Jamison "JAK" Kissh

I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?

Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.

Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.

I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.

I know it’s a little late and WhatTheFont! has been around for quite some time now however I felt it was necessary to share my positive experience with it.

Earlier today I was charged with remaking my companies current logo (which was created before my time) and to do so while trying to preserve a similar style. I had no clue where to even start and didn’t quite have the time to page through all the different fonts that I had to chose from. This is when I turned to ILoveTypography.com to hopefully find a solution, I did – WhatTheFont! The web based application uploaded the current banner from our site where it split it into pieces and I had to help it figure out which letters were which. The application then processed for a couple of seconds and returned three possible answers. The first of which was some form of University. After searching the computer on which the logo originated I found that University Regular was indeed a font that was installed. After a few minutes in Illustrator it turned out to be the exact font. Long story short, WhatTheFont! worked well and saved the day!

I encourage you to test out WhatTheFont! at WhatTheFont.com

Well I’ve been using a small bank out of my hometown called Thomaston Savings Bank and don’t get me wrong they’re great but some of their policies are a bit strange. When they started adding these new policies I knew it was time for me to pick up my money and leave. After talking to some friends of mine it looked like switching to Bank of America was the best choice for me. I’d just like to outline my experience with them.

My first observation when going to Bank of America was that it really and truly is a corporation, not as much like the bank I’d been used to. However I was able to deal with this. I was sent over to a very friendly customer service rep who set up my new accounts for me. During this time I was pleasently surprised since I’m only 18 I was still treated with the dignity and respect that someone walking in with $1 million would.

The first huge plus for me was that Thomaston Savings Bank (TSB) had a very strict funds availability policy which kept funds from deposited checks from being available for at LEAST 3 business days. When I got to Bank of America I learned that checks or cash deposited before 8pm that night are posted the same day… a huge improvement. The next plus for me being a web guy myself was their online banking. TSB’s online banking was functional yet outdated, Bank of America’s online banking blows TSB’s out of the water.

All in all I’ve been a huge fan of Bank of America, stay tuned for my feelings on American Express.

I was having issues with burning my legs with my MacBook Pro when it’s plugged in. So a quick google search found me smcFanControl that from my experience so far helps significantly took the temperature from a scorching 95 degress to a more comfortable 85 degrees. The software allows configurable profiles based on charging, simply being plugged, or running off battery. I’m currently running my fans very fast for charging since I’m often attempting to use my comptuer as it’s charging. Overall I’d say snag it if you’re running an Intel mac.

Get it here

Edit: I’ve got to just express my amazement for this program, normally my computer would be cooking right now as it sits here charging but running the fans at nearly double of the normal speed really and truly helps. The case temperature is a mere 76 degrees with the fans running at 4880 RPMs.

Well I was at work today attempting to upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 beta 3 without the nice automatic upgrade and I ended up failing to get it to work because well frankly, Windows hosting sucks. I finally got it to work after a while though, it took some playing around with some Plesk, IIS, AND Windows Explorer. I’ve got to say that hosting Wordpress on an Apache platform is a much easier since all it takes is setting the permissions to 777 for the necessary folders. I really hate windows hosting, not only is it slow it’s tough to launch anything.

Yesterday afternoon a handful of people I know headed over to the XL Center in Hartford for this year’s tour of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This year’s tour wasn’t all that different from last year’s except for the fact that it’s still amazing with the awesome moving trusses, second elevating stage, and incredible sound.

As always the technical background of this show amazed me. The sound was great and this year with my awesome floor seats (thank you TSO fan club) we had an awesome view of the stage in the middle of the arena and only 20 rows back from the stage. The pyrotechnics of this show were absolutely amazing, and color changing!

At the end of the show my friend and I headed over to the “booth” where we began talking to the guy running the moving rigging. From talking to him we learned a few neat facts:

1. The show weighs 137,000 pounds I believe he said
2. The show comes on 16 tractor trailers
3. The stuff they use to run the moving trusses is pretty cool
4. The sound board wasn’t anything spectacular
5. The load in time for the show is 6 hours (that includes testing, not sure about inspections though)
6. The load out time is a meager 2.5 hours

All in all, it was a great show and this year I even learned a few things. If you’ve never seen TSO get out to see them NOW.

Last night I realized that I’d managed to send/receive 2061 or 1561 over my texting plan. This works out to $156.10 in overages, which is still better than the $312.20 I had originally thought I owed thanks to the rep at the Verizon store.

When I got home I decided that I’d better call customer service so after figuring out the stupid pin on the account I spoke to a very nice woman who amazingly didn’t have any accent (I believe VZW’s call centers are on US soil) so that was already a plus. The woman stepped me through my actual usage and corrected me about the $0.20/message or $0.10/message deal. Then I quickly said that we had tried to back date the new 5000 message plan but that we couldn’t do it since my billing period ended yesterday. To make a long story short the woman ended up crediting our next bill for $136.10 and making the old bill act as if we were using the 5k plan for $20. Thus the reason we only got $136.10 back.

In short, I now love Verizon Wireless even more than I did before!

Although I have not had a chance to play around with the new Xbox 360 dashboard or “experience” it seems really nice and reminds me of what a console with the capabilities of the Xbox should look like work like. It’s very easy and almost rivals the simplistic and minimalistic design of Apple’s Front Row. I’ve got to say, Microsoft did a very nice job and I’m very impressed. I just hope they keep up the good work.

Now I truely can’t wait to get Call of Duty

I’ll have a more in depth review of the dashboard coming out later in the week, look for it.

A review of Get Smart

Well since I like this post and I lost it I’m going to try and recreate it.

I’ve been using Google Chrome at work for about a week now on my pc there and I’ve gotta say, it’s awesome. I switched to chrome from Firefox 3 and the difference in load time of the browser alone is amazing. Chrome seems to be much lighter than Firefox although I have not tested this theory. The browser seems to fit into Vista better as well, it uses nice smooth transitions when opening/closing tabs as well as a nice little speed dial style new tab window. It’s a much cleaner looking browser than Firefox and even Microsoft’s own IE which you would expect to fit into their own operating system. I’m going to post a review a little later when I really become aclimated to the browser.

I do have one last thing to say though, it needs to come to mac os x… now!