Month: December 2008

Best Christmas Present Ever

I am very grateful for the company of my friends and family this holiday season. Their companionship and generosity are something I am truly luckily to have. Gifts do not equal love. I want to stress that I’m not a total capitalist, but I do have one gift that stands out above all the rest that I can’t help mentioning.

Awesome Pen

This pen.
This isn’t just any pen. In fact it’s THREE pens in one. Not just blue or black, but 3 different colors! It’s an awesome translucent neon orange that houses THREE PENS and A HIGHLIGHTER. Now, the manufacturer could have stopped there, but they made it COCONUT scented. It’s like writing while sitting on a beach enjoying a… coconut.

To make it even better it has my familial designation in bold type across it’s side. Like the name of a sailing vessel it boldy claims it’s unique name. UNCLE. This is not a normal pen. It is a pen for UNCLES.

I was given this AWESOME PEN by my neice, Audrey. The story goes that she was good in school and as a reward was able to ‘purchase’ a gift for a family member. Not only am I lucky to have my very own AWESOME ORANGE 3 COLOR UNCLE PEN WITH A COCONUT SCENTED HIGHLIGHTER, but I was chosen to be the recipient of her gift.

Thank you Audrey. I love you and can not express how much I love this pen.

The Koerners in HD

So for our family xmas present this year we picked up a Flip Mino HD.  So far I’m really enjoying it.  It’s super small, shoots great video and is fun to have around for all the funny moments with Kari.

I wasn’t about to carry around 2 full-size devices (we already have a nice DSLR) and I’d rather have really good photographs over really good video.

Without further ado, Jackie, Kari and I putting up the Christmas Tree.

Booq Report

My new Booq

Two years ago when I purchased my MacBook Pro I was interested in getting some sort of case for it.  My colleague Jeff had this awesome sleeve for his Powerbook that I was in love with.  Jeff and the other guys from the office all pitched in to get me the sleeve as a graduation present. 

About a month ago the zipper broke.  🙁  I used this sleeve daily and always took great care when zipping it up.  In fact it was almost always stored in my book bag, for added redundancy. 

I thought to myself, “Crap.  I’m going to have to buy a new one.  No way there is any sort of warranty.”  

Just to make sure I contacted booq, the makers of this great sleeve.  They have a 5 year warrany!  Since the sleeve was a gift I asked Jeff if he still had an copy of a recipt, invoice anything.  Luckly he did.  I sent off the sleeve, waited a few days and recieved a very polite email saying they recieved my sleeve.

They noted that it appeared to be defective and were going to replace it free of charge!  The best part is that this apparently is a newer model sleeve.  It is much more sturdy with a thicker foam insert.  

I was impressed with my original sleeve*,  impressed with thier customer service and the fact that I ended up getting an even better product is just icing.

I highly recommend booq if you want a great product and great service.

 

*So much that once my wife got her Mac we bought a sleeve for her as well

Remove “Show all Menu Items” From Photoshop CS4

Update: John Nack from Adobe mentions a simpler solution for this particular menu behavior.

CS4 brings back the joy of the default ‘Show all Menu Items”.  As I’ve previously written when CS3 came out, there is a way to manually modify the Edit>Menu options to enable all menu items to be displayed.  It’s kinda lame that they enable this by default and offer no simple one-click solution to show all menu items.

I’m happy to report that my custom menu file works in CS4 just as well.  Just double-click the Everything_on.mnu file and Photoshop will launch, putting the settings into place.*

<rant>

As to why Adobe has this default probably goes into issues designing the interface of a complex application.  By hiding what they believe to be the least used items, it makes things appear simpler.

However, as a professional application I find this to be a bit oxymoronish.  Why not prompt the user on first run with a simple series of questions.

What do you plan on doing with Photoshop?

  1. I’m new here, just the basics
  2. Oh, you know, family photos, work on my personal site
  3. I’m a web guy, I usually start from scratch
  4. I’m a professional pixel wrangler, show me everything

Ok, while that’s by no means an ideal set of default options I hope you get the gist of what I’m trying to say.

Ask the user, don’t make assumptions and then make it possible to easily show all menu items.

</rant>

*With my limited testing this didn’t effect palettes or keyboard shortcuts, but YMMV.