I think I may die. It is beautiful.

Apparently, according to the US Army, my beloved Twitter harbors terrorists:

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” according to the report.

My personal favorite is the grouping of vegetarians with terrorists, and the word “hacktivist”, which I’m almost certain was made up just for this report to make Twitter seem more menacing.

Tonight is a very important night for the country I live in - tonight, the United States will select our next president. This is not a decision to be taken lightly. Our candidates are two very different individuals who have very different ideas for our future - and the stakes have never been higher. The future of our economy, of net neutrality, of our international affairs, and much more will be decided on tonight. We must make the right choice, for failure to do so will have implications catastrophic.

Here’s just a quick wallpaper I made today of my personal choice for our next president, Barack Obama.

I think I may cry.

Think back to the year 2005. If you were in the market of an iPod back in those days, what, now counting the iPod minis, would you find? You’d find two  models – a 20GB, mainstream model, and a high end 60GB model for all of those music crazed enthusiasts who needed enough space to be able to drive from the east coast to the west without ever hearing the same song.

Now think a year ago. Your old, trusty, 20GB iPod you bought back in 2005 has seen better days. The screen is all scratched up, that beautiful aluminum backing’s got enough little dings and scratches to pass for a shiny brick, and maybe it’s just you, but the little thing doesn’t have the battery life that it used to. What, exactly, would you find just a year ago at an Apple store? That 20GB mainstream model’s been upped to a gigantic 80GB model, and for the same price as the old 20GB. What about those music freaks we were talking about earlier? Forget about that old 60GB, they’ve got a nice 160GB model that fits up to forty. hours. of music. That’s eight-hours short of two consecutive days of straight listening. And, unless you’re the type of person who listens to your iPod when you go to the bathroom, when you brush your teeth, and when you sleep, that’ll last far longer than two days.

Today, in 2008, things are admittedly a little different. The demand for the 160GB model, as it turned out, was ridiculously low – almost nobody, not even those enthusiasts, needed 160GB worth of music. Almost nobody. So they got rid of that model, while continuing the trend of upping the casual user’s iPod’s storage. Now, today, you could walk into the Apple Store and buy yourself a 120GB iPod for the same. exact. price. as a 20GB iPod just three years earlier. That’s a 6x storage increase with a 0 dollar price increase. That’s huge, and it really makes you think – in three years time, how many songs will you be able to fit in your pocket?

I’ll get to the point - I’ve been designing and coding webpages for a long time. Ever since I was really, really young - probably one of the only seven year olds who was more into webmastering and coding than he was playing little league baseball. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my experiences, it’s that, as a web designer (or maybe just a perfectionist?), I can not commit to a written release date.

Which is why, when I started the next “home made” Servo-Macs layout and website, I would not commit to a specific release date. To be as vague as possible, I simple stated that it ws “coming in 2008″. I still have enough faith in myself to believe that will hold true. But, in my mind, I had a specific date in mind - August 25th, or better known to me as the last day of summer before school starts once more, and development becomes a side project and slows down. Obviously, August 25th is here. And I have nothing for you, today, that’ll return Servo-Macs to it’s roots. That is, today, and tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, when you type in http://servo-macs.com, the page you’re looking at right now is exactly what you’ll see.

But I do have something.

My development process on layouts has remained largely unchanged for the last couple of years - I would split it up into three “phases”, which I like to refer as milestones. Servo-Macs b4, the internal name for the upcoming site (you won’t see any nods to b4 on the actual site, though), is no different. Each “milestone” has a specific focus, and when I shift my focus, the phase I’m in also shifts.

Milestone 1: This phase begins with a .PSD mockup file of what I want the end project to look like. I then take that PSD file, open up Taco HTML Edit, my copy of Photoshop, and go to town duplicating the mockup as close as I possibly can, and figuring out a basic idea of how I want the navigation to work. What will the content of the site be? How will the users get there?

Milestone 2: After I’m done transferring the mockup over to an actual, functional website, with a basic idea of how I want the site to work, I refine my original mockup, refine the navigation system, and start implementing all the main features of the layout. This is what I’m currently on in Servo-Macs b4, and have been for around two weeks now.

Milestone 3: Now that the layout should be pretty much all done and settled, with all the features in place, I go ahead and include all the content of the site. A minor layout tweak here or there, though, is not unheard of (again, refer to me being a perfectionist).

Servo-Macs b4 at the end of M1 (left), Servo-Macs b4 today (right).

As you can see, the changes in M2 from M1 are what you’d expect - I’ve got the actual news system (FusionNews again, my personal favorite) all set up, and have just refined parts of the layout that I thought would be fundamentally better choices. In the M1 phase, I thought of having the Blog be a subpage, with the main page being something else entirely, but I could never figure out what I wanted exactly, so now the blog is the main page like it always has been. You’ll also notice that I’m toying with something pretty new - I’m going to be using categories in FusionNews to display the site’s content. “General”, “Photos”, and “Videos” will all appear on the main “Blog” page as I upload them, while the Photos page will only display the Photos, and Videos only the videos. One of the few things that’s keeping me from really pushing on to Milestone 3 is the sidebar - the thing’s got a lot of work ahead of it before I go move along.

Finally, as a cherry on this post, I’m offering you guys a preview of the whole entire webpage, so you can look at the actual thing for yourself. The link I’m giving you guys will be updated periodically as an ongoing “beta” program, so I’ll also be setting up a feedback page into this current site.

Check out the future of Servo-Macs here.

You know, there was once a day where the branding of products was predictable, and more importantly, logical. Let’s take Intel for example. The first major, mainstread processor most of you will remember is the Pentium - which was followed up by the Pentium 2, Pentium 3, and finally the Pentium 4, logically speaking. It was safe to assume that the Pentium 2 was better than the Pentium, and so on.

But somewhere along the line they decided that that was simply too boring. It wasn’t edgy enough - so hey! They thought. Let’s ditch the Pentium branding which most everyone knows (although it’s worth noting that they would later revive the Pentium branding with the new Pentium Dual-Core, completely destroying the established pattern that the Pentiums were their premium and mainstream chips), and bring in something new. So out of this idea came the birth of - no, not the Pentium 5, but the Intel Core 2 Duo.

So now, just two and a half years later, we find ourselves staring at the face of a new generation of Intel processors. These times are exciting, and Intel must realize this. The new processors, previously codenamed Nehalem, deliver up to a 33% increase on comparable Core 2 Duo processors. That’s a pretty great jump. So what do we need in a time like this?

A brand spanking new brand name, of course! Gone is the day of the Core 2 Duo (No Core 2 Duo 2? too many numbers, I suppose). Instead, help me usher in the brand new Intel Core i7. You can’t make this up. The Intel Core i7. Let’s ignore the fact that, as long as you’re willing to go out on a limb, logically speaking the name doesn’t even make any god damn sense. Using basic mathematics that most humans learn somewhere around the time they learn to stop sucking their own thumbs, this is actually the 6TH generation mainstream Intel processor, and not the 7th, as the i7 implies. Maybe the only reason I’m bugged about this is because of the major OCD I seem to have, but this is my blog. If you don’t agree with me, you are wrong.

Well that was a ride. Spent all day trying to do an upgrade from Wordpress 2.5.0 to 2.6, only to run into the “White Screen of Death” over, and over again. I couldn’t get into anything - the blog index, the admin panel, nothing. As it turned out, there was two different issues to be dealt with.

First, as pointed out by Colin McNulty in amazing detail over at his blog (http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2008/07/08/solution-to-wordpress-blank-screen-of-death/), the automated Wordpress upgrade.php script appears to add an extra line in the wp-config.php file. A single extra blank line causes most of these problems. Remove this line manually, and you can once again access your admin panel, where you’ll be able to fix the second problem, if you still can’t read the index of your blog. It may just be stupid of me, but I forgot to backup my theme folder when I upgraded - WordPress was still trying to use the theme I had on there prior to the upgrade, which was missing. So simply go to the Admin Panel, and revert back to the default wordpress theme. Or, I guess, you could just re-upload the old theme if you managed to back that up and all.