When my aunt, father and I decided that my grandfather – affectionately known as HAPPY – needed a new computer I immediately knew the Mini would be another great gift.

The first time around when Ashley unboxed her Mini I was a bit unprepared her reaction. This time I was more than ready to capture the hilarity that ensued.

Impressive Debuts

• Flobots
• The Black Ghosts
• MGMT grew on me. I didn’t like at first, glad I came back
• Justice
• The Asteroids Galaxy Tour first heard on the new iPod Video commercial

New To Me

Bands I got turned on to in 2008

• The Virgins – The Virgins
• Amy Winehouse – Back To Black

Established Awesomeness

Artists I listen to who put out strong albums in 2009.

• The Black Keys – Attack & Release, my vote for top album of 2008
• Beck – Modern Guilt
• We Are Scientists – Brain Thrust Mastery, sophomore release just as awesome as With Love and Squalor
• Radiohead – In Rainbows
• Thievery Corporation – Radio Retaliation
• Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul
• Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd., I’ll be first to admit I hated this album when it first came out. It completely lacked the energy and intensity that I loved in the first PATD album, but it grew on me over time. There are some excellent tracks on this disc.

The Best Tracks

Infinite Repeat

• The Tings Tings – “Shut Up And Let Me Go”
• MGMT – “Kids Oracular”
• Estelle – “American Boy Ft. Kanye West”
• Kings of Leon – “Sex On Fire”
• My Morning Jacket – “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Part 2″, best beginning and ending to a song released in ‘08
• Air France – “Collapsing At Your Doorstep”
• Justice – “Genesis”
• Grum – “Whoa”
• M83 – “Kim & Jesse”
• The Virgins – “Rich Girls”
• Hot Chip – “Ready For The Floor”
• Death Cab For Cutie – “I Will Possess Your Heart”
• Panic at the Disco – “Nine In The Afternoon”, best viewed here.
• Stars – “The Ghost Of Genova Heights”
• My Robot Friend – “Robot High School” (In Digital Form Remix
• Of Montreal – “Id Engager”

Best Albums of 2008

1 requirement – strong from start to finish, never skip a track.

• Beck – Modern Guilt
• The Black Ghosts – The Black Ghosts
• My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
• MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
• Kings of Leon – Only By Night
• M83 – Saturdays = Youth

Let Downs

• Cold War Kids – Loyalty To Loyalty, didn’t hold my attention
• The Dears – Missiles, totally changed their sound, no good tracks. Can’t keep members together: Wikipedia.
• Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs, same sound only, nothing new, not as good
• The Presets – Apocalypso, no stand out tracks like “Girl and the Sea” or “Steamworks” on their previous album.
• Ratatat – LP3, I falls way short compared to Classics
• Dungen – Tio Bitar, doesn’t compare to Ta Det Lungt
• Taproot – Our Long Way Home, doesn’t compare to their previous releases.
• Hot Chip – Made in the Dark, I had high expectations for this album because I played “Ready For The Floor” x 100000, but the rest of the album is meh.
• Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs, maybe I’m being harsh but I was looking for an album to rival Transatlanticism and never got it.

EPIC FAIL

• The Killers – Day & Age

I’m always waiting for The Killers to bring me back to the heyday of Hot Fuss. I always leave disappointed. On the first single “Human” Brandon Flowers asks “are we human or are we dancer” a play on a Hunter S Thompson proverb. What a stupid song. The horns in “I Can’t Stay” was horrid enough to stick hot needles through my ear drums. The Epic Failure of another piece of crap album by a band I once loved is enough to turn off the dial permanently. I am never listening to The Killers again. What an EPIC waste.

Best Concerts of 2008

• The Black Keys @ The Orpheium
• VAST @ Harper’s Ferry
• Ambulance LTD @ The Middle East
• Band of Horses @ The Paradise
• Rogue Wave @ The Paradise
• The Go! Team @ The Paradise

Best Compilations

• Lounge Anthology
• Indie Rock Playlists

Where Are They?

• The Avalanches – Air France reminded me of them
• Sean Lennon, 8 years between his debut (1998) and his sophomore release (2006), I’m not holding my breath
• Muse

Rediscovered

Back from the dead. Oldies but goodies.

• 311 – 311, I still could sing along with “T&P Combo”. That surprised the hell out of me.
• VAST
• Sean Lennon – Friendly Fire
• Second Coming – Second Coming, “Soft”

Music Resources

Give a listen to some of the artists/albums/tracks I’ve mentioned on these sites.

• Hypem, check out their 2008 Zeitgiest
• delicious.com/somedirection17/music
• The Yellow Stereo
• Aurgasm
• Last.fm
• Pitchfork Top Albums of 2008, Pitchfork Best Tracks of 2008
• Tune Muncher

What’d I miss? Let me know in the comments!

October pwns. The climate cools to the point where it’s actually enjoyable, leaves turn here in New England, baseball playoffs, and Halloween to name a bit of awesomeness. The lovely October holiday has kept a roof over my head since I graduated from WPI, minus a short stint distracting tweens.

On the eve of October, it’s worth mentioning that if you work with websites that spike ginormously in a short amount of time that up-time is critical. Each minute of downtime can have huge revenue ramifications.

At Fright Catalog I employed a free way of instantly being alerted via txt message if any of our sites were struggling.

Montastic

Montastic is a free service that will constantly ping your domain and alert you via email when there is a problem. It’s rock solid and it just works.

Send a text to my iPhone

It took a bit of research to figure out which email address on AT&T worked with my iPhone but after testing out a few:

• phone#@mmode.com
• phone#@txt.att.com
• phone#@mms.att.com
• phone#@cingularme.com – works, but on it’s way out

I finally found a winner: phone#@txt.att.net (Thanks to Ryan for the update)

It’s not sexy but it will work as an email address that when emailed will send an MMS message to your iPhone.

I’ve seen the recently popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com advertise uptimeparty.com. They’ll let you monitor 1 site for free, but otherwise you pay. Montastic does the same job and it’s free, so it makes a great alternative.

Montastic has helped me sleep easy many-a-night if we hit some up-time snags earlier that day. It could easily be used for your own personal blog as well.

Luckily I have an awesome sister who works in design and is good with Illustrator – which I am definitely not. Thanks to my sister Ryanne, I was able to go from a concept:

To the final design:

She finally helped me get it right. All that’s left is to finally get my blog design in order. It’s due for a refresh. Let me know what you think.

Check out the Upcoming Event. Sign up sooner than later, as of this writing there were only about 20 slots left!

I’ll be talking about how I’ve used jQuery in some of my development projects and some tricks and best practices I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll also be talking about degradation, progressive enhancement and (time permitting) discuss how jQuery’s Plugin architecture lets small teams do a lot with little.

Update

The talk was a great success and I had a great time. I’ve posted my slides: jQuery Best Practices. Much thanks goes to the Betahouse for hosting the Refresh Boston event.

As well as the accompanying demos on Progressive Enhancement:

• jQuery Rating
• Toggle-able Forms

My Situation

I live with my girlfriend in a brownstone near Cleveland Circle in Brighton. She recently got into an MBS Program at Tufts Medical School. We are looking to relocate for these reasons:

1. So she can have an easy commute to school.
2. We’re tired of our permanently dirty apartment. (It’s old, small, and shitty)
3. We’ve outgrown living amongst loud college kids.
4. We just need more space.

A Computer Nerds Approach

I didn’t really know exactly where to start looking. It really came down to location, location, location. We had a couple of prerequisites:

1. We didn’t want to live in a small, old place again.
2. We didn’t have a very large rental budget, one of us is after all going to be a full time student.
3. We need a 2 bedroom, no if-ands-or-buts. Both for my home office (I work from home everyday) and so Ashley can have space to do her school work.
4. 2 bathrooms would be ideal. Anyone that’s ever shared a bathroom with a girl knows this!
5. Safety, I don’t want to have to worry about her walking home from the train at night.
6. We need T access.
7. Hoping to avoid a 9/1 move-in at all costs.
8. Hiring movers (it suuuuuuucked to move into the 3rd floor on 9/1 without movers, never again).
9. Parking for my car.
10. Ideally we’d get a modern apartment. (the opposite of old and dirty)

Most of all you have to know what you want. Make sure you’re very specific, have an ideal picture of what you want and a less ideal one that you would settle for as a backup.

Where

Ashley needs T access for school. Namely Orange Line access to the New England Medical Center Station stop.

I used a couple of handy tools to figure out where we could live:

Google Earth

This was a great tool to figure out the where. I needed easy access to the T stop, using Google Earth while overlaying

Layers » Places of Interest » Transportation » Subway,Rail,Tram + Bus

• Service Nearby – MBTA Transport Availability
• Trip Planner – To Calculate Commutes

My focus was on the T and Ashley’s commute. Then, I could find apartments surrounding T stops. I got together a list of likely candidates:

Red Line

• Porter Square
• Harvard Square
• Central Square
• Kendall Square
• Broadway Station
• Andrew Square

Green Line

• Reservoir
• Beaconsfield
• Brookline Hills
• Brookline Village
• Longwood

Orange Line

• Sullivan Square Station
• Wellington Station
• Malden Center Station

Living near any of these T stops would give her about a 1/2 hr commute or less. Luckily most of the train lines converge and intersect close to the NE Medical Center stop (pic).

Use Craigslist and PWN it

Our lease is up 9/1 so we started hunting in May – this turned out to be a bit too early. Hardly anything on Craigslist of quality was available for that move-in date. I also wanted to avoid moving on 9/1 because it’s the absolute worst day to move in Boston. Often renters have to give at least 60 days notice that they will not renew their lease. I didn’t start to see quality apts for 9/1 till after the July 4th weekend.

I looked at alternates like oodle, and kahoots but CraigsList was the best game in town.

The best strategy is to use all the tools available so you won’t miss any opportunities of finding a great place.

Use Craigslist RSS Feeds + NetNewsWire (or some RSS reader derivative)

1. Download NetNewsWire. It’s Free.
2. Do a search on craigslist. At the bottom you’ll see an RSS link.
3. Load it into NetNewsWire, let your apartments come to you.
4. I decided on a couple of very specific metrics
   • 2 Bedrooms, Minimum 1300 (no dumps), Maximum 1600, Must Have A Picture, Search
   • Sample Link: http://boston.craigslist.org/search/aap/gbs?bedrooms=2&maxAsk=1600&minAsk=1300&query=porter%20square&hasPic=1&format=rss
   • For each “query” I chose all of the previous T stops that I wanted to be located near. query=porter%20square, query=wellington, etc.
   • Edit each query string and load them up in NetNewsWire, be sure to replace spaces, ” “, with the url encoded form, “%20″.
5. The Net Is Cast
6. Live in NetNewsWire until you find apartments worth following up on, mark those posts as flagged.
7. Call realtors in batch once a day from your flagged posts.
8. Schedule ongoing appointments. I used Google Calendar with Text Message Reminders to keep things organized.

Mash it up with cribq, HousingMaps, listpic

Sage Advice

• Only look at places with pictures, if it sounds good but doesn’t have one, request one. Don’t waste your time and the realtors’ otherwise.
• Go with your gut. If your alarms are going off even if it seems like a great deal just back away.
• Make sure you won’t get gouged on heat. Look at how the apartment is heated. Oil is bad, electric or gas is better. H/HW means heat and hot water are included, double bonus. There’s no reason to freeze your butt off during the winter because your heating bill is $400/mo. Avoid this mistake.
• Ask about laundry facilities.
• If a map location on Craigslist isn’t given, ask for the address. If they won’t tell you, ask for the cross street. Searching “Strathmore Rd at Chestnut Hill Ave Brighton, MA” on Google Maps will give you the cross street near my Brighton Apt.

Resources

• Google Maps – check the street view before going to see a place to make sure it’s a quality neighborhood.
• Walkscore – whats around the area?
• Find a good realtor on Yelp. Reviews are your friend.
• Safety – IncidentLog, SpotCrime
• Hack Attack Apartment Hunting 101

Results

I ended up only going to see 3 different places. I got lucky, but I also was very specific in what I was looking for and I saw hundreds of places (online) in the process. The few I followed up with had a very good chance of being the place I wanted because it met all of my prerequisites. We ended up finding a great place right on the Orange Line that met our requirements. Since the apartment has no current tenant we set a move-in date of 8/15, avoiding the 9/1 hassle which also made it much easier to find movers. Hopefully once we’re moved in I will be able to post a followup on Moving Day and The New Place.

I’ve been with Sprint since 2005, before that I had Nextel (which was later bought by Sprint). We got the phones for a now extinct development company I ran with my buddy Dan.

On 7/11/08 during the iPhone craziness I logged onto my Sprint account and saw you could check your end date. I’ve been lusting for an iPhone for quite some time and the 3G release broke the metaphorical camel’s back. Here’s a transcript of my session with Sprint on 7/11 for your entertainment.

If you read that transcript you would think that the issue was resolved and they rolled back my service so I wasn’t required to keep my contract until 12/23/2008 right? You’d be mistaken.

Today I had a followup conversation, just to validate my success getting my plan rolled back. What I learned was this: THEY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT effective 8/1/2008. Hole in one Sprint.

I’m very frustrated I lost the text conversation from today because I tried to view the frame source and Sprint knocked me out. I was speaking to a friendly fellow named "Oliver". Note: a text based online support allows for easy outsourcing. There were some good quotes like:

Oliver:

you line is cancelled. did you pay the $200 cancellation fee?

Me:

I NEVER SAID TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT

And when I said "hell no" I got this prompt reply:

To ensure that we have a productive chat session, I ask that you please refrain from using profane/vulgar language during our chat. Thank you in advance.

You’d think I said something like "Suck My Ass Sprint" which upon reflection, might not have been such a bad idea.

Needless to say my tenure as a Sprint Customer is coming to a close. Unfortunately Sprint-Really-Sucks.com was already taken. I might’ve been able to capitalize on Sprints cesspool service for profit, maybe I still will!

Maybe I should look into this lawsuit.

I’ll change my strategy and try again, this time following this great advice.

UPDATE 7/20

I was so livid with Sprint on Friday (7/18) that I got an iPhone that very day, it’s badass. I used this service to check availability. The whole process of buying the phone (16GB Black), transferring my number, and taking calls took a total of 15 minutes. A far cry of the trials and frustrations I heard from people who waited in line and got it on 7/11. This phone kicks ass. I’m still figuring out my way around it, but as of right now I’m very happy I jumped ship.

IN OTHER NEWS

My old phone is up on eBay the sale of which should put a good dent in my cancellation fee from Sprint. Send the link to someone you hate that has Sprint.

UPDATE 7/28

My HTC Mogul sold on eBay Saturday. The final price was $183.90 + $15.95 shipping = $199.85. Total shipping costs were $12.10 to ship via USPS which leaves me with $187.75 total for resale of my HTC Mogul phone.

The Sprint cancellation fee is $200. So it essentially cost me $12.25 to up and leave Sprint. For all the headaches and stress they caused they should be paying me to leave **them** in my opinion.

Another thing that made it so much easier on the wallet was that my company is paying for my new iPhone. I love my job. All is well that ends well.

Which lets me know what tunes I burnt out on last year.

It’s a vicious cycle.

The trend is over with but I couldn’t help to submit this picture this morning when I stumbled across it in iPhoto.