Jabulani Jonny

Well on Sunday my buddy Josh and I piled in the car and headed off for a business trip to St. Simons Island and Savannah.  Work stuff, but this trip wasn’t too bad.  What made it not so bad was that we stayed at The Cloister on Sea Island on Sunday night and The Mansion on Forsyth Park on Monday night.  The Cloister is one of the highest rated resorts in the nation, if not the world.  Oh, and if anyone from work is reading this entry, no the bank didn’t pay for it.  One of our business partners picked up the tab, ain’t that sweet seeing as how our room was probably $800 for Sunday night alone.  The Mansion was a pretty sweet, artsy, eclectic hotel in downtown Savannah.  All in all, two great places to stay, with fantastic food to boot.  I’d put some pics, but I’m sure they’re protected.  Go check out the sites. 

Well, we’re 14 days into January and already this year looks to be shaping up nicely.  There are things going on behind the scenes that I can’t delve into right now.  Give me about a week and I can reveal details.  Suffice to say that 2007 is going to be a year of change and excitement. 

I haven’t spoken much about it on my blog, but I’m involved with a small company by the name of Zelosport.  My step-father invented a board game called Finger Football about 15 years ago, which was based off the old school-house game of paper football.  This idea was shelved for several years, until about 3 years ago it was reborn and given new life.  Spud, my step-dad, had been looking for the proper material to make the football field out of.  It used to be a hard field and that just wouldn’t work, for packaging and shipping reasons.  Well he discovered a material that has no memory and lets you roll up the football field into a tube.  Perfect.

Since then, the game has picked up steam.  We are now in several hundred retail locations in the northeast like Modell’s.  We are online at Toys-R-Us.  We also were on Home Shopping Network in December and sold out of 500 games in about 5 minutes.  I say all that to convey how much excitement is building everyday I see this thing evolve. 

Well this week was a major evolution.  We’ve gone from one employee, my step-dad has been doing this full-time for a year, to three.  Holy cow.  2007 is going to see big things from Zelosport.  Three will promote exponential growth and I can’t wait to see what happens. 

Alright, so that’s two things, kinda, for 2007; one’s still under wraps.  A couple more things, one of my best friends ever, like a brother, is moving back to town.  Eric, at Double3, is coming back to C-town after being in Atlanta for several years.  He and I were close friends in high school, went to college together and have been involved with Zelosport together.  He’s all the design stuff guy.  So that makes this year good.

And another thing…another of my close friends, John, is moving back from B-ham.  John and I are old guitar playing junkies.  From high school, through college.  We get to see each other about twice a year and play guitar until the weee hours of the morning.  Well no more.  He’s back in C-town as well and we will be seeing much more of each other. 

So there you have it.  If 2007 of my life were going to be a wine, you’d wanna get this year.  I’m not sure what I’d call my wine though if my life were the juice of the grape.  Although I’m not big on white wines I’d say this year is shaping up to be a big robust, fruity white.  Whatever that shakes out to be.  So pour up a big glass of ChamPayne, let it roll on the tongue, take a big breath through the nose to let the bouquet linger and enjoy what 2007 has in store. 

And the heap of reasons to make the Mac switch continues to grow. Oh hold on you quivering heap, soon…yes…very soon…I will be making the switch and will not look back unless Apple starts this same type of stupidity. I mean, I don’t design graphics intensive emails or anything, but who in their right mind would think this is a good thing. Nice job Redmond, keep up the good work. Sheesh.

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In the audio/video production world dual display (two monitors) is a must have.  Unfortunately I'm on a laptop and I just can't drop a few hundred for another display.  Quite a while back I stumbled across a way to make the most of my single laptop display.  The secret is to add custom resolutions in my graphics card control panel so that I can increase the size of my desktop.  Some might already be confused at this point, but hang on a little longer.

What I'm talking about is the viewable desktop on your computer monitor.  Typically it is set at a resolution that will make your desktop fill up the entire monitor…right?  For instance let's say that your desktop monitor is 15" and you have a resolution of 1024×768 (that's pixels).  If you were able to add a custom resolution of 2048×1536 that would now make your desktop twice as wide and twice as high.  Your 15" monitor is still only going to view a 1024×768 area on that desktop, but you can simply use your mouse to "pan" around the desktop to see the rest of it.  Still with me?

What that means is that you can have multiple applications open side by side and be able to see them by simply "panning" around the desktop by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen in which you want to pan.  I really need to put up a video showing this, but hopefully you can picture what I'm talking about.

Now, to make this happen there are a couple of things you need to know first.  What kind of graphics card do you have; nVidia, ATI or the Intel Graphics Accelerator that is actually a shared graphics processor.  For my laptop, I have a nVidia 6800 graphics card.  So I went to www.laptopvideotogo.com and downloaded a modified driver for my card.  There are instructions on that site for everything you need to do to get the drivers downloaded and installed.  They also have drivers for ATI cards that will do the same thing.  One thing that the modded drivers do is add a bunch of custom resolutions to their .inf file that allows you to then add these resolutions in the nVidia control panel.  

FYI:  I just tried fiddling around with the Intel Graphics Controller properties on my work computer and you can get it to make the higher resolutions available so you can choose them.  However once I chose a higher resolution I was getting an error message that said "Cannot Display the Video Properties" or something to that effect.  So this may or may not work for embedded graphics chips.  However if you have a dedicated video card, ie. a nVidia or ATI card, you owe it to yourself to explore this option.  It is not hard, I promise and it will really add a tremendous amount of flexibility when you're working with programs where desktop space is a premium.  Start fiddling around and working through your graphics control panel, that's the best way to try to learn it.  If you have questions you can post them and I will try to help you sort it out.  

Just try it, you're not gonna break anything.  

Happy New Year Blogging community.  I hope this year is full of great memories, good music, close friends and scrumptious food.  Much Love.