I know I haven’t been around in a while. I swear I’ve been thinking about you all the time — about all the things we’ll do together and the difference we’ll make. It’s gonna be great, I promise. It’s just that I’ve been so busy trying to make a good life for us that I haven’t been able to spend enough time with you.

I even have a brand new design for you to try on (once I finish it), and some new stuff to put in your Work section. I know how you love it when I put stuff in your Work section. If all goes according to plan, we should be together again soon.

I’m not sure how many books I read in 2008, but it’s somewhere in the 2-3 range. That’s just a ballpark figure.

I’d really like to be reading more and the 2009 TBR (To Be Read) Challenge sounds like it might help me do just that.

I think what I’m supposed to do is make a list of 12 books before January 1st that I’m going to read in 2009. I can read one a month or I can read them all in one month, as long as they’re all read by this time next year.  I already have like 100 books on my Amazon Wishlist, so this should be pretty easy (the making the list part).

My List

• Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
• World War Z – Max Brooks
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets – David Simon
• Generation Kill – Evan Wright
• The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
• Return to Mars – Ben Bova
• Great Shark Hunt (The Gonzo Papers vol. 1) – Hunter S. Thompson
• Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust – Richard Rhodes
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About: A Novel – Mil Millington
• The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

The challenge also allows for an alternate list of 12 more titles that can be substituted for any of the books on my list.

Alternate List

• Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army – Jeremy Scahill
• Sentenced to Prism – Alan Dean Foster
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
• Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
• Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain
• 79 Short Essays on Design – Michael Bierut
• The Timewaster Letters – Robin Cooper
• The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
• Microserfs – Douglas Copeland
• It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be – Paul Arden
• In the Event of My Untimely Demise – Brian Sack
• Band of Brothers – Stephen E. Ambrose

“24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.”

Computer components get hot. That’s why god invented fans and heat sinks. They move air through the case and away from the hot PC parts. Bob’s your uncle.

Then some nerd somewhere decided that air wasn’t good enough and invented the water cooling system, which I guess moves cold water through some tubes or something. Apparently it’s better than air.

And what could be better than cold water running through tubes? A WHOLE CASE FILLED WITH WATER!*

* OK, so it’s not really water. Obviously that wouldn’t work at all. Whatever it is, it’s a liquid and you can submerge computer components in it. And that’s just ridiculous.

I for one think this looks pretty damn good.

OK, so it’s not that bad. It just doesn’t get updated very often.

There are several reasons for my absence of late and they’re all perfectly valid excuses so I don’t want any lip from either of you (my 2 loyal readers):

1. Work.

   Contrary to popular belief, you don’t automatically become a millionaire when you sign a record deal. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. I like to compare it to taking out a multi-million dollar loan that you don’t get to spend on what you want but you’re still responsible for paying back.

   Anyway, the point is, I have a “real” job these days and its not one where I can sit around and blog all day and get paid for it. If I did there would be a lot more to read here, and a lot less going on here.

2. Other Work.

   In the interest of me having more money (so I can pay my bills and pay off this awesome couch I’m still paying for), I’ve taken on a few freelance jobs here and there. These things take time. Time that I have to find outside of my full time job and the next few items on this list.

3. Sinch.

   In case you live under a rock that hasn’t moved in almost 14 years, you probably know that I play the drums in a band called Sinch. No we haven’t broken up. And no we’re probably not playing in Germany, France, Australia, South Africa or anywhere else any time soon. What we are doing is working on a new album. Currently in the writing/pre-production stage, we’re getting together a couple times during the week and a couple weekends a month.

   That’s another 4-8 hours a week I’m busy “not-blogging.”

4. Unnamed New Music Project

   I recently decided to fill out the last remaining bits of my free time with something a little more productive than dicking around on Facebook. In other words, I joined a new band.

   So far there’s a few songs coming together but no name for the band or any plans beyond “write more songs.” I’ll let you know when that changes. Whatever the name ends up being, it should probably be short because we’ll have to follow it with something like:

   “Featuring members of Sinch, Brass, Engine We’re a Forest & Moth Meets Machine”

5. Life

   On top of all that, I actually like to find a little time to go out and interact with other people. I know, it’s a crazy idea. But if I’m gonna “poke” someone I’d rather do it in person.

I could actually add more to this list, but there are 10 other things I’m supposed to be doing right now, so I’ll leave the excuse count at 5 for now. Don’t worry, I’ll have more excuses for why I’m not blogging soon.

A couple days ago Google released the demo of their new browser, called Chrome. I downloaded it and tried it out (it’s Windows only for now, but Mac and Linux versions are on the way), and it’s not only the fastest browser I’ve ever used but one of the fastest applications in general.

It literally starts up in 2 seconds (or less). Only the built in Windows accessories like Notepad and Calculator load this fast (for me anyway). Firefox takes at least 3-5 seconds to start up and then another 3-5 (or more if it’s trying to piss me off) to get Gmail to load.

Chrome has some innovative new features like tabs that run independent of each other (so a site can only crash a tab, not the whole browser) and a really cool “new tab” page that shows your most frequently visited sites, recent bookmarks and even recently closed tabs in case you closed something by accident. But it’s also very lean in the features department. The interface is very minimalistic. The tab bar and title bar have been combined and the address bar has the bare minimum of features you would expect: back/forward, reload, bookmark, address field, page options menu and settings menu. And that’s it.

You can’t add plugins or themes and there’s really very little in the way of customization. It’s meant to be a simple, fast and stable browser that just gets out of your way.

It’s still in beta so some sites might not work, especially ones with a lot of Javascript and Ajax going on. Google created en entirely new Javascript engine called V8 so there’s still a lot of bugs to work out. But Google apps like Gmail and Reader are lightning fast. If you’re like me and have Gmail open all the time, you can even create an “application shortcut” for it that will open it in Chrome, with no interface at all, as if it’s a standalone app.

For more about the story behind Chrome, why Google built it and the technology they used, check out Google Chrome: The Book (illustrated by Scott McCloud).

OK, so maybe I could live without them. I’d go so far as to say that I could probably live without Firefox itself, but why should I?

It’s a great browser out of the box, and the fact that anyone with the skills can write extensions for it, probably makes it the browser with the most features anywhere (I haven’t counted but look at the amount of addons there are).

These 4 extensions add features that I’ve come to rely on pretty much daily in designing and developing websites. I become so used to them that it’s only when I load up IE 7 (or if I’m trying to drive myself insane, IE 6) that I really miss them. If you spend any amount of time building websites, you should definitely have these 5 addons installed.

Firebug

Firebug is basically an HTML/CSS viewer and JavaScript debugger that integrates into Firefox. But it’s the way that it integrates that makes it so useful. Just click the Firebug icon in the status bar or hit F12 and a window opens showing you a live view of the HTML source and CSS for the page you’re on. The HTML is in a tree structure allowing you to expand and collapse elements to easily find what you’re looking for. Or just click “Inspect” and click directly on the element you want. Firebug will highlight the HTML and show you a cascading list of any styles that are being applied.

All of this stuff is live too, meaning you can change anything you want in the Firebug window and see your changes on the page right away. This is really helpful when you’re building a site and need to tweak width/height/padding/margin values or you’re trying to track down any one of the infamous IE 6 issues. Instead of making changes to the HTML/CSS files, uploading and reloading the page, you can work right in Firebug until you get it right.

Web Developer

Before I discovered Firebug, this was my #1 must-have extension. It does some of the same things that Firebug does, albeit in a different way. For example you can outline specific elements on the page, in whatever colors you want. This can be helpful to see how different block level elements are positioned or to track down all instances of a certain tag. But without the live DOM view and CSS property view, it’s become a less essential part of my tool set.

But it does have some other features that make it worth the download. The things I find myself using the most are:

Disable/Enable CSS – You can do a lot of cool stuff with CSS but you also have to face the fact that some people are going to view your site on a device that may not support CSS like the modern browsers do. With one click you can disable all styles and see what your content looks like in the default rendering.

Disable/Enable JavaScript – For the same reasons as above your sites really need to be accessible with JavaScript disabled (the big exception being complex web apps that just aren’t possible without it). It’s nice being able to toggle JavaScript on and off without going deep into the options menu.

Display Ruler – This is a pretty basic feature but one that I use all the time. When the ruler is turned on, you can click and drag directly on a website and quickly get a measurement. Before this kind of tool the only option was to take a screen shot, open up Photoshop and do the measuring there. Combined with the live view in Firebug this can be a really quick way to tweak a CSS layout or track down a problem with your width/height/margin/padding values.

View Generated Source – Sometimes View Source just isn’t enough. If you have a lot of JavaScript that is modifying the DOM after it’s loaded, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without a feature like this. Granted, Firebug shows updates to the DOM, but if you just want a quick copy of the source after some JavaScript event, this gives it to you.

And that’s really just scratching the surface. Other features include HTML/CSS/JS/508/WAI validation, linearizing of the page content, and the ability to display pretty much any information you might need (IDs, classes, anchors, block dimensions, stack levels, etc). At the very least it’s worth playing around with to see if it fits into your work flow.

ColorZilla

This addon is pretty simple compared to the first two, but just as important. Basically it gives you an eyedropper for the browser, which is a tool any designer will be familiar with. If you want to know the hex code for a particular color on a site, you just click the ColorZilla icon and then directly on the color. Right-clicking on the icon then gives you the option of copying the color to the clipboard in a number of formats — #000000, rgb(0,0,0), R:0, G:0, B:0.

Double clicking on the icon opens up the color picker which lets you choose whatever color you want from a number of different palettes and get RGB values in whatever format you need. All in all a great tool for anyone working with color when building a website.

Dummy Lipsum

Anyone designing websites knows that you usually don’t have all the content up front. So when you’re creating designs, you need to put a lot of “placeholder” text and images to show how things are going to be formatted. One of the industry standards for placeholder text is the “Lorem ipsum” text, or Greek text.

Dummy Lipsum gives you quick access to Greek text in whatever format you need. You can generate a certain number of paragraphs, words, bytes or lists and you can even generate the HTML needed to display it properly if you’re adding the dummy text directly to an actual web page.

Don’t worry. George Lucas is nowhere near this thing.

This is a fan video made by Mark Lucier and starring his two kids. I think it’s honestly better than Episodes 1, 2 and 3 combined.

via Laughing Squid

I’ve always had a weird fascination with anagrams. That is, words or phrases made by rearranging the letters in another word or phrase. For example, “santa” is an anagram of “satan.” That’s kind of a creepy example, but you get the point.

After coming up with such a brilliant name for my site, I figured it was a good candidate for the Internet Anagram Server (IAS). I put in “twenty ninth floor” and got a ton of stuff back. Unfortunately the IAS doesn’t know the meaning of the words so it just rearranges the letters in any way that will form other words. Most of them suck. But sometimes you get some good ones:

• Intently Froth Now
• Entity Flown North
• Rent Filthy Wonton
• Hefty Lint Not Worn
• Tiny Elf Not Thrown
• Horny Elf Wont Tint
• Thin Felon Wont Try
• Ninth Town To Flyer
• Tony Left Ninth Row
• Felt Thorny In Town
• Tin Tony Flew North

Now I’m not suggesting that these are hilarious or even funny at all. Just kind of interesting to me for some reason.

Does your name have any good ones? (You could use your full name, your company name, your stupid World of Warcraft character’s name, your imaginary girlfriend’s name, etc… you get what I’m saying.)Toss ‘em in the comments.