Having not updated this blog in a regular fashion, I’ve decided to re-think and re-align its direction more so with what I am doing professionally, namely software interface and usability design, with a sub-section paying special attention to UI design in relation to console, pc and mobile gaming. Other subjects getting partial coverage are sustainability [for design, products and life], web programming [slightly] and illustration [fantastical, comic book style]. I hope you enjoy it.

Current posts may or may not be archived and made available, this is still under some debate. Expect the changes to take effect some time in the next month or so.

So the latest Smallville episode “Hero” aired last night (Thursday, March 13, 2008) and all I can say about this is.. WTF?

Ads for the episode leading up to Thursday hyped it as some kind of big reveal or a life-changing event for the show’s characters. To quote Lex in the ad “Whatever Clark is hiding has something to do with these symbols.” This directly alludes to Lex learning about who Clark really is, the big inevitability of the story. This would change the world of Smallville.

So what happened?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The big event was Pete Ross returning to the show, getting super powers, thinking he’s a hero then losing them and leaving the show again, all in one episode. Oh, did I forget to mention how the ENTIRE episode is a 45 minute Stride gum commercial or repeated plugs for some lame band called “One Republic”?

Conversations between Lex and Kara then Kara and Lana then Clark hiding Kara’s bracelet in the floor cements the fact that this entire show is built around deceit, lies and keeping secrets. Smallville has gone from a decent, low budget take on the early years of Clark Kent struggling to accept his destiny to a primetime, 20-somethings soap opera. What the hell happened to the story?

It seems this show went downhill after two events occurred. 1: Clark’s father, Jonathan died. 2: Comic guy Jeff Loeb left the show to go work on some other awesome superhero show called, Heroes.

Sure, I could accept that maybe Smallville is struggling financially but it’s just gotten the green light for a 8th season. I’m happy to see at least one lame character getting the ax,.. Lana. She and Lex will be relegated to occassional guest appearances in the 8th season.

Good, I’m glad to see them both go. Lana’s character sucks. Her (and practically the entire rest of the cast’s) dialogue is a joke. In one breath she will accuse Clark (or anyone else in proximity) of betraying her or lying or looking the wrong way then later in the episode, beg forgiveness for ever doubting them, only to unload this diatribe on someone else in the next episode when she, once again, gets her ass in a wringer and needs help.

Lex is beyond the point of ridiculous. His character is a joke because he has no direction. What’s Clark’s big secret? Who cares? He’s a billionaire living in a po dunk town obsessing over some farm boy. This is the writers’ payback for a three month strike? Fire the whole writing staff and beg Loeb to return and clean up this trainwreck of a show.

If the next new episode is as poorly written and corporately sponsored as Thursday’s “Hero” my only interest in watching this show will be to see how long it takes to get cancelled.

Hey CW.. hire some good writers for Smallville or can it. Get a good show like “Supernatural” back on the air and kick your new upstart show “Reaper” into Smallville’s timeslot.

My first foray into the world of icon design comes in the form this replacement icon set for the Mac-only iPod transfer utility, Senuti. This huge set contains icons matching all recent iPods from the Shuffle to Full-Size iPods.

Download Senuti Icon Pack for Mac

• Supported Operating Systems: Mac OSX (.icns format, Windows .ico coming soon)
• License: Freeware for commercial and non-commercial use
• Contents: 5th Gen Full-Size iPod (black, white); 6th Gen iPod Classic (black, silver); 1st Gen Nano (black, white); 2nd Gen Nano (black, silver, blue, green, pink, red); 3rd Gen Nano (black, silver, green, blue, red, pink); 2nd Gen Shuffle (silver, blue, green, pink, orange); 3rd Gen Shuffle (silver, blue, green, red, purple) and two General Use Senuti Icons (Notes & Click Wheel)

Visit my profiles over at Interfacelift or DeviantART!

After seeing an article on digg.com this morning regarding statements made by Presidential hopeful Mike Hukabee (R) the need to vote in your state’s presidential primary election is even more important.

According to the article, Mike Hukabee, while being interviewed Monday morning on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe”, stated:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Read the whole article on rawstory: Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in ‘God’s standards’ and the responses on digg.

No thank you, Mr. Hukabee. Leave my Constitution alone, it’s been disrespected enough by our current failure of a president, George W. Bush.

Personally, I support Congressman Kucinich to be our next president. However, should Kucinich not make it to the general election in November, I will use Dennis Kucinich’s support of run-off voting and support my #2 candidate, Barack Obama.

Voting in your state’s (and party’s) presidential primary election has a direct impact on which candidates become the last to choose from in the November general election. If you don’t vote in the primary and help choose the best candidates you may be left with only choosing the lesser of two evils come general election day.

Whoever you support, get out there and vote in your primary election and the later general election. We, the people, can’t do this without you.

When is my state’s primary election?

I live in Indiana now after moving from Pennsylvania. My state’s presidential primary isn’t until May. A few have passed already but it’s not too late to be a part of change.
I have provided a PDF below that lists the date of each state’s primary election.

Primary Election Dates - All States [zipped pdf]
Link to original site: http://www.fec.gov
Link to original pdf: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2008pdates.pdf

Mark you state’s primary date on your calendar, add it to your phone or pda or write it on your hand but don’t forget.

Vote on that day.

Don’t make any excuses, it’s your duty to vote.
This country can’t function properly without you.

Use your vote and voice to tell our government you want undone, the wrongs inflicted on this country and its Constitution by the Bush Administration. Help bring America back to the proud, respected nation it once was.

Vote. America needs you now more than ever.

The recent (June ‘07) article over on TorrentFreak about uTorrent for Mac doesn’t seem hopeful or at least soon coming. They do have another article explaining ways to run uTorrent on your Mac via Crossover Office (beta) or Parallels.

As I migrated away from Windows I bought a copy of Parallels thinking I’d run them side by side so I could use some of those Windows-only apps like XnView and my old copy of Fontlab Using Windows apps so seldomly, I don’t like the idea of installing (and making me buy) a whole copy of Windows onto my Macbook Pro for an occasional use.

Enter uTorrent.

I had been using Azureus for my torrenting needs until Comcast started blocking resetting my upload transfers. I read that uTorrent was so much better but alas, Windows only. Well, after trying the ie4osx kit, I ended up not using the IE part so much as the intel native Darwine kit and it’s accompanying WinHelper.app. I gave it a try, downloaded the uTorrent installer, ran it through WineHelper.app and seconds later, a successful install. The real test was would it launch and better yet, access the internets? It does.

Required Parts for uTorrent on the Mac:

1] Install X11 from your Mac OSX install CD or DVD. This is necessary for running any Windows apps without using Parallels.

2] Download and install Darwine for your Mac’s CPU architecture
Mount the DMG and drag the “Darwine” folder to your “Applications” folder. Run the various wine* apps in the “Sample Applications” folder inside the “Darwine” folder. These will help better configure the environment.

Links to both Intel and PowerPC builds of Darwine:

Darwine for Intel Macs
Darwine for PPC Macs

3] Download the install package for uTorrent.
Run the install.exe and let uTorrent install to the “Program Files” directory (a hidden “.wine” folder within your home folder).
uTorrent

4] Launch WineHelper.app from the “Darwine” folder then go to File > Open, Program Files > utorrent > utorrent.exe
This will launch X11, a log window and a terminal window. You can safely close both the log and terminal windows without hurting the uTorrent process.

5] Open a torrent from uTorrent’s File menu, point it to where you want to save the file and you’re off!

Note: You can’t hide uTorrent like a normal Mac app, you can hide X11 but not the uTorrent window itself. However, you can minimize it like a normal Windows app, except it will minimize down to the bottom left of your screen, sort of hovering near the top edge of the dock. Clicking the reduced title bar will present you with a pop-up menu of options like “Restore”, “Close” “Maximize” and a few uTorrent specific options.

Note2: If the option “Minimize uTorrent to tray” it checked, uTorrent will disappear to a tiny rectangular window and icon at the top left of your screen, directly under the menu bar. This icon can be right-clicked to access all of uTorrent’s system tray icon options.

Hopefully, the uTorrent for Mac project will continue but this works (for me) in the meantime.

After having comments set to “always moderate” for a while, I’ve gotten tired of deleting the spam comments bots dump on my blog so I turned on Askimet once I realized it wasn’t on and installed the reCaptcha plugin for Wordpress.

On every other site, captchas are a pain for me. I usually type the image letters in a few times since it usually tells me I’m wrong even though it looks right to me. Most of the time I push through just to post that comment. Sometimes I just leave the site in frustration.

ReCaptcha seems to be a little nicer to use. It’s based on words (or parts of words) scanned out of books and visually altered a bit to defeat spam bots while maintaining readability for us lowly humans. The letters or words you type in are used to digitize public domain books so your typing isn’t done in vain. Also available is an audio clip you can play that speaks some numbers aloud instead of typing the letters. It can be refreshed without having to reload the entire page, which is nice if you’ve written a long or link-heavy post and don’t want it to get lost.

I may try a couple other plugins if the spam comments don’t slow down. What’s working on your site and how difficult is your method to implement?

[update] I am still getting spam comments and didn’t understand why, so I wrote a gibberish comment and tried submitting it without typing in the captcha. It was accepted and I was confused. I went to the reCaptcha site to find out why and it seems the plugin works by marking a comment as spam when the captcha isn’t correctly typed in. So the comment is still accepted but when it’s marked as spam, Askimet immediately dumps it into the Spam Comments box and neither you nor your reader ever sees the spam. Pretty slick! I’d say reCaptcha is a good alternative for those looking at anti-spam solutions who dislike the “normal” captcha software.