I’ve had these screensavers for a while, and I figured I’d post them because they’re so damn great, created by James Paterson of Presstube. Click on the images below to download:


The first screensaver can also be found at Presstube for Mac and PC.

Newsvine – “We believe in turning news into conversation, and every page on Newsvine.com is designed to do precisely that.”
Gawker – New York-centric News
Overheard in New York – What New Yorkers are saying
The Superficial – so I like the occasional tabloid news. Sue me.
Engadget – because I love gadgets.
Pitchfork – because I love music, and this site educates me on stuff I’ve never heard of.
Newstoday – great design news, inspirational sites and a solid job board (If you take 2 minutes to make an account, you can get rid of that annoying ding-ding-dong jingle).
The Onion – sometimes fake news reveals more truth than the real stuff. Just the title of this article had me dying.

After working with Tom Cruise for 14 years, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone decides not to renew Cruise’s contract with the company.
Well, when you start falling apart at the mental seams like Cruise has done over the last few years there’s bound to be consequences like losing contracts and having guys like me illustrate your spectacles on t-shirts:

Why do I toture myself by reading the “journalism” on CNN.com?
From the CNN.com article:

Seventy-four percent of the 1,033 adult Americans polled said they believe an attack is being planned, according to the poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation on behalf of CNN.

Well. There it is. Now you know.
I’m curious to know the reasons behind pollees’ beliefs. Perhaps Joe and Jane Average from Middle-of-Nowhere America should get senior level intelligence jobs in the US government since they gots the 411 on Osama.
Or more likely – this CNN article achieves nothing at all, journalistically or otherwise.
This poll is about as useful as asking a person in rural America who works at Home Depot whether they consider dark matter a threat to alternate gravity theories.

Ahh the good old days of Flash 4 and Netscape 4.7 – the best browser ever…

Is it me or have web development jobs become very specialized? Specialization is defnitely good sometimes – you don’t want a team of mediocre people just ok at everything. It just seems when I mention a floating div to a flash animator, they just stare blankly at me and blink.
I’ve come to realize that I am from the old school (like many of my collegues) . I was never taught HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Flash animation or Actionscripting 1 & 2. Grandpa voice: When I was in college there were no interactive courses, and we had to work on computers with 32 MB of RAM. We checked our email through command line programs like PINE and MM….
……. and I rode 2 miles to class on a donkey.
Another reason for my perspective is obviously my environment. First off, for interactive design, you either get it, or you don’t get it. Just like art (and interactive design can be art, but I’ll save that discussion for another day). Most of the people I went to design school with didn’t get it. They didn’t get why I was installing the Flash 3 player and why I thought Urban Desires was so damn amazing (somethine like this was ground-breaking in 1997). In a nutshell, there were no interactive designers and I had to teach myself.
In my senior year of college the head of the design program said he had a job in NYC for me, if I knew HTML. I partially lied and said, sure I knew HTML. The truth was the only HTML I knew was from the handful of tutorials I was taking on WebMonkey. I had never built a website.
When I got hired at Dan Miller Design in 1999, my first web project was to design and build the site for the documentary film Shadow Boxers. I was able to get through it with the help of Dreamweaver and constant nagging of the senior web designer at DMD. Once I had completed Shadow Boxers, I was asked if I knew Macromedia Flash 4. I said sure. A month later I designed and built Art Base Inc (I’m amazed both these sites are still up, if you view the source to Art Base, the Flash version is still 4!).
I decided that I was now going to strictly be an RGB designer. No more CMYK.
From DMD and the other companies I moved on to, it was a constant learning process and never having the luxury of large teams for web projects. It was always just me, or me and a few other people working on a project. I never experienced the glory days of the DotCom bubble everyone recounts. As Flash become more and more essential in web design, I realized that I needed to learn how to make my life easier and so I learned how to automate things with Actionscript. The fact that I learned how to parse XML within Flash had nothing to do with client requests – it was to save my ass time when I had to update Anything to avoid opening up Flash again to change a few sentences. And the concept of separating form from content with CSS just made sense.
I also bring this up, because I’m also in the process of finding new homes for many of my freelance clients and I’ve found it difficult to hand them over to one person who can help them with design AND development. Someone that can design an email newsletter AND use Campaign Monitor to send out the blast.
Update: Luckily Jory at Analogue has stepped up to the plate and has the skills to pay the bills and uh, navigate the terrain over interactive hills….
So I guess I’m wondering – What and how do people learn web design and development these days? Is code still scary to a lot of people? Is money good enough to specialize within the field web design into areas like Flash Video Designer or HTML Expert?
Are there people out there that still design – inside and out?

So Microsoft came out with a patch to fix a security flaw, but broke it instead.
from Security Focus (found via Slashdot):

The flaw, initially thought to only crash Internet Explorer, actually allows an attacker to run code on computers running Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 that have applied the August cumulative update to Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, security firm eEye Digital Security asserted. The update, released on August 8, fixed eight security holes but also introduced a bug of its own, according to Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for the security firm, which notified Microsoft last week that the issue is exploitable.

… I’m sorry, what? I don’t speak Bacchi, C3PO, was that English?!
It’s amazing how many screwups Microsoft makes and and it still can maintain its empire. I wish I had that kind of resilience.
… and in other news:
Dell withdraws from MP3 player market. Haha. Take it deep Dell. I wouldn’t be so happy if it wasn’t for their Apple trash-talking way back in the day. Maybe the smart thing would have been to put those explosive batteries in the DJ Ditty instead of your laptops.

I’ve known about Alexa.com for a while, but sometimes its fun to see how my site and everyone else’s ranks in the world.
1,926,864th in the world. I know you’re all jealous.

Flashstreamworks – flash blog. Good links.

MTV Overdrive now works for Macs – happy day! (Still some kinks in the functionality as of this posting, but its a great start.)

How to make cusom error pages on Dreamhost – that’s the kind of day I’m having.
Isn’t life all about making errors look a bit graceful?
No error page can get as graceful as this puppy.

Here is a list of solid resources for web professionals, designers developers, flashers and everyone in between:
37signals Job Board – I just discovered this one, and it’s great, I just wish there was a way to filter the results by location or job type.
Newstoday – Click on ‘Find a Job’
Creative Hotlist – I can’t tell you how many calls I get from people who have found me on the Hotlist. In my opinion, it’s a steal at $35 for a 6-month membership.
Moluv – take a look at the job section of the forums on the right, you might find some gems in there.
k10k – they post job opening fairly often in the News section on the right.
Craig’s List – results from Craig’s List can be so-so. I have gotten some great leads from this site, but I’ve also had to weed through a lot of crap to get to them.
I’m sure that many people have benefitted from recruiters. Not me. I’ve found that emailing the top companies on my list has gotten me most of my interviews, coupled with using the links above.

This is the first time I’ve seen more people hitting my site with Firefox than with IE. It doesn’t reflect world usage of Firefox, but it’s good trend:

Take it deep, Explorer.

I picked up the new Rolling Stone magazine last night and I thought this ad was brilliant, not to mention ballsy:

*The fold-out is scented just like a bag of … scratch-n-sniff weed.