Seattle-Area Tweetup on Wednesday, February 18!

Tomorrow, I’ll be going to my first Twitter-based meeting. I’ll be dragging along rookie Twitterer and long-time friend Eric Nguyen to further introduce ourselves to offline social networking events.

We hope to see you there!

Welcome the newest update to the Web site

Introducing… the long-overdue Projects feature! I know, I know… it’s been a long time coming. Check it out on pretty much any page, except for this one. In case you don’t know what I mean, follow this link (www.columnbreak.com/japan/joso.html), click the glossy-looking button titled “Stuff,” and click “Projects.”

Voila! Now you know what I work on outside of my 9am–5pm (or 8am–4pm in the summertime) job.

Now, let’s see how long it takes for me to update the “Favorites” link…

What’s the RIAA up to?

If you haven’t read lately, the RIAA—the folks who have sued single mothers and a whole mess of college students—announced that it will no longer pursue legal action against individuals who illegally download media, such as music, videos, and other copyrighted material. Sounds great, right? Sure, sounds good for now.

Here’s what I think about the RIAA backing off of threatening legal action:

• Maybe the RIAA decided that suing someone for $4,000 wasn’t worth the legal fees and that allowing Internet service providers (ISPs), like Comcast and Qwest, to shut off a subscriber’s service if they were suspected in downloading copyrighted material would be a good idea.
• Maybe instead of shutting off a user’s service if he or she is suspected in illegally downloading, ISPs might start charging a tax that in turn goes directly to the RIAA, theoretically making downloading illegal material, well… legal.

What do you think? Were you affected at all by the RIAA? Have you and will you continue to download copyrighted material? Are you a law-abiding citizen who buys your own music from the Amazon MP3 online store (which, might I add, is seriously the best place to download DRM-free music)?

A formal e-apology

I didn’t know that the video on the ColumnBreak home page was not in service until I started using Mozilla Firefox regularly… and that kind of irks me. Sorry for not finding it out earlier. Hopefully it hasn’t deterred the steadily growing 20 percent of Firefox users.

Because of that, I’ve now got a new project where I have to convert the Microsoft Silverlight Web component to Adobe Flash, which requires me to learn Flash. Maybe it’s my calling… I started working with Flash, but then I found Silverlight, which seemed to be a more interactive, rich Web experience. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really caught on as much as I thought it would.

Flash and Flash Lite truly provide a lot more opportunities across multiple platforms and browsers, so for marketing purposes, that would be the way to go.

And since I didn’t make this Web site to sell oatmeal cookies, it looks like I might be busy learning more Web technologies for awhile…

Making the gradual transition back to Firefox

As you may have read on one of my recent Twitter updates, I’m having difficulty with Windows Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2. When I open a new tab, it loads slowly even when I’m just opening a new tab for the heck of it. Also, IE8 Beta 2 crashes regardless of how many tabs I have open or how intensive the page loading is. Below is a picture of when I tried to open a single tab for Facebook and then tried to close it. It’s difficult to tell, but the popup menu window at the bottom is frozen on the screen. Bummer…

Lately, I found out that my friends and family are having the same issues with IE8 Beta 2. Quite frustrating, especially for those who aren’t computer savvy and don’t know that there are other Internet-browsing options such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

I hope the IE team at Microsoft has gotten word of this issue. I’d really rather use IE8 than Firefox 3, but if Firefox consistently gives me a better experience, I might end up sticking with it. In turn, that might make me abandon the Microsoft Silverlight components of my Web site, since Firefox 3 and Silverlight aren’t playing nicely. Oh, if only I could get those development hours back… I suppose learning Adobe Flash a little more in depth wouldn’t be so bad, seeing as how probably 90 percent of Web sites choose that as the platform for delivering an interactive Web experience.

Anybody else out there having trouble with IE8 Beta 2? Is moving to Firefox 3 a bad idea? Comments welcome!