I have new pictures up! Check ‘em out.
So a buddy of mine posted his desktop. Well I have decided to do the same.
But first, a little about my system. My desktop is a 24″ iMac (Late 2008, if you care) with a 22″ Westinghouse monitor that is directly to the left. (Yes it is plugged in, and is a second monitor, even.) I am kind of a desktop elitist. There are certain things I want in a desktop image, things like Simplicity, The Stuff on the Right, Imagination, and Striking. Now in this particular iteration of my desktop, I broke one of my own rules. The main screen is all in the center. Shame on me. On to the images..
My main monitor..
My secondary monitor..
Notice the Penny Arcade theme? (If you read PA, you’ll understand, If you know who PA are, but don’t follow, go, start, you won’t be sorry.) If have no idea who PA is, I am sorry. Believe me when I tell you your life is less for it.
If you look closely, you will see in my menu bar (from left to right), Dropbox, Quicksilver, iScrobbler, Adium, Time machine, Scripts Menu, iStat Menus, and Spotlight.
Adium is in my Dock AND my menu bar, only because if you remove the icon with the .plist hack, you get rid of the menu as well (the File, Edit, View, etc., which includes the Options, and we can’t have that, now can we.).
I also use Twitterrific to keep up with Twitter. I like it a lot, a whole lot. If you Twitter, (Tweet?) look into it.
Raise your hand if you live under a rock, with no contact to the outside world via the internet, television, or smoke signal. No one? Okay, then you all most likely have heard of the Disney – Marvel buyout. The one that cost Disney $4 billion dollars, and cost Marvel any hope of future innovation. I hope I am wrong.
Call me cynical if you will but I don’t see this as a good thing for Marvel. You might be have read about how Marvel gets to use the Disney Marketing Machine. I think the DMM will have no idea how to advertise Marvel correctly. I am 31 years old, and the last time Disney marketed to me was Aladdin. I was 14. I saw The Lion King, two years later, but I don’t recall any of their advertising being pointed at me. I don’t actually recall seeing and of the advertising at all, actually. As some one who love himself a good comic book (Be it the Ultimate Universe, or Civil War) I just don’t see how the DMM will work for comics that aren’t.., well, Archie Comics.
I think the future Spider-Man, X-Men, and Fantastic Four cartoons will have the last once of dignity FINALLY removed. (Seriously, I am afraid we will see Spider-Man start to sing ‘Paint with all the Colors of the Wind’, or worse yet we might find out that Wilson Fisk killed Bambi’s mom.)
BUT there is hope. Look at the Disney/Pixar deal. Disney is essentially Pixar’s distributor (Disney gets to put it’s name ON the movies, but in truth that’s all the influence Disney get’s) and advertiser. (I might have fudged a bit earlier, I loved WALL-E’s ads, as well as Up’s). You can also look at the deal between Disney and Studio Ghibli deal. Literally all Disney does (and this is more work than you’d think) is localize, and distribute the Studio Ghibli films. The advertising is almost non existent. That means that Marvel might get left alone. Hopefully that means Marvel will get left alone. The were doing alright on their own, if you ask me.
The other thing that scares me about the deal is that the big events like Civil War won’t happen anymore. More-so now, than before Marvel is beholden to the bottom line. You might wonder why I use Civil War as the event that might not have happened. I can’t imagin Mark Millar went into Joe Quesada’s office and said ‘I am gonna fuck your world up’ and Joe said ‘Okay,’
I bet that was the hardest sell ever in Marvel. No other huge crossover in Marvel History had the implications on EVERYONE that Civil War did. (Yes I know there was Mutant Massacre, but who did that affect the Avengers, or Spider-Man, or Ghost Rider, or.. you get the point) As such it could have gone horribly wrong and lost a bazillion dollars. As it happens it didn’t it was fantastic and generated a bazillion dollars. BUT selling that much havoc to the board of directors, or whoever has that control now, will be nearly impossible.
Now I hope I am wrong, I hope that Marvel DOES benefit from the DMM, and the dedicated television stations, and the movie making machine (Has anyone ever done the math on how frequently Disney drops a new movie?). I hope Disney does let Marvel stay Marvel. My gut (who has no tract record to speak of) tells me it is the end of Marvel as I know and love it.
For now, make mine Marvel, and Excelsior!
So I got an iPhone. It is wonderful. I am actually posting this from it. I am still looking for apps on it, but in a great many ways this replaces a laptop. Facebook, banking, chat, email, webbrowsing… I’m sure thres more, and I will go knot it more later, but this is mostly a test of the worpress app.
As you may know I am an ASP.NET developer, a junior one no doubt, but I’m learning.
The .NET framework is on version 3.5, and there was at least 1 version of ASP before the .NET framework ‘revolutionized’ the way we make websites on/with MS products. But the MVC (model – view – controller) plug-in/framework/whatever is only on version 1. Why is this? And more importantly, why is it not more widely advertised?
I was having some serious issues trying to enforce company ‘best practices’ in my web application. (We are a group of computer programmers, and in theory we should be able to code for the internet using the same methodology). Basically best practices means you need the user-interface (UI) layer, the database (db), the data model, and the business object (BO).
Well as it turns out, MS kinda builds some of that in to ASP.NET Web Forms (the not MVC part is Web Forms) but if you should dare deviate from the MS way at all, nothing works right, from persistence, to sorting, to authorization. And finding information that is timely and useful is very difficult. (The problems I do solve, I try to post here in hopes that the next person who needs that question answered finds it here.) What the MVC framework does is enforce those best practices, by design. All I had to do was add my database and *poof* my 4 layered approach to my project literally falls into place.
Basically the data model is the M, the UI is V, and the BO is.. well the C gets the BO, and tells the V what M to display. In reality the BO is one a layer between the MVC and the db, and the C just returns things like urls, and does some validation. Really the C is the bouncer.
I will go into more detail later on, I just wanted to do my part to get the word out about ASP.NET MVC.