On Hiatus Once Again

Sorry about the lack of updates. Due to an overload of work, I have to put CamWorld on hiatus once again. It's possible this hiatus will last as long as a year. Once things have settled down, I may revive it and resume with my regular blogging.

Also note that I am working on some undisclosed blog-related projects for some undisclosed people that involve blogs and web community. When I have permisison to publicly talk about what I'm working on, I will post a short notice here on CamWorld. Also note that there will be one or more blogs in the near future that I will be contributing to in case you want to follow what I'm doing.

Sorry about being so vague, but I'm under a press embargo. Stay tuned and you'll soon see what I've been up to. Thanks.

September Blog Events in NYC

Just a couple of blog-related events in NYC that people may want to attend.

• September 13: Six Apart, the people behind powerhouse blog apps MovableType and TypePad are having a massive get-together in Madison Square Park from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. Come and meet some of NYC's most famous and well-known bloggers.
• September 16: The New York City chapter of Usability Professionals' Association is holding a seminar called "Blogging in Corporate America" from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, with a following optional dinner.
• September 17: Monthly Blog Meetup Day.
• September 18: Gothamist.com and 601.am are hosting a happy hour for bloggers at the Remote Lounge. Starting at 8:00 PM.
• September 20: The Morning News party. 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM at a bar in Williamburg, Brooklyn. Come and watch people tell stories and get shit-faced (in a good way).

Hurray for Backups!

Yay for backups! Apparently, the rushed Retrospect backup I ran on Sunday after I got the hard drive working did contain my most recent Entourage database. The first time I tried restoring it, Retrospect grabbed one of the old email databases that was only current up to July 27.

Another attempt today, this time only restoring the exact files I needed succeeded and now I have all my data and email archives back. I am immensely pleased and the $250 I spent back in July on an external 40GB LaCie firewire drive was money well spent.

The Apple guys at Novaworks have confirmed that the hard drive is shot and Apple is replacing it for free with a new one. It's a good chance for me to do a fresh install of Mac OS X, re-install all my apps and weed out the collection of crap I no longer need but have living in the dusty corners of my laptop; which in theory will leave me with a faster, more organized computer.

Three cheers for backups!

Got Those Hard Drive Blues

On Sunday morning the hard drive in my new 12" Powerbook G4 decided to take a permanent vacation. I spent the entire day coaxing data off it, resulting in getting everything crucial except for my massive 1 GB Entourage email database. Luckily, I have a Retrospect backup of my hard drive that was run on August 20, however when I extract the Entourage db it has all of my mail up to July 27, which was the first date I ran the backup process. Somehow my Retrospect backup process missed the Main Identity folder containing my email databases. Bah.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to procrastinate on selling my old ComboDrive Powerbook G4 which I replaced with an identical SuperDrive PBG4 (the one that is now at an Apple Repair Center getting a brand new hard drive), so I'm now using my old ComboDrive PBG4 in the interim. The short of it is that I'm now missing about 6 weeks of email archives that I'm not sure if I'll ever get back - everything since July 27, 2003.

Interestingly enough, the Powerbook with the bad hard drive now only boots into the Darwin console, but still have full Interent access. Since I had no easy way of getting my data off this drive I enabled FTP on my old Powerbook and started FTPing gzip'ed folders over my WiFi LAN. It worked surprisingly well until I started getting FTP errors when it hit bad blocks on the hard drive. Unfortunately, this only happened when I tried to FTP my 1 GB of archived email. Bah.

I also learned that Mac OS X's default for Gzip is to replace the file you are compressing with the compressed version of it. This is bad because it leaves you with no backup. If you don't know that this is the default, and you Gzip 1 GB of data without backing it up first you run the risk of writing the compressed version to a bad part of the hard drive, effectively making it impossible to retrieve via FTP and also impossible to Gunzip. Bah.

All of this I learned in a 12-hour marathon session yesterday of trying to save my data. It has reinforced my belief that backups are good and regular daily backups are even better. It has also convinced me to abandon Entourage for a better mail client that stores its mail in the more normal mbox format which I can then regularly synchronize to my server if I don't migrate to IMAP.

The question is: Is Mailsmith a decent mail client? I've checked out GNUmail, which looks pretty good. And I'm hearing things about Eudora 6 that make me want to try that as well.

Update: It could be worse. At least I didn't run over my PBG4 with an SUV.

Photoshop Feature Request

As a mostly self-taught web designer who uses Photoshop every day I sometimes wish for things that the program cannot yet do. Recently I realized that it would make my life a whole lot easier if I could assign a set of guidelines to a specific Layer or specific Layer Set.

This way, whenever I hand off a Photoshop file to a web site builder, that person can then turn Layer Sets on and off, each having its own set of color-coded guidelines that relate only to that part of the overall site design. Compared to what we have now, which is a single color (which is changeable) of guidelines which apply across all layers within a file. As you may have noticed, once you get past about 8-10 horizontal and vertical guidelines, they start becoming less effective and more of a visual nuisance. See example image:

Knowing Adobe, they likely have this feature already rolled into their next release. If not, they should give it some thought because it would make the life of a web designer using Photoshop much better.

Note to Self

Eating an entire roll of Wint-o-Green Breathsavers in less than an hour makes for a good, natural diuretic and laxative should you find yourself in the need of such. And it freshens your breath quite well, too.

Freelance Copywriter Needed

I have a need to hire a copywriter for one of my freelance jobs. Initially, it will be about 3-4 hours of work re-writing the copy of an existing web site (approximately 4 pages) and if the client likes the results, it will turn into writing the copy for the entire site. Requirements:

• Should be in the NYC area
• Experience in or knowledge of the tax/legal industry
• Experience writing copy for consumer-based service web sites
• Ability to work from home and meet with client in midtown Manhattan or at their offices in New Jersey

If you meet these requirements, email me the link to your writing portfolio along with your reasonable rates. Only qualified cadidates will be considered.

Identify This Movie

I sometimes receive emails from people who have found my site through Google or another of the search engines. Typically, these people are looking for webcams and fill out my contact form with questions like the following:

From: latif ali
Subject: web cam

Please

 help me on how to work with cam to see other member on line
     Thank You

What they don't realize is that CamWorld is not a site about webcams. I don't know any other way to deal with this problem so I usually ignore it, thoguh I sometimes wish people would read the "About" page before sending me an email.

Other times, I receive legitimate requests from people who found my site by searching for something else. In this case, I'm hoping another reader can help this guy since I don't know what movie he is talking about:

From: nedim sinanovic
Subject: help

please help me find the title of the movie, which is in a way similar to KOYAANISQATSI, and features the camera on the special tripod with engine. the camera is panning from left to right or up and down but photography is done with slow- frames at the time- tehnique and than projected as super fast movements of the images and slow camera movements. the photography as a recall is staning and imiges of the sixteen cappele, london, egipt, etc. as i could recall the title is something like- cronos. i am traying to find this movie for a quite some time, please help me

Russian Design Links

In researching the design of a site I'm developing for a Russian friend, I stumbled across a plethora of well-designed web sites coming out of the design world in Russia. Here are a few of the best I've found so far:

» Decade.ru - Appears to be the Russian version of K10K.

» The Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters - Exactly what its title says. Great Russian design applied to a great social problem.

» Artfront.ru - The personal design site of Den Grishin, a desigenr living in Moscow.

» DesignCollector.ru - A site that indexes a number of the leading Russian designers. Worth checking out everything they link to.

» logotypes.ru - Practically every logotype ever designed, collected here and available for downloading in Illustrator or EPS format. Wow.