I’ve been using a red Speck SeeThru Hard Shell Case on my 15-inch MacBook Pro for two weeks now. Overall I’m very happy with it, no complaints. It fits perfectly snug and the openings to access the the side ports line up perfect. It’s very light weight and thin enough that I hardly notice it on there.

I especially like the rubber feet on the bottom as they are larger and more robust than the ones on the MacBook, so they elevate the machine higher to allow better air circulation. I initially had a concern about it retaining heat, but there are special ventilation slits on the bottom to prevent overheating. This also provides a layer of protection for those of you who suffer from MacBook leg burn.

This case provides extra protection from scratches and bumps, which is useful for me as I like to carry my MacBook around while it’s open AND I have two kids. It also provides some additional style. Now available in nine colors, including pink! I went with red to represent my company’s brand.

They retail for $49.95, available for 39.03 on Amazon, which you might say is a bit steep for a piece of plastic. But what your paying for is the high level of detail and engineering that has gone into making this fit and work as well as it does.

I really like the look and feel of the MacBook as it is, but the addition of this case what quite seamless and gives me a bit of comfort in the extra protection. I recommend this to anyone looking to add protection and color to you MacBook or MacBook Pro.

I’m not sure which I’m more excited about, how fun it is to cut up video in iMovie or how sweet it is that Flickr now supports video. Both have just made my day. It took me about five minutes to become completely comfortable with this unique video editing interface. It’s simple, clean and still very powerful. Not built for longer form video, but for short clips and mixes of typical videos, iMovie is fantastic.

My two favorite features are, the rollover previews that include audio, this just makes it fun, and second, Export. Apple has taken the frustration out of exporting video, no longer am I messing with audio and video codec settings just to simply export a clip. Set it and forget it.

Now I present you with this little gem, my Star Wars Kid.

Jana rented Episode 2 for Jackson and told him he could watch it on Friday. As you can see, he was quite excited about seeing Count Dooku.

Checked out Vampire Weekend again last night at In The Venue in Salt Lake. They’ve blown up in that short time since I saw them last at Kilby Court four months ago. They mentioned multiple times during the show that playing Kilby Court was probably their favorite venue of the entire tour. Tonight’s show was originally scheduled for Kilby, but quickly moved to a larger venue when they realized how many tickets were being sold.

Since being here in December they’ve released a full length album, been SNL musical guest, Letterman, and cover of Spin magazine among probably many other things. Four months ago there were just over 30 people at the show — tonight, I’d say well over 300 500 people. These four very talented musicians are having fun making new and unique music and their success is well deserved.

If their music alone wasn’t good enough, Vampire Weekend has figured out how to make them look and sound even better… By hooking up with an opening band that sounds like your little sister and her friends singing karaoke at 3 am after drinking two gallons of kool-aid. Yacht has to be one of the strangest opening bands I’ve ever seen or heard (I just listened to their music on myspace and it’s much better recorded than live). It was nothing more than a guy and a girl screaming chants to music played on a laptop (which continued to skip and mess up). Good thing for pool tables…

Vampire only has one album, so a short set is expected, playing only an hour. They claimed a new album is very close, but didn’t reveal any new music from it. Still, a fun show. I realized just how good their drummer is…

I posted a couple vids:

Blake’s Got a New Face
M 79 (compare to last time)

Update: Vampire Weekend: Quality trumps quantity as critical darlings live up to the hype By David Burger - The Salt Lake Tribune

I made a Muxtape (a virtual mix tape) for you. Enjoy.

I’m a fan of the usefulness and simplicity of this web interface from user registration to the presentation page. Beautiful design and fun idea. See 37 Signals comments.

Update: How to Make a Proper Muxtape

I’ve been using Windows Vista Ultimate for over a year before switching over to Mac and OS X 10.5.2. Here are a few items that I’m really happy to leave behind.

As a side note, the Dell XPS 410 I purchased 1 year ago, fully loaded for near $2500 is now going for less than $450 on eBay. So my first item could be hardware value retention, since Mac hardware retains it’s value very well.

1. Windows Media Player. I’ve never used a slower, buggier, more bloated piece of junk software in my life.
2. Random Error messages with no clue how to fix. image acquisition / start up items blocked (if you’re on Vista, you know what I’m talking about).
3. Buggy and slow iTunes. In OS X scrolling my huge music library is silky smooth.
4. Buggy Quicktime. I’ve spoken to many people on Windows whom I share the issue of not being able to play the HD trailers on the Apple site.
5. Spyware, Viruses and Virus scanner. The scanner software is a hassle and a resource hog.
6. Maxing out at 3GB RAM. Typical Windows machines are 32 bit. I put 4GB ram into my Vista system and it only recognized 3GB. Ripped!
7. File Browsing is slow, stalls often. Doing normal file browsing often causes a 10-30 second “stall” while the system does who knows what. In fact, I can make Windows Vista crash on demand, it’s not hard to get the “Windows Explorer is not responding” message. I can’t say the same about OS X.
8. File permissions issues. If folder is set to “Read Only” often times I could not undo this without creating a new folder and copying all the file into that folder (hack!).
9. All those flashing, pop-up approval screens for EVERY change made to the system. Sure, on Mac you have to enter the admin password for certain system changes. On Vista, times the frequency by at least four and the annoyance by five.
10. Adobe Premiere. Say Hello to Final Cut.

I will follow up this post with a Top Things I WILL miss about Windows. But I assure you, that list is much shorter.

For over a year I’ve been working (and playing foosball) at Move Networks as an Art Director in the Marketing department. My primary tasks have been on interface design and prototype development on both client projects and internal applications.

As the company has and continues to grow (over a hundred employees hired since I joined) we have the opportunity to create new departments and groups to better focus our needs and create great work. I now belong to the freshly formed User Experience Group or UXP (wikipedia) as Senior Visual Designer. I’m really looking forward to working with a team of talented people with a similar goal and understanding of interactive user experiences.

We’re currently looking to fill a couple positions within the UXP team at Move Networks. If you gots skills and are interested please take a look at the job postings and let us know.

Current UXP Openings:

• Senior Usability Researcher / Analyst
• Senior Interaction Designer / Prototyper

Oh yeah! It’s on now. Over night, I’ve become the biggest Mac fan on the planet. Not kidding. I’ve been on Windows (even via Boot Camp) forever, and been quite happy in Microsoft land. But as of last week, when my shiny new Macbook Pro arrived, I’m all about Mac and OSX.

I’ve switched a few times before, but each time I’ve gone back to Windows due to simple issues related to either software compatibility, co-worker compatibility, and application speed. When I switched a year ago, I was on a brand new quad-core Mac Pro, but Adobe CS2 was not native Intel, so it was very slow compared to Windows XP. So I installed Boot Camp and ran XP on a mac for over a year.

This time it’s different. There is a noticeable speed increase in 10.5 compared to Vista, or XP and I really love the updated Finder. Adobe CS3 is super fast, Firefox is fast. After installing a ton of apps and transferring my life over the the Mac OS. Everything just works. Unlike Vista, which has been a constant headache and often slower than even XP.

I’m all hooked up with a Time Machine backup and some fabulous new mac only applications. The transition has gone much smoother than expected.

I’ve got a few blog post ideas about my transition to mac, comparisons to Windows, great mac applications and docking options. So stay tuned for those. But for now, I’d have to say my favorite Mac feature is Spotlight.

My sweet wife has been putting the mini van bug in my ear for over a year. I’ve been anti-minivan, in denial of the usefulness a mini van provides (for a growing family) thinking an SUV would be much cooler and useful. A couple weeks ago I gave in a little and agreed to test drive a new Honda Odyssey. I must say I was very impressed, so smooth, so roomy and so many features. I liked everything about it other than when you get out it’s still a mini van. So I test drove the Pilot (an SUV), which looks awesome, especially the new ‘09 body style, soon to be released. But it felt like I was driving my truck. I was sold.

Of course the dealer did everything he could to sell us a car right then and there. I was like dude, please, I JUST started looking at cars, I’m not taking one home tonight.

<rant>

I despise car dealerships and car dealers (sorry if any of you are offended, I’m sure there are good ones out there, but this is my personal experience). They are seriously blood suckers looking to sell a car to every person who steps onto the lot at ANY cost and squeeze every last penny they can from them.

Car buying (from a dealership) is a game, one that if you don’t know how to play, you will get ripped off. If you are ever in the market for buying a car, read this website “How To Buy New Cars & Avoid Car Dealer Scams” read all seven chapters. It’s free information and full of many great tips and instructions on how to be fully prepared to save money and to deal with the dealers (scam artists).

</rant>

I did a bunch of research on costs and though I typically prefer to buy slightly used, I found that for what we were looking for it was worth it to go new. So after a bit of wheeling and dealing I drove home what is apparently my wife’s dream car, a 2008 Honda Odyssey EXL with DVD in Nimbus Gray Metallic.

A few of my favorite features are the backup camera, heated seats, and the sunroof. It’s tight.

On Tuesday I had LASIK eye surgery at Hoopes Vision and my vision is fantastic! No more contacts to dry out my eyes (or to replace), no more glasses to slide off while I’m playing foosball or to remove while I’m wrestling my boys. It’s great.

I’ve been wearing contacts and glasses since high school, when I realized I could hit a baseball better while wearing contacts. Before Lasik my vision was near sighted with a prescription of -2.0 in both eyes.

With our tax return this year, I finally got the ok from the wife to get it done. I was on the phone within seconds scheduling an appointment. I’d heard good things about Hoops so I gave them a call and checked it out. The entire process was fantastic, from all the assistants to Dr. Phillip Hoops, Jr. Everyone was very professional and the process was very quick.

I won’t go into the graphic details of the actual laser cutting and burning stuff, but if you are interested I’ve posted my video. Sped up 3x and set to a new favorite artist of mine, Bon Iver playing Flume.

The technology for doing this is absolutely amazing and I recommend it to anyone who wants better vision without contacts or eye glasses.

Update: I forgot to mention that they gave me a Valium to make the whole process more relaxing. FTW!

If there was a single must have Firefox extension (I currently have 8 installed), I’d have to say it’s PicLens. Especially if you spend any time on sites like Flickr, Facebook, Picasa Albums, Google and Yahoo image search. When installed, if you visit a supported site (like Flickr), any image you roll over displays a little play button (>), that when pressed scans all the images either on that page, or in the group you’ve clicked on. You are presented with a full screen display of all the images in a very elegant 3d navigation system that you can control with the mouse wheel (zoom in / out) and the arrow keys to navigate.

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web.

Best of all no pagination, for example if you do a google image search for Kobe Bryant and view in Piclens, you can navigate a nearly endless wall of images without ever having to click to load a new page.
In my opinion, this is the future of the web.

Piclens even supports IE, not that anyone should be using IE. But it’s there in case someone still does.