Well it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, so what better thing to do than post about the new layout for moredifferent.com that I finished last week:

Click the image to see it full-size, or just visit the site to see it live.

This week I’m finally moving NoDivisions from a Bytemark server to a Dreamhost server.

Bytemark’s virtual machine setup with full root access has been pretty cool, but it’s also been fairly buggy: for the past few months, it’s been a weekly occurrence (sometimes more often) that the system becomes unresponsive and needs to be forcibly rebooted.  They also only offer 4 GB of space and they cost about US$250/year.

Dreamhost on the other hand offers over 20 GB of space (and growing weekly) for only $97/year.  I’ve had the random outage here and there with them, but even when that happens, they are the ones who fix it, whereas with Bytemark, having root access to your own VM, you need to do the full-time system administration.  While I enjoy that at times, and am even pretty decent at it, my focus is on web programming so the admin issues can get annoying.

So anyway ND will probably be inaccessible at times over the next few days as the DNS changes propagate.  This also means my @nodivisions email accounts will be intermittently unavailable during this period.

Just as I feared, the end has come:

Crest Icy Mint Striped Toothpaste has been discontinued.

Why me?

Why does Windows have to be such a buggy freaking piece of crap??!?

I’m sitting here editing some text files, and all of a sudden, when I open a file in my text editor, the window is off-screen somewhere totally inaccessible.  It has a taskbar button, and it’s pushed in indicating that the window has focus, but there is no window.  If I right-click on the taskbar button and choose Maximize, the window appears, maximized; but if I then Restore it, it’s gone again.

If I right-click the taskbar button and choose Size or Move, my mouse cursor jumps to the screen’s upper-lefthand corner and turns to the arrow-cursor as if it’s on the edge of the window, ready for me to drag; but when I drag, nothing happens.

Now every single instance of my text editor that I start is invisible.  And this has happened to me many times before, so I know from experience that this problem won’t go away until I reboot, which means I’ll have to close all my open windows -- about 20, which is typical for the way I work.

ARGH, this is so annoying.  Someone please tell me you know a way to fix this!

I just posted photos of our Hawk Mountain hike from the other weekend.

I just signed up for AdSense, Google’s ad program.  NoDivisions gets about 150-200 unique visitors per day and I’m curious to see if that is at all monetizable.  Right now I’ve placed the ad-box at the bottom of the navigation pane; I plan to leave it there for a few weeks, then move it higher up for a few weeks to see if/how that affects the click-through rate.  But I doubt I’ll be happy with it at the very top of the nav section, before any of the actual navigational elements, so I may switch to a 3-column layout to have a little more flexibility there.

Patrick Nissley is one musician I can’t stop listening to right now.  He’s actually the brother of my friend Andy, which is the only way I ever would have discovered him, and that bothers me because his stuff is so good that he should be extremely well-known.  Unfortunately that’s not how the music industry works, but I digress.

Patrick’s music is largely electronic, but it’s not techno really, and not really electronica, or anything like that.  Trying to describe music in words is always hard, and not really necessary when you can just instantly listen to the music to see for yourself, but I do want to say that while the music itself is good, the vocals are extremely strong and good.

So, on to the music: Andy sent me 2 unfinished recordings that Patrick made a while ago, called October and Prove.  When I contacted Patrick to ask if I could post these on my site, he basically said "sure, but those aren’t finished..."  Trust me, download them right now, because they are probably ten times better than whatever else you might happen to be listening to right now.

Patrick has only 3 songs that are publicly available that I know of: they are all available on MySpace, which sucks, but at least he did enable the "download" option so you don’t have to go back to the MySpace page every time you want to listen to them.  The first song is Everywhere Everything, released under the name Monodramatic, and the other 2 songs are The Waiting Time and The Lovers Dancing, released under the name The Takeover (which is actually a whole band and not just Patrick making all the music 100% himself).

Update: Patrick’s current band is called Inner Party System (or maybe it’s InnerPartySystem with no spaces).

The other band that I’m playing nearly nonstop right now is the pop/rock band Snow Patrol.  Apparently they toured with U2 on the Vertigo tour, and had a song on the TV show Grey’s Anatomy last month, and have a couple singles on the radio, but I had never heard of them until someone uploaded one of their songs onto my FileChucker demo.  I’m hooked on their album Eyes Open, which you can listen to some of on their website.

Apple has 3 new Get a Mac ads and they’re even better than the last ones.  My favorite lines are from "Out of the Box":

PC: What’s your big plan?

Mac: I might make a home movie, or maybe create a website, try out my built-in camera; I can do it all right out of the box.  So what about you?

PC: First I gotta download those new drivers, then I gotta erase the trial software that came on my hard drive...

Mac: Sweet.

...

Mac: Let me know when you’re ready to go.

PC: Actually, the rest of me is in some other boxes, so... I’ll meet up with you later.

These played fine under Firefox/Linux, but skipped horribly for me on Firefox/Windows.  In case you have that problem too (or if you just hate inline videos like I do) here are direct links to the ads:

Work vs. Home