Kevin Ridgway

Octopressed

2011-11-30T00:00:00-05:00

I loved Jekyll. But Octopress is my new best friend. Will be giving this a try for awhile. I’ll definitely be creating a new theme soon, but for now I’ll be sporting the default theme.

Notes on a Meeting

2010-05-02T00:00:00-04:00

I came across some awesome meeting notes I took a few months ago. Here is what amounted to about three pages of what a colleague of mine coined, “paper.twitter.com”. Essentially you write short quips on the page, that roughly equate to the length of a tweet on twitter.com, written with the first posts at the top, and then continuing down the page, as you go. (And yes, I literally wrote the timestamps out on the page, in the beginning, they are here in this post, and then I stopped doing it because it was cumbersome. Ha ha.)

Fascinatingly enough, it actually turned in to a great writing exercise that brought up some interesting thoughts on the meeting I was in.

paper.twitter.com/program247365

Waiting for a meeting to start.
    - posted seconds ago via pen

Posting with my right hand!!
    - posted minutes ago via pen

Where would I.T. be without virtualization?
    - posted seconds ago via pen

"The realization to the potential of an 'event'." 
That's some words there.
    - posted seconds ago from a pen

When you have 10 different systems performing your main business 
competency, the shit gets crazy fast.

I suggest the new name for our all-inclusive system be, "The thing, at 
the place, with the guy, that does the magic stuff and what not."
Short and snappy.

This meeting should have a word bingo board that includes the words, 
"The Intersect", "event", "platform", "innovate", "integrate", and 
"consolidation". And if it was a  drinking game, I'd so be hammered 
right now.

I just found out I'm part of "Business Operations". Uhh, cool.

Is the Automation Team going to be called the A-Team?

I'll bring that up @ tomorrows meeting 
    -By @Mario 3:05pm

And does that make the BSC the "B" team?

"Changes" sometimes means "Oh shit, watch out!".

I need a shirt that says, "Top Performer".

"...in bed."

"No longer with the company", sounds like, so morbid.

**C**ost **R**eduction **A**pplication **P**rogram

Three pages of posts, I'm awesome.

It seems figuring out how long something should take is way
more difficult that it should be.

Nine Eleven

2009-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

I was asleep. I didn’t have any classes in the morning, so my alarm hadn’t gone off yet. My roommate, had the TV on, and I rolled over to see he was sitting raptly in front of the small TV we had placed between our beds. I didn’t say anything, just wanting to sleep, and somewhat annoyed that he had the TV on when I was sleeping. It was my freshman year in college at the University of Tampa, and I was still sleeping a lot when I could.

Then my phone rang. I groaned, rolled over, answered it and croaked, “Hello?”

It was my girlfriend at the time, now wife, Elizabeth, “Kevin do you have the TV on?”

“Yeah, it’s on. What’s going on?”

“A plane has hit the World Trade Center.”

I glanced at the TV, and my roommate looked at me with semi-scared look. He was from New York. The TV showed smoke billowing out of the first tower that was struck. I remember thinking, “Oh, God.”

I was up, threw some clothes on, and trotted the short distance between McKay hall, a sad one-story brick dorm, to the Boathouse, which was a very odd, small dorm, that had the long crew boats stored underneath it.

It was a gorgeous day, I remember. Already warm, even though it was only 9:30 or so, in the morning. I continued up the stairs to the deck of the dorm room that faced the Hillsborough river. The river sparkled so brightly, I had to shade my groggy eyes.

I entered the common room where a large TV was with couches and chairs situated around it. The majority of my girlfriend’s roommates were present, except those that were already in class. Everyone’s face was drawn, and dark. The time passed painfully, as we listened to the newscasters report what was going on. Some people left the room, needing to call home. Other people filled into the common room, coming from class, wondering why everyone was gathered. We’d fill-in the newcomers, with the somber news in hushed tones.

The second plane hit.

Gasps, audible grunts, and a few outcries came from all of us watching.

Some more people tried to call home using their cell phones. The lines were all giving busy signals. Whoa, ‘this is serious’, I remember thinking. A lot of the students at UT were from the north, a lot specifically from New York and New Jersey. From what I learned later, there were even some students who lost a parent in the attack.

The first tower started to fall, and I remember someone saying, because I couldn’t rip my eyes from the TV, I couldn’t tell you who it was, just kept saying, “Oh my God, Oh my God!”, over and over again, in a rising crescendo until the tower fell to the ground, in a enormous cloud of dust, and debris. Some people in the room were now crying.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. No one could.

Before we could recover, incredibly now, the second tower began its collapse. The room vibrated with the shock, the sobs, the utter unbelievability of the situation.

I will never forget where I was on 9/11/2001. A few days later sitting in a World and Government Affairs class, a few jets flew low overhead, and I remember everyone gripping their desks, and looking around very nervously. Even Dr. Kerstein stopped lecturing and half-jokingly said something about the jets, once they had flew past. We were very close to MacDill Air Force base, which was a major deployment point for troops to the Middle East. There was a disturbing amount of military aircraft in the air around Tampa during the immediate days after the event.

Shock, disbelief, and the utterance of the phrase “Post 9-11” filled my memory of the days, months, and semesters afterwards. I remember the hope of finding more survivors faded, several days after the event. I remember the fear, the anger, the suspension of daily life for a time.

I remember. Let’s all remember.

Better

2009-09-09T00:00:00-04:00

The Resistance

There has been a murmur in the back of my head for a ~~few months~~ few years now — the quiet whisper, the flash of inspiration, fleeting at first, but then always there, always nudging me to do something.

That something has been, to do Better.

Most of my problem is trying to focus, trying to get laser sharp accuracy, and concentration, in the current thing I’m doing. I fail horribly most of the time. To me, as a creative person, whom constantly feels like they need to add something to the world, even if it be a clever 140 character quip — I’ve always felt like I needed to add something. Something to define me, something to make me feel worthwhile, and something to make me feel right. I’ve decided to not only add something to the world, but to add something of value.

It is my worst fear that my value, that I contribute to the world, will turn out to be worthless — and therefore has stopped me from doing all but maybe 1% of what I think, I’m capable of doing. It’s not that I’m vain, or that I need attention, it’s that I need completion for myself. Myself has been dying the last couple of years. If I don’t do something of value now, then that thing inside me, that urges me to do great things, my never speak up again. That would be a personal epic tragedy for me.

Go Pro

This is the most truthful thing I’ve written in a long time, and I’m O.K. with that. I want to evaluate where I’m at, and simply ”Go Pro”, and do the things that make me feel complete, the things that will allow me to win all the inner battles of doubt about what I want to do.

I’m going to, I desperately utterly need to put away Ego, and be firmly seated with Self — to do the things I do, and do them well. To strive for better.

How to Be a Keyboard Ninja on Mac OSX Leopard

2008-07-03T00:00:00-04:00

Some colleagues of mine, asked me to pass on to The Interwebs - my grand knowledge of getting around on Leapard - via the keyboard. How did I learn all these on my own? Experimentation, firstly, and secondly working at the Apple Retail Store as a Mac Specialist/Trainer certainly helped.

So let’s dive right in…

These are the default keyboard shortcuts that are in Mac OSX Leopard, unless noted otherwise. To change these, find a keyboard shortcut you forgot, or make your own, you can go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts

Some Oddballs

Grab image from site quickly

Click and hold an image on a website you want
While still holding, hit F11 (show desktop)
Release mouse button to drop the image immediately on your desktop

Note: This technique also works by dragging an album art image from a webpage right into the album art field in iTunes!

General

Command + M Minimize the current app window to the dock
Hold Command and Press Pill button in upper right hand corner of any finder window As you press this, you will cycle through different “setups” of the Finder toolbar (this changes all Finder windows)
Command + H Hide current application (still shows up when you click on it in the dock, or Command + Tab to it)
Option + Command + H Hide all others except active application

Help in any App!

Not sure where to find a menu item in a particular application? Try this:

Click Help menu item at the top of the screen
Start typing a search term
Use the arrow key to navigate down your results, and see the items that are in the app, open and get pointed to by a wavering blue arrow (I’m not kidding! Try it.)

Dialog Boxes

When you’re on a dialog box for just about any application, you can press Command + (first letter of button), to press that button without using the mouse. For instance, if you closed a document without saving, it would ask you if you wanted to:

Command + D Don’t Save
Command + C (Or Escape works here too) Cancel
Command + S Save

But remember, it works for whatever the button is, not just the examples shown above, simply press the first letter of the button along with the Command key.

Spotlight

Command + Spacebar Opens the search bar in the upper right hand corner of your screen, so you may begin typing your search term

Once you’ve typed a search, and results start showing you can press Command to go to the first item. In addition, you can press Command + Down Arrow, to go to the top item in each category. Simply press return to open that item.

Command + Option + Spacebar To open a Finder window in “search mode”, simply begin typing, or you can press this after you have started typing a search in the Spotlight bar, to open a window with that search term already placed in the Finder window.

Spaces

Probably my most favorite feature on Leopard. From Apple’s site, the description reads, “Organize your activities into separate spaces and easily switch from one to another.” This has been around awhile in the Linux/Unix world, and finally, they’ve built it into OSX.

First and foremost (in my opinion), you should go to System Preferences > Spaces, and check the checkbox at the bottom that says “When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application”. It’s a little long winded but basically what that means is that by checking it, it will allow you to have each Space assigned to a task, not just an application. So, basically multiple windows of one application will not “know” about other windows of the same application if they’re in other Spaces. Therefore, when switching between windows within an application, it will only do so within that Space.

You can have up to 16 Spaces!

You can assign applications to certain spaces by going to System Preferences > Spaces. Click the plus button and select an application from the drop down menu. Once you’ve chosen an application, you can then click next to it, to choose a particular Space, or assign it to all Spaces.

Spaces is not enabled by default. To enable it, do the following:

Go to System Preferences > Spaces
Check the checkbox labeled “Enable Spaces”

You can also choose to check “Show Spaces in Menu Bar”, which will give you a visual cue while your in Space, as to which particular Space it is (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.).

I prefer to do this, so that I can have quicker access to Expose and Spaces:

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard
Check “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys
When this option is selected, press the Fn key to use the special features printed on each key”

So instead of pressing Fn + F8, I can now just press F8 to activate Spaces.

To navigate to another space (can be changed in System Preferences > Spaces):

Control + Arrow Key (in the direction of the space you want to switch to)
Control + 1 (the number of the space) Switch directly to a space

You can move windows to different Spaces by doing any of the following:

Hit F8, and then use your mouse to drag and drop your window into the Space you want
Click and hold a window, then hit the keyboard shortcut to go to another Space to have the window move with you to that Space
Drag a window with your mouse to the edge of the screen, in the direction of the space you want to move it to, and hold it there for a tick. You will be switched to that Space with window in hand.

What the different keys look like on your keyboard:

Apple or Command Key: ⌘
Alt or Option Key: ⌥
Shift Key: ⇧
Enter: ⌅
Control: ⌃
Tab: ⇥
Tilde: ~ `
Function key: fn (on new mac keyboards and portables; since Leopard came out)

Application Switching

Command-` Cycle through windows in application or Finder (if more than one window is open)
Command-Tab Switch application
- Command + Tab then Command + ` Cycles through open applications, but goes the other direction (so if you Command + Tab to an app, but pass it up, this will let you go back)

Spaces

F8 View all spaces at once
C Collect all windows in the current space (hit C again to return them to their individual spaces)
F8 then F9 View all spaces then view all windows in spaces with Expose

Expose

F9 View all open application windows (if Spaces is enabled, it only does it in the current Space)
F10 Show all windows of the active application
F11 Show the desktop by sliding the windows away (F11 again to return them)

Finder

Basic commands for file manipulation in the Finder:

Command + W Close Finder window
Shift + Option + N Create a new folder
Command-Up Arrow Move up one directory
Command-Down Arrow Move down one directory
Option-Drag Copy to new location
Option-Command-Drag Make alias in new location
Command-Drag Move to new location without copying

Using the Trash:

Shift + Delete Move highlighted item immediately to the trash
Shift + Command + Delete Empty the trash
Option + Shift + Command + Delete Empty the trash even if items in the trash are being used or are locked

With a Finder window open you can switch between the four views:

Control + 1 Icon view
Control + 2 Details view
Control + 3 Pane view
Control + 4 Coverflow view

When you there is an active application, you can:

Command + Q Quit active application
Command + Comma See the application preferences for the active applications

Here’s how you can close lots of applications quickly:

Hold Command, then Press Q and Tab one after another until the only thing left is the Finder

Quickview in Finder

When an item is selected in the Finder:

Spacebar Shows you a preview of actual item contents (if it can, note that note all filetypes are supported)
Spacebar Again Leaves Quickview (Escape works here too)

While still in Quickview on that item in that Finder window, hit the arrow keys to navigate to other items without leaving Quickview

Click on the arrows in Quickview to see the item fullscreen.

Instant Slideshow of Items

Open a finder window (preferably one with photos or videos, but it could be anything really)
Press Command + A to select all items in the window
Hold the Option key, and press the Quickview button in that finder window (it’s the button that looked like an Eye, then turned into a play button when you pressed Option)
Watch magic unfurl!

While in this slideshow mode, you can move your mouse, and see controls pop up. From left to right they are:

Move to previous item
Pause/Play slideshow
Move to next item
Show thumbnails overview of all items (from here you can click on any item to go back to fullscreen slideshow on that item)
Exit Full Screen
Close slideshow (good ole’ Escape works here too)

Screenshots

Command-Shift-3 Take a picture of the screen
Command-Shift-4 Take a picture of the selection
Command-Shift-4, then press Control while selecting Take a picture of the screen, place in Clipboard
Command-Shift-4, then Spacebar Take a picture of the selected window (Hover over the window you’d like to take a picture of, the the cursor that is now a camera, and then click with the mouse)

Sleep, Shutdown, Force Quit

Option-Command-esc Force Quit
Control-Eject Restart, Sleep, Shutdown dialog box
Control-Command-Eject Quit all applications and restart
Option-Command-Eject Sleep
Option-Command-Power Sleep

Setting Up Even More Keyboard Access!

Go to System Preferences > Universal Access
Check the “Enable access for assistive devices” checkbox

Makes these available:

Control-F1 Turn on Full Keyboard Access
Control-F2 Highlight Menu
Control-F3 Highlight Dock
- when you’re on the dock you can use the left and right arrow keys to navigate over your dock items, and the up arrow will bring up a menu on that particular item
Control-F4 Highlight Window (active) or next window behind it
Control-F5 Highlight Toolbar
Control-F6 Highlight Utility window (palette)

And as a bonus, it does the following:

Well basically it allows you to tab through form fields in your browser of choice, including drop-down-menus, yipee! Although when I showed this to my colleagues recently I noticed it’s not working in Firefox 3 (but it does work in Firefox 2). I have asked the Mozilla team why this might be the case, and I’m awaiting their reply.

And I answered my own question:

Navigate to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts
Under “Full Keyboard Access”, select the “All Controls” option

Now it will let me tab to drop-down-menus in Firefox 3.

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?forumId=1&comments_parentId=86761

See a comprehensive list here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343

I hope that brings light some of the many keyboard auto-magic-ry that can be accomplished on Leopard.

OMG, iPhone Rumors Conflict!

2008-06-07T00:00:00-04:00

I was doing my usual late night thing, browsing the The Interwebs, and checking The Twitter, and I came across this gem:

IPhone Rumors Conflict (Brian Caulfield/Forbes) http://tinyurl.com/5bfzul 7 minutes ago from web

Are you flippin’ serious?

OMG, Rumors about the iPhone (a.k.a. “The iPhone”, “The Jesus Phone”, or my favorite, “Jesus, it’s just a phone!”) conflict! Ok, ok, timeout (made the hand gesture of a “T”), are you telling me that, unconfirmed rumors, from unconfirmed sources…are conflicting? Well, someone needs to call the blogging police, because someone may be wrong on this one.

How about we all calm down a little bit, take a deep breath, and wait for the freakin’ keynote? Can we have a little less speculation this time, leading up to said event? Some of us understand what is really important among all this craziness - for that I applaud you.

“Are you getting an iPhone, if there is such a device coming out on Monday, Kevin?” Man, I’m glad you asked, the answer is you-bet-your-apple-fanboy-wearin’-hat I am, regardless of what other people think.

To Do

2008-05-23T00:00:00-04:00

That someone has this tagged as “todo” on their del.icio.us.com bookmarks is inspiring:

http://www.xprogramming.com/Blog/Page.aspx?display=GoodEnough

Getting Back into Design

2008-04-30T00:00:00-04:00

I’m finally getting back on the “design” train. I thought I didn’t know how to do it anymore, but low and behold, it’s like riding a bicycle, you never forget.

I think the key to these things is to constantly tweak, however, it’s also key to knowing when to say “when”, and call it a finished product. It’s still difficult to get started, but once I get going (without distractions…gasp!), it becomes easier.

Nice to have gotten in a “design flow” again.

muxtape icon

2008-04-21T00:00:00-04:00

I used to make mixtapes back in the day. It all started when I found out that my brother’s dual-cassette deck stereo could record songs off of the radio onto cassettes.

And thus mixed tapes, for me, was a hobby for a time. Obviously, as a web whore, finding out that someone had made a terrific webapp based on the oldie idea of making mixed tapes, I was an immediate fan: http://muxtape.com.

Of course finding out how you could use the cool thumbnail-as-coverflow feature with Fluidapp.com and muxtape, was awesome! And brought me to making this (ok, somewhat poor) fluidapp icon for muxtape. I believe someone had posted one to the flickr group for fluidapp icons already, but I believe mine is bigger (it’s true!). And in digging around, if someone wants to make a better one, I found the original istockphoto for muxtape.

I hope someone finds some use for it, or makes a better one, and posts it to the fluidapp group on flickr.

Cheers.

Pirate Ship Leaving Port

2008-04-08T00:00:00-04:00

Arrrrr! We shove off, to the soundtrack of The Pirates of the Caribbean. This was a fun experience, the Pirate Ship at Clearwater, FL. Free beer/wine to boot for the grown-up pirates!

I’m glad Flickr finally turned on Videos! Nice.

Media Temple (Fluid App Icon)

2008-04-08T00:00:00-04:00

I created another Fluid App icon (http://fluidapp.com/), because I’m obsessed with having the correct PNG 512x512 with transparency. :)

Beautiful Inspector...

2008-03-27T00:00:00-04:00

The Safari 3.1 brings a lot of updates concerning web devs,this one in particular is turned on by Preferences > Advanced Tab, and the checkbox at the bottom. Then you have the “Develop Menu”. And man is it gorgeous.

Recognize that size bar at the bottom? Yup, directly from iTunes.

(Don't) Click Here!

2008-03-13T00:00:00-04:00