The other great thing about being up here is all the microbrews. Portland is known for having e most of 2 things. Strip clubs and microbrews. We aren’t in Portland so we haven’t visited any strip clubs. But the bar we’ve been hitting here, Wanker’s Corner, has 30 microbrews on tap.

It’s been fun so far. 4 days is a perfect vacation. Anything more and you start to miss home too much.

Teachers: “Pay us more money and we’ll make your kids wicked smart”
Superintendent: “You can’t teach at the rate you’re being paid now, will you somehow get better with more money?”
Teachers: “Dammit… We hate rhetorical questions.”

Here’s the kicker. Now that all of these failing teachers are out of work they’re going to have a hard time finding teaching jobs again. Why would anyone school hire a teacher that was fired from a school that failed this well. I say failed well because looking at the test scores these teachers and students are the definition of #FAIL.

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Whatever this device will have I’m sure I’ll get one. So I don’t really care much about the rumors leading up to tomorrows Apple address.

The coolest thing I’ve seen is the interface shown in the video below. A couple things come to mind while watching this video.

1. With it’s popularity I think you’ll see websites changing UI to fit the use of a mouseless/keyboardless device. Looking at this example you can see the demo UI was designed for finger gestures. For those designers out there this will mean bigger brighter buttons that you can hit with your fingertip as opposed to a tiny mouse arrow. Remember the button has to “POP”!!!

2. I don’t like flash intros, headers or navs. Will the majority of designers cop out and start designing all-flash sites to accommodate this iTablet, or will they dig deep in to things like jquery to achieve the fluid motion of the site shown below. I’ve use small plugins for jquery, but I’ve seen the pros use it and I hope that’s the direction of the web.

I’m not a huge book reader, but this thing is going to kill the Kindle or any other book reader on the market. Those that have/love their Kindles now will keep using them, but I’d guess sales will come to a screeching halt once this tablet go on sale.

1. I think this Haze double spread looks great. Without loading it up with a bunch of overlays and flare, this turned out to be really clean. Whether or not you like the people in the ad, most of them have pop success right now. The design didn’t take away from the paid acts.

I’ve had to design these double spreads before and dammit if I wasn’t told to add “more flare” or the dreaded “it doesn’t pop” comment.

2. Check out the smile on this chick. The ad says there’s an American Apparel in downtown LA so I know I’ve never see it. This ad got my attention pretty damn quick.

Now, if the same ref makes a mistake and his call is reversed several times it would make sense that maybe that ref should find another job.

I’m just curious if something like this is present for the NFL refs.

So far I’ve only been able to connect the USB device 50% of the time. I try to use the service mainly when I’m at my sons baseball practices. These are outdoors in the middle of open fields. There should be no issue grabbing a “clear” signal. But I’ve still had issue.

Keep in mind I’m on a mac.

The USB piece will keep trying to connect over and over again requiring you to put in your password each time. I’ve also noticed that the clear connection manager will get stuck on “obtaining IP address”, but the network manager on the mac will show it as connected. You’re able to cruise the internet fine while it’s in this mode even thought the Clear manager reads obtaining IP.

The home unit has never showed more than 2 bars and most of the time it’s only at 1 bar. The most annoying part of the home system is buffering on youtube and other internet related videos. The speeds of the home unit are less that desired. With Cox cable I could watch any video without the pausing for re-buffering. This just isn’t the case with Clear. It can’t keep up.

I’d rather they save some money on advertising and upgrade the speeds of their service. It needs to happen if they want to compete in the future.

The District isn’t a bad place to take pictures. It was dead on Saturday, I guess it’s not fun to walk around with it’s 105 degrees out.

I could make a qoop book with pictures of these 3. I have plenty of pictures over the last 3 years using my Canon XTi.

Going out drinking with friends is a lot cheaper when your drinking $3 beers as opposed to drink $10 scotches.

Favorite beers so far are Labatte Blue, Stella Artois & a Portland microbrew called Firehouse5.