New Reel, New design.

For those of you that navigate directly to this blog, go check out my new stuff: chriskelley.tv.

I *might* update the blog section to match (I should) but time constraints and priorities currently dictate otherwise.

So whaddya think?  Not a bad little body of work I suppose :).

Goodbye Dreamhost, You’re a Nightmare

So I’m finally biting the bullet and switching the hosting for all of my sites. Dreamhost, my current host, is horrible.  There is constant downtime, a couple of months ago almost every other night my hosting would be down (for all my sites).  And DH is CONSTANTLY slow.  Every 5th time I visit one of my sites, the brower almost times out.  Dreamhost sucks, but it’s also ~$10/month.

Media Temple is much better.  Some companies I work for host with MT, along with some other larger sites I know, and they are much better.  I have developed sites on Media Temple hosting and they give equal flexibility for controlling server options (more or less) as DH does.  Also, the Customer Support for MT is faaaar superior Dreamhost, blows them out of the water.  But, MT costs twice as much.  I think it’s worth it.

So, I’ve bought the account and will begin transferring my sites to MT over the next couple of months.  Hopefully there won’t be any hiccups and we’ll keep chugging right along.

Midnight Oil

Yesterday, the accountant at Blur asked me how many cups of coffee I drink per day…

“um… 5 at work plus Starbucks in the evening?”

At which point, I realized maybe that is a lot of coffee.   But. Moderation Shmoderation.  I wake up around 8 every day (try to) and I leave the house by 9, and generally don’t get home till past 10pm after rugby, gym, whatever else is involved that day.  Busy bee, but I’ve got to get it all out now while I can!

Last night, I fell asleep right in the middle of breaking my site (which maybe you noticed) and knocked my laptop off the bed… brilliant moment in my life.

Do not pity me, for I love every second of it.  Just thought my moment of realization was entertaining.

Happy Clients

Just finishing up my booking over here at Blur Studio this week - last Friday we delivered a huge package for the Kids’ Choice Awards (which aired this weekend) and got this note in my inbox from the client via our Creative Director:

“Thanks for all the work on KCA….when we were looking at the open in the production office, the head person at NICK that we deal with, Marjorie Cohen, just calmly turned around and said ‘These grafix are gorgeous.’
They were great, you guys set a high standard for yourself.
The show got the highest ratings ever — wow that’s 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and now 2008 that we have done that…..and the teen #s went up too!”

That’s the Spirit!

From The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (via Hacker News):

“…it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness — they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching the parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a grey flannel suit.”

Very proud to love what I do for a living, to be 25 and being in a place where I am both very happy and also excited about the future gives me warm fuzzies sometimes.

Firefox 3 Memory Optimizations

A quick rundown of what changed and how they did it for the new beta of FF3:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

I wish the AE team would take a good look at this and realize the importance of small changes making huge differences. (ok semi-small, as the article mentions the memory allocator they switched to doubled size of codebase during development…)

How about instead of “Brainstorm”, maybe next time we can shoot for After Effects to have some more render stack optimizations.

Kevin Hale on Genghis Khan

So last week at the conference, the second workshop I took was given by Kevin Hale of wufoo.com. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but Kevin seemed like a pretty intelligent guy and perhaps the topic was a little too broad. I’m not the type to one-off somebody, so I poked around online a little and saw he gave a talk once called “How to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan”, and I saw a photo of one of this slides… my interest was captured.

I poked around, and voila.

Slide Presentation for “How to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan”.

I love the interwebs.

Conference Results

Conference was a success, met some great people and heard some incredible perspectives.

Top speakers in my opinion were Kathy Sierra, Cal Henderson, and a combined Tantek Celic / Brian Oberkirch / Joseph Smarr talk.  Kathy Sierra in particular was very intelligent and well-spoken, and shows why she has been such a foundation in the development world for so many years.

Workshops Day 1

Not a bad day today at the Future of Web Apps in semi-sunny Miami yesterday.   I attended two workshop sessions, the first was with the fine Dan Rubin, speaking on the finer workings of user-design and interface-design.  Good topic, quality discussion.  I had a chance to meet with Dan later in the day and we talked about two of my favorite topics — software bloat, and also the convergence of the animation industry and the web industry.

Second session of the day was Kevin Hale from Wufoo, “Building a web app from A-Z”.  It’s was alright… basically he just talked through how Wufoo came to life and some experiences they had along the way.   He had a couple gems to pick up, and some great book recommendations.

Today the conference begins and I’m actually sitting in a rockstar seat as we speak, ready for the shenanigans to begin.

Off to Miami

Tomorrow I head off to the Future of Web Apps conference in sunny Miami. I am absolutely stoked. This will be my first developer-oriented conference and I hope to meet some great people and and learn a lot… more than anything, I can’t wait for the inspiration.

Excellent.

In other more technical news, obviously this blog is brand new… and I’ve completely hacked together this WordPress Theme based off of something completely different… So you are definitely going to find some bugs.  I apologize in advance, and I’m currently working to sort through all the nooks and crannies.