Stefan Hayden

I recently had a chance to help Liz Danzico over at AIGA with some podcasts. First one on the block was An Event Apart being held in philly with three of my heroes, Jeffery Zeldman, Eric Meyers, and Jason Santa Maria. While I did little more then cut some audio together and take some work off of Liz’s hands I’m all to excited to be involved with all of it. Check out Jeffery talk about all sorts of crazy stuff and stick around to hear my name at the end! Lets hope this is only the first time my name is in the same place as Jeffery’s.

On another note I’m happy to be helping AIGA get more involved in web design. Hopefully I will be able to not only be able to get the print world to take notice but get more web designers involved in AIGA. So many seem to not join because AIGA doesn’t do much for web design and I hope we can bring the kind of value to AIGA that will give web designers a reason to be more involved.

I remember having AOL 1.0 and loving it as much as I hated it. I loved the internet but I could not play online games through their service and web pages loaded so slow. It really felt like a walled garden. Even though TiVo has been out for a while it really has the same feel of early AOL. It’s doing something revolutionary but doing it so haphazardly and poorly that it’s almost not worth it.

I just got a Tivo and you need a phone line to set it up. I don’t have a phone line. Search for setting up a TiVo with out a phone line and you’ll get a ton of results. Most are little help as they are very vague about why it needs the phone line or what exactly they use to set it up with out a phone line. I know there is a way to do it but not with the equipment i have.

A lot of people graduating from college move out of home and get a land line. They get one just because that’s what you do. I’m a leading edge case of some one who knows they will not use a phone line and refuses to get one. The same techy people who makes this leap of reason are the some kind who want TiVo. Yet they don’t seem to want to cater to this group of people. I’ve just ordered a phone line that will take a week to get so I can use my TiVo. I don’t know any one in my building or any one with the same service as me in my area. I’m not going to make friends with people in my building so I can take over their TV for about 10 hours.

I think many people who run in to the same problem get over it eventually. I will not. When I got AOL I immediately started to look to see how I could get off. where could I go to get better service at a cheaper price. I’ve been looking for better options than TiVo for a long time now and I opted against them because TiVo was cheaper and easier to setup. Is it cheaper and easier? I really really want Myth TV now that I have TiVo.

I’m fairly new to PDF creation. I’ve outputted my share through Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark but have put too much thought in to it as I mostly have not had a need for it. My resume is in PDF and that’s about it. Working on a little beta feature presentation for the Sconex reps I need to up the PDF anti and really make it shine.

Screen shots don’t scale well. When my senior portfolio teacher made me print out 11x17 print outs of my website I was less then pleased at the 200 dpi print out of a 72 dpi file. Damn you internet and your low resolution. A similar problem happens when you save a screen shot to PDF. The default zoom is default to what ever the user’s Acrobat (or in my case Foxit) is set too. This means that if the zoom is set for anything other 100% your screen shot looks like crap and you don’t look very professional.

The trick is to force any PDF reader to open up at 100% so the screen shoot looks as crisp as it does on the site. Most times I’m fairly impressed with Adobe’s help files, but Acrobat’s seem to be rather sparse. Search through google got me no results either.

What you need to look for is the Open Options, which on Acrobat 5 is listed under File > Document Properties > Open Options. Here you can set all the different things you want to happen when anyone opens your PDF. The one I was looking for was the magnification which was set to default and I simply changed it to 100%. Now every one can see my beautiful screenshots with out Acrobat Messing them up.

Praise the lord! Odeo has released a new mp3 player. The last player consisted of a play button and a stop button with the additional ability to pause while playing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally reloaded the page forcing me to listen from the beginning. While having to listen from the beginning would drive most people away I kept coming back knowing that Odeo provided such a service that I could not get anywhere else. I just don’t want to download mp3s to my computer and be forced to be locked to that one machine. I feel more people will ruin in to this problem as handheld devices become more ubiquitous.

One interesting change of interface is the play button. Previously you could play, pause or stop. Stop would make the mp3 play from the beginning while pause would let you pick up where you left off. Now there is only one button that toggles between play and stop. This time though stop does not put the scrubber back at the begging of the file but instead pauses.

The new interface is just beautiful. I was begging for a way to advance with in the mp3 since the beginning and I’m glad that they didn’t just tack one on but instead completely redesigned the user interface. I am so so excited that I’m really having trouble forming coherent thought about it. If you have not checked Odeo out now is the time to do so. They don’t seem to have made any big announcement but I see this as a reinvention of the site since it is so focused on audio files.

Want to start a tech company and need some help? Although I have not meet them all, here is a list of all the Boston residence that are looking to change the world.

• Robbie Allen
• Wayne Chang
• Michael Ducker
• Lucas Englehardt
• Danny Gagne
• Adrian Heilbut
• Bryan Maloney
• R. Scott McIntire
• Daniel Silva
• David Wurtz

I hope to be able to come back to this list in 5 or 10 years and count the millionaires who changed the world. If you want to join the fun check the Boston Startup Meetup group.