Fast forward almost 3 weeks later and i’m in a new apartment in DC and off to a great start at the new job. Lots of change in a very little time, Yea, I know.

Before I left I bought a Sprint 3G/4G Overdrive hub. DC is one of the cities where sprint has 4G coverage and I gotta tell you, the service is spectacular. The Sierra Wireless hardware, not so much, but the signal is great. The only place you really notice it’s not cable is on download speeds. Everything else seems pretty zippy and I’ve had no issues whatsoever doing web dev on the road with it. It’s serving as my primary internet access until I can get cable installed… and get a TV… sigh… first paycheck is due any day. Can’t come soon enough.

Picked up a Flu bug somewhere in my traveling and i’ve been sick as a dog for the past week or so. Second flu/cold/croup of the last 6 months. Really sux. Can’t stop coughing.

I’ll talk more about the projects i’m working on in a later post, but suffice to say most of them are government projects and the projects are primarily Drupal-based. Yea, I know drupal sucks, but I hope to convince them of how great eZPublish is after I win their trust theming Drupal sites.

Found a great apartment in a high-rise in Crystal City… The Bennington. Wanted a 1BR, but all they had was a studio. Hope to move up to a 1BR after 90 days, but the studio is fine now, considering all my stuff is still back in Florida.

It’s a six month contract-to-perm, but I hope to convince them they can’t live without me and go perm before the contract ends.

The firm has some really great people working there. So far none of them hate me, but it’s early in the relationship .

One of the bars has a “bear happy hour” on Fridays. Fantastic meet & greet. I’ll definitely be going back.

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I’m waiting for it.The offer should be here any time.

After a year out on my own, i’m waiting right now for an offer for a job that should come this morning.

Out of the blue I got a call 2 weeks ago about an offer in DC. And 2 weeks later i’m pondering packing up my life and starting over in a new city.  This is how it works for me. Change always comes quickly, out of the blue and it’s always simultaneously destructive and creative.

The Hindus have a holy trinity similar to Christianity. Shiva is the Destroyer, Brahma is the Creator and Vishnu is the Preserver. Shiva is usually pictures doing a dance, dancing on the demon of ignorance and fear and bringing rebirth to the Universe.

Wonder if he’d do ‘Dancing with the Stars’?  That would be EPIC.

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So I don’t know if you’ve caught Jamie Oliver’s new show, but it’s on hulu and abc.com if you missed it. It’s called ‘food revolution’ and the premise is he’s a renown British chef and he goes to most unhealthy city in the most unhealthy state in america… Huntington, WV. He then tries to change the school lunch menu.

The thing that makes this show so fascinating is the human drama. Everyone he meets makes every argument not to change, not on the basis that he’s wrong… but that the status quo is easier/cheaper/more acceptable in some way. It’s such a microcosm of what is going on in our nation’s politics.

In this country, there is such an emotional investment in the status quo in the face of dramatic and dire evidence that it’s not working. It’s interesting to watch this national problem play out with an inocous thing like eating habits in a public school.

How much investment do I have in the status quo despite all evidence that’s its time to change. What do I defend staunchly for no good reason other than that’s the way It’s always been done.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.” If I want to see change in this great country of ours, I have to be willing not to defend the status quo and to let go of ideas, things, and passions that lead to defense of the status quo.

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So I presented the design for the new pride site last night. There was a lot of good feedback.

Everyone agreed that the sponsor logos were too small. I think I was fooling myself into thinking I could make them that small and get away with it. I’ve given in. They will be larger.

Also met some other designer-y creative types in the attendance. I hope I can bring them in on some of the pride projects. I really don’t want to go through another year doing all the marketing support myself.

Still hoping for a Feb 1 rollout. Cheers for now.

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I got laid off in February. Shortly thereafter I met a developer who was doing destination travel sites for a marketing company that catered primarily to the hospitality industry. We’ve since done sites for hotels around the world.

I’ve been webmaster for St. Pete Pride for several years now and this work that i’ve done has colored much of the work on the new 2010 St. Pete pride website. I began to think of Pride as a destination travel event. Remember that 90% of the people that view your site have no connection to pride other than the possibility that they might come to the event.

I started looking at the travel sites we’ve done over the past year… some 30+ of then and began to codify the things that they have in common. I found I agreed with my previous efforts on the pride site and completely disagreed with others.

I started with what I believe to be the primary goal of any pride website: Get people to the event. It seems silly to say it this way, but your pride website should make people want to come to the event. Many sites, in an effort to provide information, ONLY provide information. People will look at your website and decide in less than 10 seconds whether or not they want to come to the event. Make them want to come.

I hope to get the new pride website up by Feb 1. I’ll try to get in several posts before then.

More soon.

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You see the total devastation visited on people who’s lives are already so much worse than yours. Please consider making a donation to Doctors without Borders.

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One of my heroes is Steve Jobs. Always will be. I never want to meet him. I want him to remain larger than life and an inspiration for me.

A year or so ago, Disney bought Steve’s Company Pixar Studios and set Pixar up as the center of Disney’s Animation strategy. This deal gave Steve a seat on Disney’s Board of Directors. A few days ago a story made the news that Steve had a hand in re-mapping the strategy for the Disney retail stores.

As a background, Disney retail stores were created during Mike Eisner’s tenure. Mike was all about volume. Putting as much product in the field as possible equals the most sales. He was about the path of least resistance. Do it as easily and cheaply as possible. As a result, Disney stores saw some initial success, but in recent years have languished because they really didn’t represent Disney so much as SELL Disney. Today they seem the epitome of late 90’s consumerism: Stale and Tired. Whored out.

Steve gave the retail branch of Disney two words: Dream Bigger.

Have you ever worked for a company where your boss says your plans aren’t ambitious enough? I know I haven’t. We’re in the middle of the worst economy since the great depression. Every day another report that 300k+ jobs are lost and the message Steve gives both his staff at Disney and Apple is “Dream Bigger.” Everything about our surroundings tells someone to buckle down and hold on because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I am challenged. What am I doing now for which I need to “Dream Bigger”?

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Avenir Heavy

As an experiment in using the @font-face support in modern web browsers, I’ve done screenshots of the navigation’s reference render and each browser’s rendering of embedded fonts.

Photoshop Reference Render

Font Rendering Using Safari/Mac

Font Rendering Using Firefox 3.5/Mac

Font Rendering Using IE6/Win XP

Font Rendering Using IE7/Win XP

Font Rendering Using IE8/Windows 7

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