No Mr.Bond, I expect you to die!
Design Feed
I'm a graphic designer, multimedia developer and online marketing consultant by trade. There's a never ending stream of creative work going through my company or my personal life, so below are some links to the more recent ones I've tackled. # 
Nascor International. Just completing this site, adding in the Russian version of the site next, to make it a valuable international marketing tool for Nascor. Video content, CMS tools and collateral materials. #
Jan Batiuk. This local Calgary author needed a self-promo site that can grow as she does. #
HotWings. Your definitive online source for finding decent chicken wings in your city. #
Our Little Planet.
I hope I'm rich enough to send my kids to this paradise Summer camp. #
Love2Eat.
Just wrapped up Barb Thomas's new website and branding. Healthy stuff. #
What's New?
iFitness iPhone App.
October 27th, 2008 by adminRediscovering old tunes, with help from BitTorrent.
October 26th, 2008 by adminIdentity Design Crisis.
October 26th, 2008 by adminProject Mania. As Always.
October 20th, 2008 by adminBlog test from iPhone
October 16th, 2008 by adminPolitical Flash Fun
October 14th, 2008 by adminWhat the hell was that election about?
October 14th, 2008 by adminLoving the new iPhone.
October 13th, 2008 by admin
Got sick, and stuff happened.
November 18th, 2008 by adminSo I’m finally feeling decent enough to have ‘turned the corner’ on the cold I had for the past 3 days. Of course now it’s going to run rampant through our little house, with both kids already feeling signs. One of those nasty nose blowing, yuck feeling lie in bed affairs for a few days, unable or willing to do much but cope. You know, those types.
I think it started after my immuno-depressed Scotch tasting Wednesday at the Willow Park Whiskey Festival. My sister-in-law had given the ticket a couple weeks ago, with a nice handmade card, a bottle of water and a bottle of Advil. The writing was on the wall. The scotch tasting was amazing, with a whole new appreciation for something I already had an appreciation for. Peated, UnPeated, Highlands, Lowlands, 18 year, 21 yer, 25 year and so on. I must have sampled from at least 20 of the vendors, often trying a few of the different ones they offered. That said, they do only pour you *just* enough to actually get a sense of what it’s about. And then you do rinse your glass in between sips, so there’s some constant water dilution, but in the end, the 46-105 proof alcohol finds it target. And then I passed out on the couch in the basement.
I woke up, feeling groggy as hell, and under the normal hangover pains, I cold feel my throat getting sore - sort of swollen and scratchy. Bad times. It progressed until finally on Friday afternoon, I was in full swing anti-body battle mode, with the runny nose and aches. It was my birthday. And I was sick as fuck. So I went to bed early, slept in for most of Saturday, mustered a movie that night at home, even though the wife was going to take me out for dinner and the new 007 movie. Sunday went about the same, just lazing about, powering through 3 full boxes of cream inflated Puffs tissues. And today, Monday I felt much better but slept in again to make sure I let the body rest.
My regime for recovering involved the following:
- Youth Juice mania, making sure I hit the daily recommended dosage
- Cold FX
- Advil Sinus
- Poor mans green tea
- Hot food
- The Internets, TV and the iPhone
Now, in that short, sick duration, whole load of shit happened too, some too do with my birthday, of course, and some random shit, like my daughter puking all over my new Dodge Journey (luckily I had sprung for the extra upholstery protector, but that new car spell has been dulled). A few of the other highlights included:
Awesome birthday gifts, like the Kodak digital picture frame that my wife got me - the big one. It’s absolutely brilliant, both figuratively and literally, with awesome colors and then it just flips through 300 of my favorites. The nav system took a bit getting used to on it, and it’s support for Flash and SD memory cards, USB sticks and onboard memory make it a breeze to load up. Add to that a sweet set of Pentax binoculars for hockey games, camping and beaches. 
The iPhone kept my occupied throughout the 3 days, allowing me to just lie there, with tissues rolled up nostrils to catch the snot, and still check on anything at the office, our sites, or birthday well wishers. I tidied up my Contact Book, check in on Digg headlines and generally putz around on it. I did manage to load on a few new apps, including Tapulous’s suite of Twinkle and Collage apps.
- Collage allows you to add and snap photos and post them to friends, people nearby - geolocated by the new iPhone - the world, or whoever else. I’ve only seen a few interesting pictures come through so far, seemingly just other people testing and playing with it. Not really that useful, but well executed with a nice GUI and quick loads.
- Twinkle is a good Twitter app, if you use Twitter a lot, which I don’t so I don’t know how long this one will stick around either, but again it’s well executed, with some cool sounds, and simple GUI. It allows you to geo-locate yourself and then only get feeds from 1-1000kms away (or everywhere). Or you can just stay in Friend mode and go back and forth that way. Unfortunately, my Friends section was blank. Ha.
- WiFi Speed is just a web-based app that tells you your current data transfer speeds, benchmarked against other 3G and GSM networks. I’ve been averaging about 900kbps all day today, a far cry from the 3.2mbps that 3G gets.
- Google Mobile is probably the coolest of the bunch though, with it’s new Voice Activated search, which brings up web pages or your contacts by simply speaking normally. I caught the article off of Engadget, and figured I’d take it for a spin. I don’t have any contacts in Google Address Book, since I use the Contact Book app, so the first search I did for a buddy returned a web page with his name on it instead. I then tired a bunch of client websites and random terms and it performed suprisngly well. You can also tap into the whole suite of Google apps through this iPhone app.
I managed to also solve a serious issue my Mobile Mac and Sync functions with my MBP. I scoured the web and found this solution - that didnt work for me, but lead me to the path which did solve it. The Sync functions on my Mac were frozen, and the Sync tab on the MobileMe preference tab was greyed out and wouldn’t display anything. The solution asked you to input a command into Terminal which would purge the history on the SyncServices data. Didn’t work for me, and since I knew I had all my data back-up, I thrashed the whole damn /Library/Application Support/SyncServices/ folders and restarted. Voila fixed, and I then managed to resync everything just fine, and enabled MobileMe on the iPhone and Mac so they now Push data to one another when i updates my contacts, calendars, email and bookmarks. Finally.
In Search of Bluetooth iPhone Control App
November 3rd, 2008 by adminWith my recent vehicle purchase, it’s now possible to integrate my iPhone directly into the car for outgoing and incoming calls, meaning you never have to pick up your phone, except for when selecting someone to call. It relies on Bluetooth and in the new Dodge Journey, it’s called uConnect. Once it’s set up you just have to press a little button near the radio to answer the call. This now means that I have to remember to turn on, or off the Bluetooth connection when I need it, and that means cruising back to Home, then General Prefs, then Bluetooth and then flippin it on. Cumbersome. So, I’m off to find a quick little App that with 1 tap gets me to that toggle.
Update:
So it would seem that no such app yet exists unless you’ve got your phone jailbroken, in which case you have your choice of Services or bossPrefs, both of which work exactly as I’d like. This time around I’ll wait, rather than go through the jailbreaking hassle and mess with a good thing.
How To Make Wicked Zombie Intestines
November 3rd, 2008 by admin
I came up with a fun costume for my buddies Fright Night ‘08 Halloween bash this year, going as the ever delightful Zombie. I added some intestines hanging out of my shirt and made up a good and bloody shirt and pants to go with. I’ve prepped a little visual how-to on my Flickr page for the intestines.
Hit it up: http://flickr.com/photos/designisgood/sets/72157608604249468/
iPhone Tip of the Day
October 29th, 2008 by adminWhilst browsing this hilarious image posted on Flikr, I stumbled across this tip in the comments section. It deals with how to do a screen capture on your iPhone, which can be useful for things like snapping captures of maps and forwarding it off to sites or emails and so on. The tip is: Hold your Power and Home button at the same time for a quick second and you’ll hear the standard Mac screen capture sound. The image then shows up in your Camera Roll in the Photos section, and you can now to whatever the hell you want with it.
