Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “Blog” Category

Internet, Go To Work: Help My Friend Become The Official Blogger For the United Nations’ World Environment Day

Posted on April 26th, 2012

My friend and co-worker, Maggie Comstock is in a competition over at the United Nations Environment Programme, where she currently sits at third place. If she wins first place, she wins a trip to Rio to be the official blogger for World Environment Day, pretty cool The current first and second place contestants sit at around 1800 votes. Maggie is in third place with ~1360 votes. Internet, you know what to do. You can vote on it here and she has a second post as well, which you can also vote on. Live status of the current voting for the competition. Below is a snippet of one of her posts: Maggie Comstock, at the UN Environment Program, writes “The Top Three Reasons Rio+20 Will…

Rachel Gilmore’s 100 MPH Fastball

Posted on March 28th, 2012

Andy Ihnatko, at Andy’s Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth. He writes about a topic I seldom care about, Opera, but makes me care about this story: Kim, an elite professional, accelerates through every curve. She seems to have no limitations; every note she sings is a conscious choice and she’s in full control of her instrument throughout. And keep in mind that as impressive as this performance was, it was all in a day’s work for her. She would do it again and again and again throughout the show’s run. So. One night, Kim got sick and Rachele Gilmore was forced to make her Met stage debut on just three hours’ notice. You must read his article, and watch the two videos embedded within…

Technology & Related Concepts That Need To Die

Posted on March 26th, 2012

Joel’s Technology Hit List Monday Morning Rant, 26 March, 2012 Skeumorphism in design Adobe Flash Adobe Air The concept of “write once, deploy everywhere” code (web standards being the exception, of course) QR codes Comic Sans and Marker Felt WPTouch WordPress plugin. Just don’t. Websites serving up a “get our app!” splash page to iOS users prior to serving the requested page Websites refusing to serve page requests and insisting you get their app Websites who serve up a mobile version, but when you switch to the “full version” it forwards you to the homepage Websites serving up mobile versions only to iPads Using Powerpoint to make documents that should have been made in Word/Pages/Plain Text. Using Powerpoint to send images as if it…

Ode To The “Computer Guy/Gal”

Posted on March 19th, 2012

Internet friend, Michele Catalano on asking someone you know who “works with computers” to “fix” your own computer: And really, most of the time he doesn’t mind. He likes you. He wants to help you. Then you call and say “Gee, I really want to get this fixed right away. Can’t you come over on your way home from work?” and he just spent all day in front of a computer and all he wants to do is go home and eat dinner and NOT sit in front of the computer. But he does it anyhow. He does it on a Saturday when we should be kicking back. He does it on a holiday when everyone is in your backyard enjoying a barbecue and…

Bertie Arrives

Posted on March 5th, 2012

We picked up Bertie this weekend. As you’ve probably already seen on Instagram or Twitter, here are photos of his first weekend home:

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Ditching My DSLR On Vacation

Posted on March 5th, 2012

A week ago my wife and I went on vacation to Disney World in Flordia. The main purpose of the trip was for Steffanie to run in Disney’s Princess ½ Marathon. While packing for the trip, I dutifully packed up my Canon 40D and my two lenses, a Tamron 28-300mm that I now regret buying, and my beloved Canon 50mm f/1.4. After arriving in Florida, however, it never left my bag. I thought about whether I should take it with me each morning as we were preparing to leave our hotel rooms, and each day I decided to just take my iPhone 4. I was quite happy with how a lot of the photos below turned out. When taking photos I primarily used the…

The Puppy

Posted on February 20th, 2012

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Yes, this is happening.

Evil

Posted on February 8th, 2012

There has been some recent news in the last month that I want to talk about. Google announced several weeks ago the new Google+ infected search results, where they attempt to shove as many aspects of Google+ in front of the user, whether the user wants it or not. This goes against something Google has said they never would do, for years and years – polluting their own search results with preferences of their products over competitors. Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s this is the exact reason many people switched to Google in the first place. All of ther competitors pulled bullshit such as this, and Google being the “good guy” did not. Zuckerberg and his monstrosity has them so scared…