Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

Virb Invites

Okay my contest didn’t work out so well. Either a) no one’s interested in Virb.com, or b) I haven’t the readership to support a contest to give out invitations to it. The latter I can deal with, and completely understand. The hype surrounding Virb is such, though, that I would think anyone who’s at all interested in social networking, Web 2.0, independent music, new media or any other buzz word, would be interested in seeing Virb for themselves.

I can only conclude, then, that the cost is perceived as too great. Well, let me fix that: Want an invite to Virb? Just ask.

Update: Still have a bunch of invites, but I’m going to begin giving them away to people I know off the internets. Now or never, people!

Update 2: She lives! VIRB is now open to the public, so go signup, add me as a friend, and commit myspacecide.

23-Feb 2007

She Said Yes! (Again)

Valentine’s Day came and went, and this time I didn’t let it get by. Actually, I was determined I wasn’t going to strike out this year. I made reservations at the Melting Pot’s Seattle location … nine months ago.

Well, needless to say, since Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday (the same night the church hosts mid-week services), we didn’t make it, and ended up giving our reservations away to some friends. It was alright though, because the restaurant had an opening the next night, Thursday, at about the same time. I nabbed those reservations and we ended up having a wonderful time – and paid probably half what our friends were forced to. (You see, restaurants typically limit their menus and drive up their prices for the lovers’ holiday. Suckers in love, I guess.)

A lost memory

It was somewhere in between the cheese fondue appetizer and homemade seasoned vegetable bouillon that I realized our engagement website was no longer live. The site told the story of how I proposed on Valentine’s Day 2004, as recalled by The Wife (then “Casey Maddox”), and it including video clips of the entire event. It had been forgotten about during a service switch, I think.

I built the site for family and friends across the country who hadn’t been able to participate in the engagement festivities – the after-party or announcement at church – where the story was verbally told and the video shown. As per the nature of the internets, though, the site got picked up on some popular social blogs. What resulted were some interesting off-site (and off-color) conversations about us and our lifestyle. Whatever. We paid it no mind.

But I still get about one or two referrals to the non-existant site per week. The poor souls who click through only get my homepage … Well, not anymore.

Relive the moment

This past weekend I decided I’d resurrect the site, clean it up, give it a fresh look, and relaunch it. The Wife was gracious enough to permit me to post the video clips on YouTube so we may save bandwidth, and ensure a more compatible deployment across OSes and browsers.

In fact, I just checked out the site using my Wii and the beta Opera browser – the video loads and plays just fine. Ah! Geekout moment! Embedded Flash video; on my TV; on a website; on my Wii!

Originally the site included some photos and goofy accent graphics (like a Starbucks cup), but I opted against including them in this version. I wanted the story itself to be the main focus. I used Roger Johansson’s automatic pullquote JavaScript (the same one I use on this site), and selected a few of The Wife’s more pertinent statements to feature.

Previously the story was broken up across multiple pages, and laid out using nested tables and inline CSS. Ew! Now the site semantically correct in terms of the markup, and hopefully more lasting because of that. It’s also limited to just one document/page. We’ll see how this goes. Hopefully, since the blog revolution, users have been (re)taught that scrolling is a permitted behavior, and perfectly acceptable. The story is short enough that limiting it to just one page seemed reasonable.

Feedback welcome

I didn’t enable any form of commenting system for the site. The reason for that is mostly because it would’ve taken another level of attention, which translates into another few hours of work. Instead, I opted to direct readers back to this entry. Hopefully this serves a bigger purpose, though, and users become more informed as to the context of the story before commenting. I wholeheartedly welcome feedback, but I’d prefer if comments were made by people who know me as more than “the guy in the story”.

So, without further ado, I present the resurrected engagement story website: She Said Yes!

19-Feb 2007

Show Me The VIRB: Knock

Update: This contest is dead. I’m just giving away invites now. Aren’t I nice?

Welcome to the first installment of the Show Me The VIRB contest! Very similar to Joshua’s deal, the rules are simple: Show me the verb I want to see, and I give you the VIRB you want to see.

This week’s theme: Knock.

Instructions

1. Snap a photo illustrating the contest verb.

   Be creative. It could be you or someone you know performing said verb, or could be the verb from a different perspective.

2. Upload the photo to Flickr or your photo-sharing website of choice.

3. Link to your submission in the comments.

   Use Textile’s linking formatting if you want. Example: “Here’s my submission”:http://www.flickr.com/your/photo/url

The top three submissions will get an invite to VIRB, as well as fame and glory and their wildest dreams come true¹. Judging of the submissions will be done by yours truly and The Wife.

If, for some reason, you don’t have the means to take a digital photo, and/or upload it, you can substitute a word-only, essay answer. You’re required to replace a verb (or number of verbs) from a famous quotation with the theme verb from the contest. For instance:

To knock, or not to knock. That is the question.

… only it better be more creative than that.

Guidelines

No offensive or otherwise un-funny submissions will be accepted. The contest will conclude next Sunday, February 25th. If VIRB.com should happen to go live in the middle of the contest … no hard feelings. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited.

¹ I am not responsible for the fame and glory and wildest dreams coming true.

17-Feb 2007

Define “Support for”

Apple has just released an update for iTunes. In the release notes it touts its new “support for the Second Generation iPod shuffle”. I find that interesting because iTunes 7.0.1 (the previous version) supports my new shuffle just fine – everything besides the color.

So, what would you expect “support for” to mean? Yeah me too. But apparently it doesn’t. Reepicheep is still silver.

16-Feb 2007