Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

So, when AT&T and SBC became one flesh, they decided to ditch the Saul Bass AT&T logo and go with a new one. They did it for all the reasons you would guess: they want to be fresh, communicate vitality and all that stuff. Instead of really developing a new strategy, or maybe hiring freshness consultants, they decided a new logo would do the trick.

From the press release:

The revitalized mark symbolizes these attributes—innovation, integrity, quality, reliability and unsurpassed customer care… The new logo reinvigorates the AT&T globe.

snort

If someone tells me that they need a new logo, immediately I say “why?”. I resist change here. Usually I’m all for change, I love tweaking and adjusting my routine to incorporate new things, but logos are different. To change a logo, I firmly believe that you need to determine that there is something very wrong with the old logo. Changing a logo is expensive and it waters down your corporate image. You are telling the entire population of earth that you aren’t to be …

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I finally fired up Final Cut Studio a couple weeks ago and played around with it. I could have lots of fun with this suite of programs. Especially if I read the manual.

When I exported my final project, it ended up, at full quality, to be around 1.2GB. That’s big. I wanted to send it to my buddy Vance for his approval, or at least for him to see it and get some kicks and grins out of it. So, I exported it as a smaller version, this time using the H.264 format that Apple’s pushing. (In fact, it’s not an Apple-specific thing, H.264 is a part of the MPEG-4 standard.)

How big was it? Well, let me tell you, I was impressed. Hold onto your hats, it was 17MB. That’s right folks. We went from 1200MB to 17MB (that’s less than 1.5% of the original size). I was a fan of H.264 to begin with, but this is killer. Everybody should use this. I’ll say it, Quicktime is the best format for video ever. This has nothing to do with my Apple super-fan status, and everything to do …

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Happy thanksgiving folks. This is one of my favorite holidays, it’s not all fancied up like lots of the other ones.

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving. We’re going to be doing two thanksgiving dinners this year, one today and one tomorrow. That’s a lot of turkey.

I have lots to be thankful for this year, but alas, the turkey beckons, so I won’t make a list. Thank you for reading and being a part of the site. Give your loved ones a hug and a smooch today.

We’re off to Dallas today. My Grandpa is really sick so we decided to head over and be with him and the family for a couple days. The guys in white coats are saying he probably doesn’t have a whole lot of time to live, so being there for this special time is a pretty big deal. I’ll be seeing my sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all whom I didn’t plan on seeing for thanksgiving, so that’s pretty special too.

More when I have time, I have a plane to catch.

I type this with a parakeet standing on my head. This morning we flew out of Denver for a two-week vacation, currently staying at the inlaws house. They have many pets, including Bill the Female Parakeet. Posting will be intermittent.

Speaking of RSS…

Anna’s using RSS and she’s really liking it. We downloaded NetNewsWire and got her set up with all her feeds. She was sick of visiting the same sites day after day, many of them not been updated in weeks. Now the internets come to her. Cool!

Every time I help someone get started with RSS they have this feeling of “Wow, how did I ever get by before this?” What is it going to take to get RSS into the hands of the masses? Is it ready? Are the tools ready? Chime in, I’d love to hear what you think.

Two more articles of mine are online now.

One is a story I told about Anna’s and my experience last year of getting caught in a snow storm in Arkansas, and using the opportunity to make a DVD for the family:

DVDs and Family: A Christmas Story

The other is an article I wrote about RSS, also for ComputorEdge

RSS and Newsreaders: A New Way to Use the Internet

So, read away, and I hope you enjoy them. I believe there are two more ComputorEdge articles awaiting publication, maybe more in the future. It was kind of wild last week, when I got my writers copies of the DVD and Family issue. It had been a long time since I saw my name in print like that. Fun stuff.

So, I was signing up for MSN Groups today, and as I did, it was rejecting my suggested usernames, because all the good ones were taken. I’m sure you’ve seen this before, you sign up for some website with the user name of pants and it says “sorry, the username pants is already taken, would you like to select from the list of suggested names?” and it has a list such as:

• pants123
• pants1985
• fancypants
• coolpants

So, my name was misterwarren. Of course it was taken, so the ones it suggested were:

• MisterWarren123
• UrbanMisterWarren
• CadavericMisterWarren

I kid you not. They suggest I associate my name with dead bodies.

Anna and I went to Breckenridge and hand a marvelous weekend. We stayed at the Fireside Inn, a very cool place owned by an English couple with a poodle. We can’t wait to go back. It’s quiet, comfortable, has great rooms, great breakfast, and it’s cheap! It’s got to be the best deal in town.

So for supper we went to the Cellar. Wow. This had to be one of the best, if not the best, meals I’ve ever had. First of all, we spent over three-and-a-half hours enjoying our meal. We both took the Chef’s choice route, a fixed-price, four-course meal. Each course is artfully paired with a wine by the sommelier and chef. The pairings on each course were just amazing. They did all this without being pretentious in any way. We spent much, much more on our meal than our room, and we were fine by that.

We needed this weekend. We were feeling a bit burnt out and just too busy. When we saw the opportunity, we jumped at it. And knowing that Anna’s tips funded the entire weekend, well, that was just bonus.