Lexington, Va: moe. at Washington and Lee U.

Fun show at (of all places) the Maintenance Facility building converted in to a concert hall at Washington & Lee U.

My first time seeing the band, and I have to say, I was pretty impressed

My Role: Graphic Design, Wordpress Installation, Product Management
Techniques: User Interface Design, Project Management, & Resource Management, DNS management, Social Marketing.
Launch: April 1st, 2009
Site: aprilfools.hotelicopter.com

At the beginning of 2009, VibeAgent (the company that I work for), decided that we needed to rebrand the site to make the site more memorable, and stand out from the crowd. After some brainstorming, beer, and some more brainstorming… we came up with hotelicopter.com. As we began to make plans for the rebranding the site, one of the items on the list was to gain visibility in the market, and not lose ground in the traffic arena. So, we went back to the drawing board (read bar), brainstormed (read drank) some more, and asked ourselves the question, “what if there really was a flying hotel?” Just like that, The Hotelicopter was born.

A little Wordpress Wizardry, some fine 3D modeling, and a little help from one of the teams 15 year old son on the video front, and we had a pretty convincing site heralding the launch of “the world’s first flying 5 star hotel”. The site featured tour dates, and exhaustive list of amenities, images of the hotelicopter, and cabins (courtesy of yotel.com), and a video of The Hotelicopter in flight.

The site peaked at 1.5M visitors, and on April Fools day, we were the #5 most watched video on YouTube. Well, the hoax worked, and hotelicopter.com launched amidst a frenzy of media attention including articles on Wired, CNet, Business Week, and Gizmodo.

It can be very time-consuming to find the right hotel at the best price online.  VibeAgent solves this problem by aggregating rates, availability, and content from over 30 travel sites, and adding a layer of intelligence to match each traveler to the perfect hotel. We do the searching for you, by consolidating rates, availability, and hotel content on over 140,000 hotels, providing you access to the largest hotel selection and best room rates available online. You can use VibeAgent’s real-time price, location, and category filters to determine which hotel best suits their needs, and then see consolidated room rates from all the searched sites.

This saves you from having to visit multiple sites to find the right hotel at the best available rate. In addition, VibeAgent allows registered users to post and share hotel reviews with their own network of friends and colleagues.  We just launched the Hotelier Suite, which allows hotels to post or claim their hotel and manage their content directly on VibeAgent’s search engine.

Read the full press release on TechCrunch.com

And yes. It’s bad to the bone!

When Previews is active, any link that you hover over (based on your settings) will produce a preview icon that will overlay the linked page in an interactive window. This is very useful when making edits to multiple entries in a control panel, previewing search results, or any number of sites that offer a list/detail view.

I recently had to use the Expression Engine maintenance suite to mark 12 entries as ‘not active’. I was able to open each in the Previews window,  set the selection to inactive, and save - all without leaving the list view in the edit screen. This probably saved me 1/2 the time it would have taken to navigate back to the edit screen and finding the next entry.

Still waiting for a Safari 3.x compatible version, but it shouldn’t be too long.

I have had great success with this plugin and the Piclens (though I don’t use it nearly as often) plugin by the same folks.

I’m cruising along at work today, and I receive an email from my mother containing a link to the Wired blog stating that McCain is learning to use the Internet. Now lets be clear - My mother is not a computer genius, nor she does not work in an office with constant access to the Internet. Still, she has the knowledge and skill (partially imparted by yours truly) to get online all by herself, search for articles and news, and communicate instantly with the ones that she loves. Knowledge & skill which Presidential Candidate John McCain apparently lacks.

I’m not generally prone to political commentary - but this is a man that wants my vote to run my country. A country that is woefully in danger of being left behind in the technology arena (despite W’s promise that no child would be). The article even points to a link where his name on twitter has even been taken over by a prankster.

This is just unacceptable.

So, Yes! My Mother is better than Presidential Candidate John McCain at using the Internet. I couldn’t be more proud!

Love you MOM!!!

NOTE: Please reserve the  moma’s boy comments - I’ve heard it all before.

Picture if you will…

People around the world are lined up in anticipation of the upcoming release of the iPhone 3G. Meanwhile, those of us with our second generation phones are fervently clicking the ‘Check for Update” button in iTunes after spending the previous afternoon browsing the AppStore and downloading our favorites.

Finally this morning around 9AM, the 5th click on the update button caused my heart to skip a beat… Version 2.0 is here! It’s finally here!!! Chants of “Huzzah!” ring through the office as all of the have-iPhones prepare to update and rub all of the iPhone-have-not’s noses in the ease of the update and the cool new toys that we’ll all have (in the traditional iPhone smugness reserved for such occasions). A few even throw the gauntlet down in preparation for a Saber Battle.

Then, a dark cloud descends over the crowd as one-by-one, the horror sets in. Through the din of whispered “WTF!” - we all realize that our phones are BRICKED! I felt like Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas watching iPhone-have-nots smugly making phone calls on their plain ‘ol phones.

Way to go Apple… Probably the most highly anticipated software update to-date, and you shoot yourself in the foot… How very Windows Vista of you. Hopefully you’ll figure it out, or at least give us an idea of when we can have our phones back (at the time of this post, this was the top story on Apple’s Hot News.

Sadly, our epic Saber Battle will have to wait.