oooOOOOooh. nice. this adobe AIR app called Tour de Flex is probably now the clearing house of all things Adobe Flex as far as its capabilities, components and data integration. If you are a Flex developer and/ or are interested in Flex. you gotta git it!

Well i had issues trying to get the theme tab to work in my GMail account. I noticed that my GMail looked a bit differently this morning with more rounded corners and cleaner design, but the themes tab wasn’t rolled out to my account yet. So i went to another browser in my VMWare and the tab was there. I copied the URL in that browser, pasted it into my other browser and like magic, the tab appeared! URL is below

http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/themes

Its about time but Google has announced new themes (article courtesy of readwriteweb.com) for GMail. I often thought that although GMail rocks for email, it was a bit bland on the design. The one hope i have is that these themes don’t slow GMail down. We’ll have to see but as the article shows, there should be plenty of themes to choose from!

Technorati Tags: gmail themes email

I saw this post on a website that was sent to me that automated the note-carding process. Now i am a big fan of note carding during the planning phase of development projects. Its a great exercise to get
thoughts down an it encourages participation by even the most resistant team members. The Beauty of the process is that it gets you to think differently about the solution that you are trying to provide that solves the problem. Although this product seems worthy of praising as it saves time in digitizing the process later. I feel that in doing so, it short-circuits what the process is meant to do in the first place.

Note-carding is supposed to be a bit laborious. Its supposed to be messy and its supposed to encourage manually writing things down and pasting them up on a wall. Dis-engaging from our CPU’s to work together creatively to come up with elements to solve a problem is what the process is supposed to do. I would go as far as to make sure NO digital devices be allowed in the meeting room during this process save a figital camera to take a picture of the wall you may be stick-i-fying.

Maybe this product has applications beyond software development. But for my team, we will use the hand-spun 3M stickies so that our creative right brains get more involved in the process of what our left-brains like to dominate.

Wow, I’ve been a member of Facebook for some time and to be honest, haven’t updated my profile or cared too much about the technology. However, in the last few months i have been inundated with friend requests from EVERYWHERE. Most of my friend requests are coming from past High School alumni. Its a pretty amazing thing actually. I’ve had to break out the ol’ Year Book to find out who some of these folks are but it has been a pretty cool ride getting in touch with people that frankly, i forgot about.

Ok, this really is getting annoying. I work for an organization that has decided to go whole-heartedly to Vista. The wisdom of this decision, i will not debate here, but i am sure that people smarter than myself have their reasons. Anyway, we are on this road to Vista. I have an employee who has only worked here for 5 weeks and today, Adobe CS3 has just stopped working. No joke, this thing has just started to crash out of the blue. Now i dare you to google “adobe cs3 crash +vista” and take a look at what people are going through. I am amazed that Microsoft can unleash this software on the unassuming assuming public. Let me explain.

The public assumes that their operating system will work. The public assumes that when they upgrade, their system will be better than the last. The public assumes that their investment in their software packages will be upheld through the upgrade. The public assumes that someone as large as MicroSoft could manage to put out something that just works. And there’s the joke! HA HA Joe Public! There you go again thinking that Microsoft has your best interest at heart!

I am not impressed by this operating system Microsoft. Its slow, its a memory pig, and now i have to deal with major downtime of one of my employees because your software has just decided to stop working with other major software vendor’s packages.

Some of you may be saying, hey! this isn’t MicroSoft’s problem! It’s Adobe’s! Wrong, wrong, wrong. I understand software development, i understand interoperability and I understand that Microsoft cannot control the 1000’s of vendors and how they implement software. But wow, i just don’t understand how this Operating System can be so unstable. How can a major piece of software JUST STOP WORKING in this day and age?

Microsoft is losing market-share, It may be a slow process, but its happening. I am so happy that i am a Macintosh user at this time because my software just works. It doesn’t crash randomly… or at all.

That being said, here ends my rant.

I’ve been on facebook for quite a while and its been the last few months that there has been a massive amount of activity where people are coming out of the woodwork! People from my past, people from High School. Lost friendships. Its actually very cool. At first, facebook.com is a little weird to navigation. I think it could use some User Interface updates to make things run more smoothly. Anyway its a great service and much more ‘mature’ than mySpace or something similar.

I guess if there is any authority on Christian philosophy or even someone to call the ‘Father of modern Christian philosophy’, its got to be Francis Schaeffer. I admit that this is the first of his books I am reading but already its got me thinking differently about how current human thought has shifted in recent times. I will post more here as i learn more. A note of caution thought, have dictionary handy when reading this book - There are many terms he uses that i have to look up. I guess my vocab is not as wide as i thought.

I think everyone should read this book. I am currently only in Chapter 10 and yet i am enthralled with the accuracy and diligence of Mr. Rosenberg. If you are a Christian, this is a must read. Not to get hyped up on last days thinking or panic but to realize what is going on in the world and that prophecies are being fulfilled. If you are not a believer in Christ, then this book is still for you as it makes us keenly aware of what is going on in the world under our noses. With everything going on in the current Presidential races, the war in Iran and the ‘noise’ of the world, it is sobering to read what is going on between the powers that want to see Israel wiped off of the map.

I am usually not into self-help books and/or ‘programs’ to make your life better through some person’s overly complex system that seems to work for them. Franklin planners and Day-timers all were huge in the 80’s and 90’s and all had their own plans to teach you how to run your life. I’ve been through those mundane classes and have invested in those planners and it got me where? Bupkiss! That’s right, you know why? they are not intuitive and take way to long to implement. The Getting Things Done (GTD) way of doing things is not only intuitive, but its simple. You’ll find a ton of resources on the web as well as this system is the latest and greatest in getting one’s life in order.

Why do i need such a system? To put it simply, my memory is about as reliable as a lead-ladened zeppelin. Those of you that i owe phone calls to and other such things know what i am talking about. Granted i have only gone through half of this book as of yet but its a great and simple read thus far. I’ll let you know how things are going but for now… back to the brain dump and my ‘In Box’.