Chris Coyier
Archive for January, 2014
Tony Rice
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2014
He hasn’t really been able to talk well or sing for 19 years, but this past September at the IMBA awards he stunned everyone with something he’s been “working on”. What a hero.
It’s Raining
Monday, January 13th, 2014
“I’m going to wash my car.”
“But it’s raining!”
I’m sure I’ve bore witness to hundreds of versions of that conversation in my lifetime. It’s this weird generic response that everyone seems to intuitively understand, tying together car washing and raining. I’ve never quite understood though. I think it means one of two things.
- Why would you wash my car right now? It’s raining out, thus the world will wash it for you.
- If you washed your car right now, it will get dirty again immediately because of spray from the wet roads.
I guess it doesn’t matter too much because the result of “don’t do it.” is the same. But I wish I knew which one people meant. I’ve asked before, but it’s not really worth the weird looks.
Netflix
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014
Netflix’s big problem, it seems to me, is that it can’t afford the content that its subscribers most want to watch. It could try to buy streaming rights to every major Hollywood blockbuster in history — but doing so would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and could never be recouped with $7.99 monthly fees. What’s more, the studios can watch the Netflix share price as easily as anybody else, and when they see it ending 2013 at $360 a share, valuing the company at well over $20 billion, that’s their sign to start raising rates sharply during the next round of negotiations. Which in turn helps explain why Netflix is losing so many great movies.
Because they can’t be our go-to for the latest and/or greatest movies, their strategy needs to be different. Good original content. Making it easier to find older/niche-y movies.
Without shoving it down our throats, it’s already working. I already think of Netflix as the place to go watch older movies, documentaries, indie movies, etc. And iTunes as where I snag the latest releases.
Disappointed
Monday, January 6th, 2014
This basic email transaction is common for me recently:
Email: Hey Chris, are you interested in doing this thing? It’s a fairly major request that will take lots of your time.
Me: That thing sounds awesome, but I’m afraid I’m just too overcommitted already to add anything new.
Email: We’re very disappointed.
It was already hard for me to say no. I’m aware that’s not an awesome email to get. You were hoping for a yes, and I couldn’t come through. So now you’re going to make me feel even worse by making sure I know that you’re disappointed.
Well, sorry, backfire. Now I’m annoyed at you.
The 1500 Plan
Sunday, January 5th, 2014
I fell off the health wagon over the holidays. I’m going to do my best to get back on and reach new goals.
Eating is the most important aspect, so to help, I dusted off InDesign and made a weekly chart I could print out. It’s based on the eating plan I’m on when I go to Hilton Head Health, only increased a bit. 1500 calories a day. 300/400/500 for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner and 100 calorie snacks in between. Fairly aggressive for me on a long-term basis, but I’m hoping I can do 2-3 weeks and then morph that into a more normal plan.
I think my OCDish desire to fill out a perfect week of X’s will help me get it done.
Force
Saturday, January 4th, 2014
I upgraded to the FitBit Force from the FitBit Flex about a month ago. So far:
- The hardware button is a huge upgrade. Tapping the Flex was awkward.
- The display is great. If I’m going to wear something around my wrist it should at least tell me what time it is and now the Force does that, as well as giving you quick access to your basic stats for the day.
- I preferred the the thin-ness of the Flex, but it’s not that big of a deal and I can see they just needed a bit more room for the display.
- Not having to take the little nugget thing out (like on the Flex) to charge it is nice. You just plug it directly in.
- The battery life is amazing. Like 2+ weeks. At the end of the time I was using my Flex I only got a few days. Charging (either of them) is a bummer time because you aren’t tracking while it’s charging and you run the risk of forgetting to put it back on. With the Force at least you have to do it less.
- It’s a little more expensive but not much and it’s a one-time cost.
- Apparently you can do less water-related stuff with the Force (no showering, where you could with the Flex), but I don’t shower with it on anyway (weird) so that doesn’t affect me.
- The “floors” tracking is neat. I live in a 4-level house so I like getting credit for all that climbing.
So Close
Friday, January 3rd, 2014
I’ve been Platinum on Delta for a number of years. I got pretty dang close to Diamond last year.
Then the year flips and back to square one:
The only way to hit Diamond on Delta is to have a really heavy-flying calendar year and fake it at the end if you need to by buying a few miles or taking some extra segments or something.
I’ll probably never hit it since I don’t plan to travel as much in upcoming years. Just kind of a bummer to know that you can’t work your way up to it. It happens in one year or not at all. I also don’t even know what you get for it, but it’s gamified so obviously I want to reach the top.
It also seems weird that once you do get it, you have it forever, but if you get super close a bunch of years in a row, that doesn’t count for squat. I guess that’s more gamification.
Dealing with Photos: Still Awkward
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014
I have a folder on my desktop containing some pictures that different relatives took during the holidays and sent me. Some via text message. Some via email. Some via Facebook. They sent the photos however they happened to have learned how to do it once. I didn’t sense any great level of confidence in the process.
Now I have them. I like them. I want to keep them. I use Flickr for my online photo storage. But I don’t want to put them there, because then it looks like I took them and I didn’t. I use iPhoto locally. I’d just put them there, but I have to keep my iPhoto library on a bogus, slow, external hard drive because the library is too big to keep on my laptop hard drive all the time. I don’t want to set all that up just to move a few photos over. I only go through all that after a trip or something when I have a bunch of photos from a digital camera to dump.
It’s surprising that photo sharing and photo storage is still as awkward as it is.
Target
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014
This thing with credit card information from Target being compromised is pretty crazy.
I’ve been with the same credit union for going on 20 years and I like them so I stick with them. But it’s about 90 minutes from where I live now. I don’t deal with my account there in any other way than using that card to get cash or buy stuff.
Because of the compromise, my debit/credit card with them was cancelled and they automatically ordered me a new one. It’s going to take at least 6 weeks.
So for 6 weeks, any activity whatsoever with that account stops. I’m just going to have to use other credit cards and then pay those off directly from the account (I assume that still works).
I wonder how that affects a small credit union like mine? Is any significant portion of their revenue tied to me actively using my account through my card? If it is, they are going to lose 11.5% of their revenue for the year from me through this one incident they couldn’t even control. I bet a majority of their customers had this happen to them – since it’s an affluent-suburbs kinda area covered in Targets.
It’s a pain in the butt for me, but hopefully it doesn’t ruin them.