…but what exactly?
Hmm, I don’t know. Just a little something I’m working on.

We may have iPhones, but we still end up walking on foot when we get a big thunderstorm.
I need my subway!

Microsoft doesn’t always produce crap. Entourage is actually a pretty good email application and I’ve been using it for years now.
But I’ve decided to revisit Mail.app and it’s also a great e-mail application, but one of the reasons I’ve never used it was because I could never figure out how to tell the application to use my IMAP folders (on Dreamhost) for specific functions like using my IMAP “Trash” as the real Trash, etc.
Thanks to my buddy dalematic, I’ve found the solution:

note: this problem was previously solved using this method.

Let me clarify. Through word of mouth someone found me and asked for help on their website. I visited their existing site and it’s horrendous. It’s just plain 1997-old-stale-HTML nasty. My gut said, delete this email now and move on.
Then I decided not to do this. I wrote a quick, blunt email back to this person on where their site is failing. Just quick bullet points. It was harsh, but it was meant as constructive criticism and I told them that.
They heard me, and wanted to talk on the phone. We talked, I told them how I work, what you get for when you hire me – the whole process.
The bottom line is, if you’re a designer, you want success stories in your portfolio. Nothing says success more than taking lead and turning it into gold. This isn’t always easy. I let my clients know that I demand quality on both sides my projects. I will listen to them if they listen to me. Clients need to understand how to heed to design – and I’m not talking about fonts or grids. I’m talking about why I did certain things. How what I’ve done to their site will impact their business.
So next time a poorly designed site comes your way… consider it. If the client is on board with your vision, make some gold.

Hey, after almost 5 months, Nokia MOSH is finally live to the public (we initially had the Alpha version open to a small group of testers). You can upload your own content, or collect other peoples’ and have it immediately available for your phone via the mobile version of the site (you don’t need a Nokia phone).
This site is the result of a lot of hard work by both Nokia and Schematic New York. For as much art direction and design I did, it wouldn’t be worth anything if it weren’t for all the hard backend and client-side development from my Nokia team at Schematic. We also had great project management (thanks Eoin).
Big ups to Ian, Vinny, Wes, Maggie, Emily, Andrew, Jason, Brian, Eoin, David, JP, Del, Chris, Ben, Kevin, Karolina, Pablo and everyone else who contributed!

Shots from this weekend – About Town 8.5.2007.

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity

• Occam’s razor, by William of Ockham

So I downloaded my first DRM-free album from iTunes – The Beastie Boys, The Mix-Up. The album is entirely instrumental jams – the kind of tracks you’d be familiar with if you have Ill Communication, The In Sound From Way Out!, or Hello Nasty. The album is great and it shows that The Beastie Boys are talented musicians off the mic.
Once I got the album, I decided to check out their website. On their website I discovered that they have a Flickr album:

I’m been using Dreamhost for my site hosting, as well as my clients, for over 5 years now. The problem is, in the last year or so, our relationship has been getting strained. Dreamhost doesn’t give me the kind of attention and uptime I need. My sites are down or slow all the time.
In the afternoon today, if you went to this site, you would get a message saying “bad_httpd_conf”.
So I Googled bad_httpd_conf.
The first 4 entries were from Dreamhost.
That’s not a good sign.
I know I need a dedicated box for my sites. Now I just need to get the budget to afford one. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know at michael [at] thecombustionchamber [dot] com

Microformats: Social Network Portability (via Zeldman)

Why does every single social network community site make you:

• re-enter all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
• re-add all your friends?

In addition, why do you have to:

• re-turn off notifications?
• re-specify privacy preferences?
• re-block people you don’t want to interact with?

These are great questions. It makes me this of this great parody site, Useless Account.

Bubble 2.0 Coming Soon, By John C. Dvorak (I kinda think of him like the Bill O’Reilly of tech) (via Slashdot.org)

The current bubble, already called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned. A number of unique initiatives, however, are in play here. Let’s look at a few of the top ideas floating the new bubble.

Even kookie people you can learn from, and Dvorak is no exception. What he talks about has some bits of truth to it. Ever since around September of 2006, I’ve been thinking, “Damn, there’s a hell of a lot of start-ups launching.” This could be result of reading sites like TechCrunch and Mashable, but I still had this sense, and I still do. There’s been a lot of venture capital money floating around this last few years, and when I say a lot I mean billions.
I’m not sure that there’s a Bubble 2.0 so much as there’s a lot a lot of little farts in the bathtub we call the Internet. I’ve seen a lot of services that all piggy-back on YouTube. If they go under, no one will give a shit because they don’t employ many people. API’s have effectly made it easy for anyone to provide a service without too much heavy lifting. Yelp.com is a perfect example of a great mashup service that I love, but relies on the Google Maps API to make their site effective.
I think what we are seeing already isn’t so much a Bubble popping as much as we’re seeing air being redistributing from bubble to bubble. Social networking won’t be going away anytime soon, but users are fickle, and if they find out that their friends think MySpace is no good, and that Facebook is the place to be, then they will not hesitate to move.
If something happens to Google, that will be a Hydrogen-filled Zeppelin the size of California crashing to the ground. Other than that happening, there’s no bubbles that will be popping.
The old video and music industries are dying which is one of the reasons why we’re seeing so many efforts to reinvent these media online. A lot of these video start-ups HAVE to fail. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, everyone wants to make an online music store, everyone wants a video sharing site. They can’t all survive.
The key thing to understand is old music and tv media are going to keep plugging away at New Media until they get something that makes them money (read: That people like to use).

BumpTop
I’m on the fence on this product. There’s a certain usefulness you get when you take real world office supplies and tools and you abstract them into a Graphical User Interface.
Great GUI’s take the best aspects of these objects and throws away the rest. Manila folders on your desk become simple icons with an arrow next to them, letting you ‘open’ the folder and see a nice clean list of files in that folder.
BumpTop seems to be moving back towards a real desktop, complete with messiness. I know what you’re going to say – people who have messy desks will inevitably have messy computer desktops. True – but BumpTop doesn’t seem to be helping the situation (They even refer to some things in the demo below as “piles”).
Does anyone else feel me on this?
Check the video below. Remember to ask yourself, Do I think this is just cool, or do I really seeing this as something useful?