Clay Newton's quick bio: Clay Newton is an artist and designer, raised in the wine country's illustrious Napa proper. After spending three years as an apprentice of sorts at Richard Carter Studio, working at the French Laundry (pre- & post- Thomas Keller) and Trefethen Vineyards, he jumped the hills for Davis to attend the University, majoring in Art Studio with a minor in Sociology. His first kid, ZZ Anne Newton, was born in November 2005. Clay's technology career started in the bowels of the UC Davis IDEA Lab, where he studied under Randal Packer, Lynn Hershman, and Jon Winet. Jon later became one of Clay's close friends and collegues. In 1998, Clay started working for Eve.com which was really his indoctrination into the fast and furious dotcom mentality. When crumbled under the weight of idealab!, Clay was lucky enough to be able to cash into a house in yet another less-than-illustrious locale: Richmond (as of this writing in 2005, Richmond is the 11th most dangerous city in the US -- oooo scarey!) From Eve, Clay moved on to iEngineer which morphed into Assentive Solutions. When Assentive died a fiery death, Clay bounced over to Virage (2 hr commute hell.) After the third round of layoffs in 9 months, he shifted gears to Navis which tried to devour his soul but only took away a portion of his liver. In 2005, he joined Bank of America as a VP of Interaction Design. In the summer of 2006, Clay moved back to Napa and now telecommutes all the time.
White Screen of Death
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Wholesale Hangup
On the heels of the launch of iLife 06, I was chomping at the bit. I simply had to try out some of the new features, and while I was at it, I figured I would dig a bit into iWeb. My first foray: Wholesale Hangup.
First impressions...
The templates are nice and clean, and provide for multiple subtemplates, which melikes. Unfortunately, it is not immediately clear how I might extend these templates, which menolikes. Another wonky thing about the templates is that they seem to have elements that are unique to the given types for example, I wanted to add a slideshow to a blog entry and was flummoxed. Granted, this may just be due to my ignorance, but regardless, for a standard user figuring this out is going to be taxing.
It would also be nice if you could set a header image that would permeate your site. Example: I had added a banner image to all of my pages, so I thought. Then SB clicked over to the Blog archive and there was the standard iWeb chica with the knit cap on. I had some 'splainin TODO. Seems pretty lame that when I set a banner image for the homepage it didn't push that out to some of the more obscure pages. Slight maintainence issue and unintuitive.
Another strange thing is that there seems to be no clear way to do some sort of sub-nav under Photos. I think the only way is to create a single non-blog page that you place static entries under: wack. It would be really nice if they supported some thing similar to the Photocast notion they have dropped into the latest iPhoto and gave it the proper archival functions of a standard weblog.
Native Podcast support. This is evocative, but WTF. Although I have dreams of podcasting, it has not turned into a day-to-dayer for me, and I don't see it doing ... unless there is a significant paradigm shift. Maybe that is Garageband, dunno.
Editing content and rearrangign page elements has all the niceness and secret sauce of Pages; ferdaze WYSIWYG. In fact, IMO, this will destroy Dreamweaver and the like on the Mac OS, there simply is no reason to use one of those editors.
One ultra gripe: the space that your .Mac account alots is meager! ~500 Mb?? Come on! Considering Gmail drops you 2+ Gigs of space for free and a Pro Flickr account gives you 2 Gigs per month, this seems like the uberlowball. Are they realy on that tight of a margin?? Space is cheap, peeps.
Google Video redux
So there is lots of info out there about the new Google Video. Although it doesn't address any of the major navigation and classification issues I was discussing earlier, it is much cooler.
The ability for instance to add to site ...
... is pretty big pimpin'. I am sure that the MySpace crowd will *lover* it.
hello, NSA (I expect I will now be spied on wantonly), the POTUS has proven once again that he is a freaking spineless hack. Case in point:
President Bush yesterday made a raft of controversial recess appointments, including Julie L. Myers to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau at the Department of Homeland Security, in a maneuver circumventing the need for approval by the Senate.
Is there anyone out there who is not a right-wing pundit or a labotomized nutjob who thinks this is acceptable? Recess appointments should be used as emergency stopgaps when a time of crises neccessitates fast action. Although this is a time of crises, that crises has largely been caused by ShrubCo's contempt for advice and consent.
Google Video sucks right now. The only way to find anything is to know how to search for it. For instance there is a really funny video of some redneck surfing his truck into a telephone pole which I can no longer find because I don't know how to search for it! Darn!!
I had the realization earlier today that the core failing of GoogVid is that it lacks some form of tagging (read: folksonomy.) There should be a notion of "My Tags" and then something like "Other Peepls tags". Like a cross between flickr and del.icio.us style, so that I can navigate, search or tag things as I encounter them. This would make finding things a joy, and would provide a way for users to expand their access to videos that map to their interests.
What is your dangerous idea: 2006
I read a lot of people talking about how cool this is, and everyone seemed to blurbify their fave answer to the quesion, but I have to say, I was amazed at how interesting and inspiring this has been to read. I am only so far as page 3 of 12, and I am pretty damned riveted.
The article is a bit of a time commitment, but it reminds me most of being in college. Grab a bunch of hella smart people and surround yourself with them. What are they thinking about? Find out and run with something!
Interesting, that also makes me think of del.icio.us inbox which Kottke just posted about today as on of his 2005 favorites. I have a few people that I have set to pull into my inbox, most of them collegues, but he had a couple that really got me thinking, for instance Peter Merholz and Clay Shirky. A really good site would pair minds with their delicious links... this would enable exactly what I was referring to above.
The Edge Annual Question — 2006
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Todo: del.icio.us + Metamark|tinyurl userscript
This would be the pimpness: a userscript that would add the shortened url for all del.icio.us links. Should include the functionality on metamark, where the text field is listed with a "select" link next to it to facilitate selection and copy of the link.
New Year: Julien Fouet
New Year's Eve was pretty great for Sarah, ZZ and I. Rather than celebrating w/ a flute or two of bubbly at the stroke of midnight, SB and I decided 8pm would be a better call, as ZZ was asleep, and we could actually enjoy it. I had picked up a great bottle of Champagne, the real deal, straight out of France: Julien Fouet Cremant de Loire.
Neither SB nor I are really big on Champagne; in fact, we usually avoid it. This mostly stems from the wedding we attended walked to back in 1995. The trip back is a bit of a blur, but I think I fell in a ditch, and once we got home I spent the rest of the evening holding Sarah's hair back as she refunded about 3 bottles of bubbles. Blech.
Deciding to brave it this year, and showing the restraint of our years, we were both very pleasantly surprised. The flavors launch with butter and round out with crisp apple; not at all overpoweringly round or overly dry. I highly recommend the Cremant de Loire to anyone celebrating just about anything.
¶ 10:40 AM0 CommentsLinks to this post
