Creative Juices Bo. Co.

Well, he didn't resign from Washington, but he did from Missouri. For those of you not familiar with the situation, I worked on a documentary project awhile back that followed a 2004 congressional race between Jeff Smith and Russ Carnahan in Missouri. I handled all the graphics and design for the marketing material as well as some other stuff. Jeff wound up losing this race with Carnahan, but eventually went on to win a seat in the Missouri state senate. This was largely possible because of the success of the "Can Mr. Smith Get To Washington Anymore?" documentary. After the movie, there wasn't to many people that didn't know who Jeff Smith was.

The movie portrayed Jeff as a very charismatic, for-the-people type of guy. You couldn't resist liking him after you met him. Unfortunately, looks can be a little deceiving, because apparently Jeff was a very bad guy.

Using jQuery's ready() method and callback functions to get your animations to queue smoothly

One of my long time followers and most likely my biggest fan, ran into a little jQuery problem the other day and e-mailed me to see if I could help out. Here's what he had to say:

I am trying to get jQuery to do a fade, a slideDown, and a fade. I need to delay each by a few seconds, or ideally have them trigger after the previous effect completes. I can't seem to figure it out. Your an awesome guy, think you can help out?

The secret to getting me to look at something is to call me "Awesome"!

I drew this picture on the left years ago in college. It always bugged me that I never finished it. Today I decided to scan it in a see what I could do to it in Photoshop. If I was smart, I would have made it into one of those photoshop speed painting movies, but I didn't think of that until I was almost done. Sorry. Hope you enjoy it though.

First let me say that I understand that no hosting company is going to be perfect. I understand that they have to deal with issues every single day and sometimes an issue may not get resolved immediately. And now that I have gotten that off my chest, let me tell you of my experience with a hosting company called HostMySite.com.

It all started last year when I finally had it with CrystalTech. CrystalTech's tech support at the time was horrendous. I could no longer deal with the constant site crashes and abysmal support responses. So after a few weeks of scouring the web, I made the decision to move a couple of clients to HostMySite. On average, people were giving them praise and said that their tech support was superb. They were a little more expensive, but I made the assumption that this was the price I had to pay to receive better service. I had my clients buy their top shared hosting ColdFusion 8 plans.

Almost immediately after moving the site over to their server, we began to notice problems. HostMySite uses a ColdFusion server management application called "SeeFusion". I'm not 100% familiar with this program, but from what I can gather it keeps the different sites in check by making sure that they don't overload the server, kill request that take to long and handle server restarts. The error message we started to see was simply called the "java.lang.ThreadDeath" error.

Rarely do I link to news articles, but this is the best news I've heard in 5-6 years...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/