person who has held onto many things in the past 7 years of my life, but I do have this website. It’s nice to know that I have something that’s old. Okay, I might have a few t-shirts that I still have from back in the day that I still wear, but damn, 7 years of this website? Really?

Now, I won’t lie. I haven’t been the best at updating this website over the years. There were some months, possibly years, that it just sat there doing nothing. I was very into my creative experimenting before this became a blog. It was tough to update all the time. Especially when everything was coded manually in HTML. Now, in the modern times, it’s a lot easier to update ones website. Plus, I don’t think I’m experimenting too much anymore. Which is okay by me. My creative is spent on other people’s stuff now

older.neverbesocial.com
This is not my first version of the site. Unfortunately, that one is probably on a zip drive that I can’t access anymore. But this was my second version. It’s a lot clearer then the oldest version. You can definitely navigate it easier. I had all kinds of stuff. A blog, flyers I made for my brother, mixtape artwork, photos, all kinds of stuff. The home page shows that my last updates to this version was from when I left Chicago for the first time.

work.neverbesocial.com
This was my companion site to the older website. This was my old portfolio. Definitely showed that I had worked at PETCO for awhile.

No War
Ah, yes, so simple yet so important to me at the time. I took part of a web thing were all these websites campaigned for no war in Iraq after 9/11. First off, the war didn’t make sense at the time, and it never has. Plus, my best friend was going to be out there if the war started. I remember my mom seeing this and trying to explain to me how necessary the war was. She was disappointed at me at the time. I’m glad I still have it.

A spalsh page here and here
These were things I made to make the time go by before I updated the site again. I don’t know if I ever did update for quite a while.

old.neverbesocial.com
Last, but not least. This was updated when I moved to Portland and trekked back to Chicago. I was afraid to update with WordPress at the time and handcoded still. So glad I jumped on the WordPress. CMS is the best.

So there you have it. I really wish you could’ve seen the oldest website. Maybe I’ll save it for something monumental like the 10 year anniversary of this site. It had photoshop tennis and desktop patterns and all kinds of crazy stuff. Haha, well, if you’ve read this far. Thanks for staying interested and thanks for coming to this site.

Just noticed a link to The Simpsons where they mock Apple and all that is holy. Haha, they really put a beat down on some underlying things about Apple. Have they really turned into the behemoth they mocked in 1984 with the Macintosh? I was really hoping they would do something like this on an episode of Futurama, but the Simpsons works almost as well. Check it out and enjoy.

The big buzz last week was the introduction of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops that came out from Apple Computers. These machines are crafted with the love and genius that make Apple computers so great. They introduced a mighty trackpad that handles multi-gestures much like an iPhone to command the screen. It doesn’t have a button because the whole pad is a button. There are even gestures for a right click. They also went out of there way to make this pad out of glass. For a smoother glide with your fingers the glass seems like the appropriate material for a track pad. These new beasts also feature the new NVIDIA 9600 graphics card. These robust graphics cards due eat a lot of power. Apple has built in a feature in the system prefs so that you can adjust power consumption of the card, which to me, is great to have.

They all come standard with 2 gigs of memory and for just $150 dollars more you can upgrade to 4 gigs. Which is nice to know since Apple has always been kind of a beast to buy memory from. They are always double the price of competitor memory. The base of the laptop is made out of a single piece of Aluminum. They are hyping this because of its hardware achievement. Less moving parts on a laptop is alway better. Due to the shaking and rumbling a laptop has to endure having a casing with less screws and sections minimize loose parts or creakiness.

They all feature shiny LCD screens with glass enclosures very similar to the latest generation of iMacs. I’m not so much a fan of the glass shiny screens. They have to be a lot brighter to battle the sun and the glare could become a big problem. And for me, I’m a stickler for fingerprints on my screens, so I know I would be constantly cleaning it and it would seem a little to high maintenance for my taste.

USB, Ethernet, Monitor Uplink are standard on both, but the Pro has a firewire 800 port and the standard MacBook doesn’t. Which is kind of a disappointment for someone who lives, or wants to live, the ‘iLife’. I say that because Macs have a hard time reading Digital Video Camcorders via USB. I have a Sony Handycam and the only way it works with my Macs are via Firewire. I hope it’s as simple as a software update to fix that USB/Firewire situation, but still, its a disappointment not to have it standard as they promote the iLife when something as important as Firewire is not standard on there mobile computers. These are still beutiful machines that fit perfect with Apple’s slew of computers. I wish I didnt have a new laptop, cause I would’ve picked up one of these bad boys in a heartbeat. Maybe someday, I’ll upgrade. They still havent released the 17″ MacBook Pro. That one is still a few months away…

There has been some recent buzz over the new Windows $300 million ad campaign that have been coming out in Phases. The first phase was the 2 Seinfeld, Bill Gates ads. They converse at a shoe store and another shows them living with a normal family. Both seemed to be like little quips of the Seinfeld TV shows that really mention nothing about Windows, but conveys a message that they can connect with ‘real people’. It’s great as a snippet, but its hard to figure out why they did these ads. Seinfeld got something around 10 million dollars to do these, which is insane. It’s almost like they just really wasted there money. Not really an effective ad campaign for Vista.

The next phase, which has just begun airing, is more direct and to the point. The first phase’s rollout only lasted about a week and now the second phase campaign is a direct backlash to Apple’s, I’m a PC ads. They’ve been vocal about the fact that they feel that their Vista product sales have been effected by these ads and they needed to do something about it. They even got a look alike who resembles John Hodgman on the Apple ads. I can truly say that I kinda like these ads. I’m an avid mac user and I like the battle that ensues between these two. It’s about time that Apple put a dent on Windows and finally there is a little backlash. But I truly like the environments in where they put these “I’m a PC” people. They put all walks of life in the commercial and make it seem global. You can check one of the ads below, but you can see other ones here and here.

Another thing that I just saw that is funny is that the images on the Windows website promoting the “I’m a PC” ad campaigns were apparently made on macs, hahaha.

Just wanted to share with you my love for a little word game that I downloaded to my iPhone. It’s called Quordy. Its a touch-play word search game. You get sixteen letters and your job is to make words with all of them as fast as you can in 2 minutes. You can play solo, or you can send challenges to your friends that also have the game. It compares your scores against your opponent and keeps a running tab of wins and losses. Currently, I play against my wifey and Oliver. I bought this game when the App Store went live. I’ve played hundreds of times. It’s a great when you’re riding on the bus or during a commercial break from a TV Show to whip this game out and play for 2 minutes.

It seems that the problems people are having with their iPhone’s is coming from power consumption. The phone is a power-munching machine that demands too much from the cell phone towers creating this dropped call, poor reception, slow 3G fiasco. The solution is to upgrade your iPhone to the new 2.0.2 software.

In a mixed environment where users are running 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2, the power control problems of 2.0 and 2.0.1 will affect the 2.0.2 users. It is not the network that is fault but the interaction of the bad power control algorithm in 2.0 and 2.0.1 software and the network that is at fault. The sooner everybody is running 2.0.2 software the better things will be.

So upgrade to 2.0.2. And we will all live happy iPhone lives.

There has been a lot of talk and chatter of the new iPhone and it’s lack to hold a phone call. Message boards all over are complaining about this and Apple and AT&T are staying mum about the situation. I personally havent felt the real magnitude of this epidemic. I know at the ballgame this week at US Cellular field I could not get my phone to load a web page even though I had full bars and 3G strength. It was odd, but I just blamed it on the fact that I was at a baseball game and there were probably 15,000 other people using the phone at the same time.

My own brother though, who lives in Las Vegas, has been having a lot of issues of dropped calls. Dropped calls that would have never happened on his old Samsung cell phone. News.com wants to know your story. Some are thinking that Apple’s secrecy of product development is to blame.

We will not know the truth until Apple and AT&T come up with a solution to this mess. I personally think that the AT&T networks have just been overflooded with so many new iPhones that it’s having a hard time handling all that bandwidth. But what do I know? It’s just a hunch. Hopefully action will be taken and it will only be a software update.