Vectoring

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So one of my friends asked me in reference to my prior post what I meant by ‘vectoring’ .  This is a defensive philosophy popularized by Jim Bates, who had some success in Denver and Miami with the scheme, but ultimately was run out of town.

The vectoring or Run Control style of defense exists to help the entire team work towards forcing an opposing player into a zone of the field that the defense wants them to be in.  It’s kind of this odd mixture between man coverage and zone coverage, and uses outside linebackers to move players to the middle of the field while NOT making actually making the tackle.  That’s what the MLB is for.

Again, the OLBs do not typically make tackles.  Odd, but it makes sense if you think about it.  Instead of working in a zone or a man situation where one player takes a risk that can or may not success (read: attempting to make a solo tackle), the Run Control/ vectoring system basically uses OLB players as traffic cops to force a player back into the center of the field.  Basically, this increases the likelihood there will be multiple players available to attempt a tackle, and thus reduces the likelihood of missed or broken tackles.

There are some very important things you need to make this system work, however.  

You need big, strong interior linemen to occupy the offensive line.  These players rarely will get sacks, as their job is to simply hold the blockers in place from the other team, so that the linebackers are then free to funnel the play to the middle linebacker (and the rest of the team).   The defensive ends will get multiple sack opportunities coming off of the edge, mainly as a result of the interior linemen creating mismatches (double teams) on the inside.  These players must also be able to peel off on running plays and meet the runner.

In essence, you use your big strong linemen to stop runs up the middle, forcing the team to try to work their way outside of the tackle box.  As soon as they try this, your outside linebackers and corners must funnel the runner back towards the middle, where the rest of the team is waiting.  Eventually, you shut the run down completely.  At this point, your speedy defensive ends tee off on the QB because of the tight man-to-man coverage your corners put on the receivers.

Sounds logical in a way, but it requires you to have a lot of players that are hard to find.  You need two big 2 gap defensive tackles.  Good luck tracking two of those down and being able to afford them.   You need two lock-down corners that can play man-to-man for most of the game.  Again, expensive positions and hard to find the talent.  You need fast, intelligent OLBs who understand the play happening behind them and funnel the opponent accordingly. And finally, you need a tackling machine at MLB.  Everywhere Bates has gone, the MLB in his defense is a top 5 tackler that year.

So when you consider the needs of this defense and you think of the personnel that were in Tampa when he showed up, it’s kind of a head scratcher.  TB had:

  •  Smaller, 1 gap penetrating offensive linemen (1 gap = you are responsible for the gap between two opposing linemen and you tackle whatever comes through it.  2 gap = you are responsible for controlling a lineman in front of you and whatever happens to the gaps to his right or left.)
  • Smaller, faster corners who work well in zone coverage.

TB got run all over.  It was no contest.  They gave up 158.2 yards per game, dead last in the league.  The smaller defensive tackles couldn’t do their job, which made the entire system break down.  Now we’re back to a variant of the Tampa 2 for the Bucs, that take advantage of the smaller size and relative quickness of it’s players.  Over the last half of the season we saw a huge improvement as the team went back to attacking instead of reacting.

So in conclusion:

System Advantages:

  • Speed on the outside (DE and OLB) allows for effective blitzing in the pass game.- Takes away the outside run & forces teams to throw the ball into tight man coverage.
  • Meets the inside run with DTs and a MLB dedicated to run stopping assignments on most every play.
  • Swarm type defense creates multiple fumble recovery possibilities.

Disadvantages:

  • If the runner beats the defender to the sideline and turns upfield, it’s a bad, bad day.  The rest of the team is waiting in the middle of the field.
  • Requires the DTs to be above average 2 gappers, big, and patient.  Also, they cannot be relied upon to rush the passer.
  • Steep learning curve for the players.
  • In general, requires a perfect set of player types for the system to run well.

Recap: Bucs v. Dolphins

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The only people who would say that football is BACK are the nerds who want to see what their team is going to look like in the regular season.  Everyone else just (correctly) says it’s a bunch of backups and folks who aren’t going to make the team anyway.  However, for the Bucs this is a big transition year as they are flush with young talent from 3 solid drafts, a coach in his second year, and growing pressure on the franchise to show some growth and maturity.  After watching the first preseason game, I think some questions have been answered.

Last year’s offense was a bit of a hodge-podge of philosophies, with Jeff Jagodzinski being hired as the coordinator and being fired within 8 months.  When Greg Olson was promoted from QB coach to coordinator weeks before the season began, he kept most of the tenets of Jagodzinski’s offense and added a few wrinkles of his own.  However at times the playcalling seemed uninspired, and I think that can be attributed to 50% Olson not being comfortable calling HIS plays, and 50% personnel issues.

Saturday night’s game at Miami was a great glimpse into what this year’s offense will look like with the coaching staff and personnel in place. Olson wants the offensive line to establish the line of scrimmage and get Cadillac Williams and the Bucs’ ground game rolling. Williams was impressive in ripping off a pair of 8-yard runs and finishing the night with 21 yards on four carries (5.3 avg.). Once the ground game was established and used with some regularity, the quarterbacks took some big shots downfield in a vertical passing game. Josh Freeman hit Mike Williams on a 30-yard fade pass to help set up Sammie Stroughter’s 13-yard touchdown catch two plays later. Josh Johnson threw deep twice to Reggie Brown and Arrelious Benn, but was off the mark on both throws and saw his pass to Brown get intercepted. Rudy Carpenter threw deep down the middle to Chris Brooks, who hauled in a 31-yard pass before fumbling the ball – and the game – away with just over two minutes left in regulation. Freeman finished the game 4-of-4 for 53 yards and one touchdown and that’s exactly what Olson wants to see. If everything goes as planned, Williams’ running will set Freeman up for manageable passing downs, high-percentage passes and a couple deep shots, and touchdowns instead of field goals inside the red zone.  This offense isn’t going to be that much different from what we saw when Gruden was in town, honestly.  I think the main difference will be that Olson is a bit more patient than Gruden ever was, and I think that’ll lend to a more balanced attack.

The defense looks to be a whole lot of the same if you are used to seeing mostly base cover 2 defense.  Gone is the ‘vectoring’ style of defense that essentially funnels running plays to the MLB and forces corners to play straight up man the entire game.  This passive style of defense relies of big, strong players to keep everything in the middle of the field, and frankly those players just don’t exist on the Bucs roster currently.  So, we’ve gone back to the older style of smaller, attacking, penetrating down linemen with mostly zone behind it.  It’s hard to really know what sort of schemes we’ll see going forward since some personnel were missing (Talib, their best corner, being the main one), so I’m curious to see how much we see man coverage this year at all.  My guess is we’ll see a very small amount, mostly on plays where we see nickel backs on the field and Ronde Barber bliztes from the slot (that’s still one of their favorite plays).  The Bucs did a good job of swarming to the ball, got some pressure on the QB, and forced a few turnovers.  However, the Dolphins were able to run up the middle early on at will.  I think the interior linemen will be tested early and often until they can prove they can stop that sort of thing.  It was the weakness of the defense last year, and something tells me it will be early on this year as 2 of the top 3 DTs are rookies.  It’s going to take some time for them to get accustomed to the speed of the league.

Overall, I think that the Bucs had a lot to like about their first game.  They actually dominated physically and the first team offense looked really crisp in some awful weather.  Freeman was 4/4 with a TD and Caddy was running hard.  However, I think one thing you’ll quickly notice about this team is the HUGE dropoff from the first team to the second team.  This happens a lot with younger squads who are rebuilding.  I think if you look around, the Bucs are maybe one or two players away from having a squad that could, in theory, challenge for a playoff spot.  The problem is that they have no depth behind the core they’re building.  So, if and when a player goes down with injury, you’re going to see a huge drop off in production.  God help them if Freeman gets hurt or another player without a solid backup goes down.  If you look at the Bucs roster on paper, they have enough talent to compete with anyone.  However, the lack of depth points to a team that will be lucky to win more than 6 or 7 games.  I think they’re a year away.

A few other notes from the game this weekend:

  • Freeman looks in control. 100%. Good movement in the pocket, doesn’t try to run first. Eyes downfield.
  • It’ll be interesting to see how much we see the FB dive with Earnest Graham playing at FB full time now.  He could be a valuable weapon.
  • Interior run game looks a lot better than sweeps and tackle runs.
  • Mike Willliams will be a star in the NFL. Write it down.
  • Derrick Ward is terrible. I think Kareem Huggins will beat him out for the #2 RB job. Ward was the ‘speed guy’ in NY, but can’t get outside in Tampa. Defense strings it out and kills the play every time.  He has no burst and no power, either.
  • The Bucs were flagged seven times for 58 yards.
  • TB slowly is becoming one of the best ST teams in the league. Punting and kick return teams will take pressure off of a young offense and put them in position to put points on the board.

What’s Up?

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So, more big news.

Last week was my first at What’s Up Inter­ac­tive, an Atlanta web mar­ket­ing agency. I’ll be han­dling a big chunk of their front end devel­op­ment for some very impres­sive clients. As fate would have it, another one of the front end guys is my buddy Paul, so it’s nice to col­lab­o­rate with a famil­iar face.

I don’t remem­ber ever being as eager or excited to start some­thing as I have been with this oppor­tu­nity (Prob­a­bly explains me lit­er­ally stop­ping work at one place Monday and start­ing at the other on Tues­day!). I’m really look­ing for­ward to a clean slate, and a chance to work with some blue chip clients at a larger company. 

Between the engage­ment & this, it’s been an event­ful few months. But in a very, very good way.

Making the switch (again?)

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Over the past few weeks, I have real­ized that I love MobileMe when I’m using my iPhone or my laptop, but I absolutely hate it when I am using these ser­vices via my web browser. 

You see, the MobileMe ser­vice basi­cally offers a hand­ful of things that you can get on the web for free, but they have done a good job of pack­ag­ing them into a Mac/iPhone cen­tric way that just ‘makes sense’. If you change a con­tact on your iPhone, it is nearly instantly reflected on any other com­puter you have. Add or remove a cal­en­dar entry? It’s reflected on any number of machines that you use. Change a book­mark on your laptop? It’ll be changed on your work com­puter, iPhone, and any other com­puter you use next time you use it. This is a really amaz­ing thing that has, over the past six or so months, become some­thing I have taken for granted. 

It goes with­out saying that it’s also a push-​based IMAP mail ser­vice. On top of that, you are able to sync things like saved pass­words, mail set­tings, ftp logins/passwords (thanks to the Panicguys!), and more. All of these fea­tures, along with a 20gb web stor­age space that I gen­er­ally store lots of things on (gen­er­ally doc­u­ments I might need while out and about but aren’t what I’d call ’secure’ either), and $99 for a year isn’t that bad of a deal.

Failure to deliver

While I am at work, I depend on the me.com web­site to allow me to check my email, update con­tact infor­ma­tion, access files from any­where, and I expect to be able to do this reli­ably and quickly. That’s where the prob­lem lies. The web-​based soft­ware is just a mess. Things take dozens of sec­onds to load at times. The UI is not intu­itive – there is no feed­back when you click on some but­tons, but others do have feed­back. There is no rich text editor for com­pos­ing emails. Some­times, when you read an email then return to the mail index, adja­cent emails are now marked as read. Simple things like “keep me logged in for two weeks” does not work reli­ably so I am forced to log in repeat­edly over the course of the day. These may be first world prob­lems, but when you are paying money for some­thing, you expect it to work at least as well as the free com­pe­ti­tion does. 

Hon­estly, I’ve always been strug­gling with iTools, .Mac, MobileMe (what­ever you want to call it). It always sounds so much better than it actu­ally could be, but it’s gen­er­ally just good enough to make you stick around. MobileMe suc­ceeds every­where but the web-​based space. Using MobileMe mail, con­tacts, etc is a pain. They have tried too hard to shoe­horn desk­top metaphors into a web based world and it simply doesn’t work well. I think that Apple has invested way too much into sell­ing the plat­form and using it to push OS X to turn away from this approach and come up with a fast load­ing, easy to use solution.

Switching to free services

With all of that com­plain­ing out of the way, I have con­sid­ered switch­ing from the MobileMe ser­vice to free ser­vices like Gmail (using google apps to check my daniel@danielandrews.com mail), Google Cal­en­dar, Drop­box for file sync between plat­forms, and saving myself $99 a year. Then of course I start think­ing about issues with Gmail’s IMAP (which they have kind of addressed with more advanced IMAP con­trols), the fact that I would no longer be able to sync key­chains, Trans­mit favorites, desk­top wid­gets, or use Omni­Fo­cus the way I cur­rently do (I cur­rently use the iDisk to sync Omni­Fo­cus between my laptop, my iMac, my iPhone and my work computer).

What is the solution?

Again, first world prob­lems to be sure, but I am torn. Is saving $99 and get­ting a better web expe­ri­ence a fair trade in exchange for a slightly worse expe­ri­ence on the desk­top and iPhone? If I aban­don the push ser­vices of MobileMe, I would only be able to sync my book­marks, cal­en­dars and con­tacts when I man­u­ally sync my iPhone to my laptop (which I do not do very reg­u­larly). I spend 8+ hours a day at work using web-​based solu­tions to com­mu­ni­cate with people, and the MobileMe web solu­tion just isn’t cut­ting it. But I also spend a lot of time on my com­put­ers at home and using my iPhone out and about. I’ll prob­a­bly wait and see what Apple has to offer at Mac­world tomor­row and make a deci­sion shortly there­after. I could see fur­ther inte­gra­tion with iLife 09 (assum­ing some­thing like that is announced), fur­ther inte­gra­tion with the iPhone 2.3 or iPhone 3.0 soft­ware, or simply promised improve­ments when Snow Leop­ard comes out this year.

So after all this rant­ing, no solu­tion just yet. Stay tuned to the saga.

iPhone Apps

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Allow me to be the last blog owner in the galaxy to write a post about the iPhone apps that I’m using, and a few that I’d love to see come to fruition in the near future. I’ve been really impressed with the first batch of software released last week, but a few have really stood out:

Twinkle – Twinkle is a really cool Twitter app that also shows you folks around you that are posting to the service. Stalker-ish, but not too terribly much as it only gives the city and how many miles (roughly) they are from you. The UI is kind of lame, but overall a nice product.

Facebook – the 1.0 release was kind of weak, but by 1.1 they have really put out a solid version that quickly allows you to update your status, look at other’s profiles, and upload photos and whatnot. Pretty cool stuff if you’re a Facebook user.

OmniFocus – I have a tendency to forget things if I don’t write them down and keep them super organized. OmniFocus for the Mac lets me quickly enter my thoughts, assign them to contexts, and remind myself to get things done when they need to be done. Having a mobile interface for the same program is excellent, as it insures I can always enter those random thoughts into my OF database.

BofA – The Bank of America app isn’t all that pretty, but it does what it’s supposed to do, and rather quickly. A UI refresh (it currently looks just like the mobile version of the website) will surely improve that.

Remote – A cool app that allows you to control any iTunes installation on your LAN, or an AppleTV if you have one. Great for when I’m playing video games and want to change the tunes on my Mac.

Last.fm – Streams music over WiFi, EDGE, or 3G to your iPhone from the excellent Last.fm service. Unfortunately, as of now it doesn’t submit songs played thru your iPod to the online service (yet). Fingers crossed on that.

Yelp – Yelp is an excellent service for finding ratings and info on local restaurants. This application finds your location and shows you the top rated places around you. Very cool, especially when you’re lacking inspiration on where to eat and need a nudge in the right direction.

Exposure – Nice app by Frasier Spears (of FlickrUploadr fame) that allows you to browse your Flickr library and view and comment on other’s. Very nice app.

NYTimes – A very straightforward app that allows you to browse the NYtimes site and customize what type of news you see when you launch the app. It has a customizable bottom row of icons, much like the customizable iPod app’s buttons. If you don’t care about political news and want to see an editorial menu items instead, so be it.

Shazam – If you’ve ever been out and wondered what the song on the radio or in the store was, Shazam can help. Simply open the app and press the ‘tag this song’ button, and after about 20 seconds, Shazam will record the audio, send it to their server, analyze the waveforms, and send back a result. I’m yet to stump this app with any songs in my iTunes library. It’s truly amazing how far technology has come.

Other apps I’m using

Here are some other great applications I’m using on my iPhone right now. Some of these I either don’t use much, or are rough around the edges and need some work.

  • AIM
  • Twitterific
  • NetNewsWire
  • Instapaper
  • Jott
  • CheckPlease
  • Mobile News
  • Scribble
  • SportsTap
  • Loopt

Apps I’d love to see

Amazon.com barcode scanner – Let’s say that I’m at my local Target, Barnes and Noble, or some other retail establishment. I’m browsing around, and see a book that I’d really like to get, but not today (for whatever reason), or that I just cannot carry at the moment. It would be amazing to have an app that let you use your iPhone’s camera to scan the barcode, and either a) buy it now or b) add it to your wishlist. Someone would make a killing off of the referral cash alone.

Fantasy football app – Once fall gets here, I will be playing Yahoo! Fantasy Football. I would love an app (even if it’s only for the paid members) that allows you to quickly see lineups, player news, and league standings.

And Finally…

I’m really excited to see where the software development community takes us as the platform matures, and competition begins to spring up. I think that the iPhone OS will be the dominant Apple OS within a few years, and this is going to be a huge cash cow for them. Moreover, I can’t fathom what type of amazing technology is going to be in our hands within the next 5 or so years. The iPhone 3G and the iPhone OS 2.0 is just the beginning.

The Definitive Dominican Republic Review

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Well, we’re back in town after a delightful weeklong trip to the Gran Bahia Pricipe Ambar hotel in the Dominican Republic. Michelle and I have been talking about taking a ‘real’ vacation for quite some time, and after much research, saving, and rushing around at the last minute, we were on our way. We finally decided on the Dominican because of the amazing deals for the all-inclusive resorts down there, and even thought it was inexpensive, it wasn’t cheap. Everything down there was top notch – the service, the rooms, and the activities.

The resort

map-tn.jpgThe resorts in Punta Cana are on the easternmost tip of the island, and basically they’re the only things around. There are a handful of developed towns out there, but not much else yet. Most of the towns in the eastern Dominican exist only as a place for the hotel staff members to have somewhere to live. This is actually kind of a good and bad thing – good because despite the massive resort, you can walk down the beach a mile or so and you are completely to yourself. It’s bad because other than the activities at the resort, you’re pretty much on your own. There isn’t really a town to speak of within a few hour’s drive, so the activities at the resort are basically what you get. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to do, but I didn’t really hear anyone talk about leaving the area very often.

The flight from Atlanta to Punta Cana is only about 3 and a half hours. We had a layover in Ft. Lauderdale, but a direct flight would have clocked in under 4 hours easily. At the airport – which is one of those really neat ones where you get to walk out on the runway after you land – we easily found a cab driver (there were dozens there waiting when we landed – look for the guys in pink polo shirts) who spoke some English, and happily drove us to the resort for $33. Considering it’s nearly 30 miles, that’s not a bad deal at all. As soon as you get to the resort, an employee takes your baggage and shows you to the front desk, where you are checked in, given room keys and are taken by a little cart to your room. We lucked out bigtime, as we were told that we had been upgraded from the Punta Cana resort to the nicer Ambar section of the resort. While the word ‘upgrade’ is always a nice thing to hear, I was honestly not too sure what that actually meant at the time.

punta-cana-map-tn.jpgOne of the things that confused me the most before our trip was the layout of the resorts at Gran Bahia Principe. Gran Bahia Principe is the name of the hotel chain, much like Hilton or whatnot. Within this chain there are 3 actual connected but separate hotels: Gran Bahia Principe Punta Cana, Gran Bahia Principe Bavaro, and Gran Bahia Principe Ambar. Visitors to any section can take advantage of most of the facilities of the other resorts, with one major exception: Ambar guests belong to the ‘adults only’ section of the resort, and as such have their own restaurants, pool (with swim-up bar), beach area, lobby area, and 24 hour room service.

Once I realized what we had been upgraded to, I was pretty excited. Closer to the ocean, our own pool, and adults only? Not bad!

Things to see

The resort is pretty well secluded from the rest of the island. There are a handful of other resorts in the area (apparently Punta Cana is the largest concentration of rooms in the Caribbean region), but other than the actual resorts, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot to do in the area. That means that most of the things to see are on the beach or around the resort itself. The beaches are absolutely beautiful, and while they can be crowded in places, it’s really simple to escape to a more secluded area. Michelle and I actually took a few walks away from the main resort, and within a half mile or so, there were only a dozen or so folks visible. Another mile or so and you’re the only person on the beach.

One of the first thing you’ll notice when you’re at any of the Gran Bahia Principe resorts is the shipwreck about 200 yards offshore. This is the remains of a Russian freighter named the Astron, which was scuttled there a few decades ago. The entire shoreline is pretty shallow in this area due to a pretty extensive reef/coral system, but near the shipwreck the water can’t be more than a few feet deep – in some places it was only 2 or 3 feet deep 100 yards out.

The architecture is really beautiful at all of the Gran Bahia Principe resorts. It’s a mixture of Caribbean & Victorian styles, but everything is kept absolutely spotless, and doesn’t look very old at all. I’m fairly certain the resort is no more than 5 years old, and it certainly shows. Our room had tile floors, marble everything in the bathroom, a garden tub, a stand up shower, and a separate stall for the toilet. It was a really big bathroom compared to some I’ve had. About the only complaint was a relatively small TV. It was probably only 25 inches, and I kind of expected something nicer. But it wasn’t that big of a deal, as there weren’t that many TV stations worth watching. I doubt we would have even noticed it if it didn’t rain all day during the fourth day, but it would have been nice if they had HBO or another movie channel in English to watch. TBS gets old really fast.

Things to do

boats.jpg

The resort we stayed at had a lot of things to do, and most were free. Everyone could take advantage of the ‘all inclusive activities’ such as snorkeling, banana boat rides, catamaran rides, kayaking, and even scuba diving lessons. Each person could do one of these activities per day, and it was as simple as giving your room number to an attendant and you were on your way. Michelle and I tried to kayak out into the reef near the shipwreck, but turned back once we realized we were most likely going to die when the waves nearly threw us on top of rocks.

There are also a lot of activities to do that cost money. Things like parasailing, scuba diving, island tours (there are a few large islands a hundred or so miles offshore that you can visit), deep sea fishing, speedboating, massages, mountain excursions (there is a mountain range roughly 100 miles from the coast), and things of that nature. We wanted to take an island trip, but never really got around to it. Next time.

Because it’s an all-inclusive resort, all of your meals are included, and most of them are buffet-style. Even those meals were pretty good, but slightly hit or miss, mainly due to the fact that someone from another country is inevitably going to cook things slightly different than what you’re used to where you’re from. For every week that you stay at the resort, you get to make reservations at smaller ’speciality’ restaurants. These are more traditional ’sit-down’ places that allow you to place your order at the table and get waited on hand and foot.

The speciality restaurants we went to were: BBQ (steaks, chicken, etc), Italian, French, and Japanese. All of them were pretty good, with the Japanese probably being my favorite. The staff at all of the restaurants were fantastic, and most of them spoke english fairly well. It’s funny, most of the places I eat in America didn’t seem to have staff that came close to what we got while down there.

In the middle of the resort are most of the restaurants, an open air theater which had nightly shows, and two of the lobby areas. The lobbies are neat because they’re open all of the time, have a bar, and have lots of comfortable seats in and outdoors. If the weather is crappy, you’ll probably end up here to hang out for a while. Honestly, even if the weather is nice, you’ll probably be here at some point too. There’s usually some sort of entertainment going on (singer, pianist, etc) which contributes to the nice, laid back atmosphere.

At the front of the resort, there is a market area that has a neat open area courtyard for night time entertainment, a casino, a bunch of shops, and some open-air carts that are in the middle of the courtyard. Beware of these guys. They’ll try every trick in the book (most of them hilariously awful) to try to get you to buy their crap. Stick to the stores that ring the market and you’ll not only avoid the high-pressure sales, you’ll probably find better stuff to buy.

By the Numbers

Some number-centric estimations:

25% of the men wear speedos. This was a huge cultural shock. Even more so, around the same percentage of the women were topless. By the end of the trip, this wasn’t a big deal, but I must admit that the first few days were interesting. Us Americans aren’t used to turning around and seeing a topless sunbather.

The make up of nationalities went something like:

  • 20% American or Canadian
  • 20% Eastern European
  • 40% Central American / South American
  • 10% French
  • 5% British
  • 5% Other (Chinese, Italian, German)

The drive from the Punta Cana airport is around 30 minutes.

100% of the salespeople were high-pressure. Avoid them at all costs.

1 US Dollar equals roughly 30 Dominican Republic pesos. While this sounds great, it’s not as amazing as you’d think. Most things cost about the same as they do here in the USA. For example, a t-shirt is around $10-$15. However, they do accept US Dollars everywhere, which saves the hassle of changing money at the airport or the resort.

What I learned

sunset.jpg

I was really happy with how ’seamless’ the entire week went, but that’s not to say that there weren’t any snags. I made a few mistakes based on either me being too lazy to read up on the resort’s policies, or just sheer chance. First of all, all guys should bring a fair amount of business casual type clothes with them, as the dress code at all of the restaurants lean that way. I made the mistake of bringing only one pair of khakis, and was wearing them almost every night at dinner. Another little tip is to bring your own insulated cup. While the bars are ‘all you can drink’, they give you drinks in fairly small cups, so your tasty fruity drinks get melty pretty fast. We picked up two of these insulated cups from target for about $9 each, and they were well worth it.

We also learned that if you don’t want to spend a lot of money (other than the costs associated with airfare, taxi, and the actual hotel), you don’t have to spend a dime. We spent $33 on a taxi each way from the airport to the resort and back, and $10 each to enter the country. That’s it. We bought some souvenirs for family members, but the only real costs were under $100.

The only news you’re going to get is CNN International. While it’s a great network, you get absolutely no weather information or local news. On our fourth day, a huge rain system roughly double the size of the island blew through, sending us indoors for the entire day. We were completely oblivious to what was going on until we ponied up $12 at the local internet cafe to look up the weather on the web. The moral of the story is: check the weather online once you’re there. It’s the only portal to local news you’re going to get.

Overall impressions

I was floored by this place. I honestly didn’t know exactly what to expect at an all-inclusive resort, but these guys set the standard by which all other Caribbean resorts will be judged in my mind. Even if the service wasn’t excellent, the rooms weren’t great, or the beaches weren’t fantastic, I’d be okay with it because of the great deal we got. But the fact that we were able to book a fairly inexpensive vacation and have it be one of the best weeks I’ve ever had makes this place even more special to me. I’ll definitely be recommending any of the Gran Bahia Principe resorts to people, but if you don’t have children I do suggest you go with the Ambar section. It’s only $30-$50 more a night, and it’s much less crowded, there are no kids, and you get 24-hour room service for free (even though I didn’t take advantage of that).

I think the best endorsement you can give a place is to say that you’re going back again. And without a doubt in my mind, I will be back at the GBP resorts in Punta Cana again.

You can find all of the photos that we took while in Punta Cana on my Flickr page.

Deception.

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So, a funny thing happened to me last night. While going through my Mint site statistics, I noticed that one particular site was bouncing quite often – all while trying to visit one specific page. The way my blog is set up, any 404 redirects back to my main page, so the only information I really had to go on was the referring site. After clicking on this site and going through a few of the pages, I noticed that it was a coffee / restaurant review site, specifically for the Orlando, Florida region. Keep in mind that I attended college at Full Sail roughly 3 years ago, so I do have contacts down there. More specifically, one of our projects involved making a website for Palmano’s, which is a small coffee shop down in Winter Park.

As it turns out, the site that was linking to my site was actually linking to the location of a testing page that I had accidentally left up for about six months. You see, the Palmano’s folks had contacted me last spring regarding revamping a lot of what we had made for them while at school. Their host had gone down, and they lost their entire site. They wanted me to help them get their site back up (if I still had it – which I did) add some features, tweak some text, add some new photos, and things of that nature. I told them that I would gladly do that for them, and I did have the files they needed, but I did not have the sql database backed up. If the server was in fact down, I’d have to re-create all of that for them, and it’d take me maybe a work day to make all of the changes they wanted. I told them that would cost them, they said okay, and away we went!

Fast forward to July of last year. By this time, I had re-created everything and gotten most of the content back where it needed to be. I had also sent the clients some hosting options, told them what it’d take to get this thing live, and thought we were on our way to essentially getting the site back to where it was 2 years prior. As soon as money was mentioned, all I got was radio silence. No replies to my emails, and even to my phone calls. I had obviously seen this behavior before from people, and gave it a few weeks and tried again. Still nothing. At this point, I figured I’d just let it go and move on. If they wanted to continue working, I’d demand payment in full and we’d move forward from there. If not, I guess I was out a few hundred bucks.

I didn’t hear anything from them until I emailed the son of the owner (the guy I had been working with when I lived in Orlando, and the contact I had when I was getting things set up for them again) last night. I basically told him that I noticed a site was linking to my site, and I’m not sure how that happened, but I have since deleted the test pages and made a meta refresh that will send traffic to a google search for their company. Additionally, I offered to redirect it somewhere else if they so desired. I just figured this was a simple mistake, and we could sort this out quickly and easily.

No reply.

I decided to see what would happen when I typed in the client’s address. Wouldn’t you know it, it redirected to my site as well. This, of course, set off a nerve. Someone could have made a mistake and linked to my personal site, but it takes a real set of balls to log into your registrar and redirect it to a testing location when you have stopped replying to their emails and phone calls. Simply amazing. Torn, I wasn’t sure how to react. Part of me wanted to do something vindictive, and the other figured I should remain as professional about this as possible (although this could hardly be considered professional work). I decided to strike a compromise and simply link the redirected location on my website to a starbucks.com search for locations in Winter Park, Florida. I also sent an email to the client in question outlining how unprofessional they have been with me from the outset, but this was obviously the icing on the cake.

The money is certainly not the issue. At this point, it’s been a year since we got started and it’s only a few hundred dollars. I just find the fact that they chose to go behind me back and link to my personal site hilarious/infuriating (if that’s possible). These guys seemed sketchy from the outset, but I certainly didn’t anticipate anything like this.

Anyway, if you’re ever in Winter Park Florida and need to quickly know where a Starbucks is, don’t waste your time fiddling around with their search interface. Just type in palmanos.com!

UPDATE: Looks like they have changed their DNS info. It was fun while it lasted! To at least see what the client saw, you can go to http://www.danielandrews.com/palmanos/ – where he had palmanos.com pointing to.

Full Sail University, Revisited

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A little over a year ago, I wrote a review on Full Sail University’s Digital Media program. It was met with a minimal amount of controversy, with a few folks saying that the school was a joke, that Full Sail University doesn’t provide the necessary tools for success, and they are now in huge amounts of debt with nothing to show for it. I’ve had more time to think about things since then, and figured I’d write a follow-up about some of the pros and cons of the Full Sail University Digital Media program. Despite some of the criticism I’ve read, I’ve never really seen how this differs from any other college — a student will get out of the institution a result proportionate to what they put in. The ones who complain are the ones who are not talented, are not dedicated, or have unrealistic expectations of what any college education can do for them. Every student I went to school with that actually had the talent, the desire to learn, and put the time into the classes did great and are all in career-related fields now. Some are web designers or developers, some work in the video field, and others are involved in the video game industry. In all cases, these guys and gals showed tremendous amounts of initiative throughout the 13 months that we were at school and now have good jobs to show for it.

However, if you are an aspiring designer, videographer, or (insert creative career choice here), it should be noted that no school can teach someone to be creative — and Full Sail is certainly no exception. I think schools like SCAD are better suited to traditional artists or aspiring artists who are looking to break into the design field. Schools like that exist to spend more time and invest in your development as a designer/artist, and Full Sail exists to teach people how to harness the massive number of tools at their disposal to be successful in the design industry. That’s not to say that creative people didn’t come out of Full Sail – quite the contrary. There were a lot of amazingly talented designers that I went to school with — but I think the point is that these people were quite talented before they even walked through the doors.

Admissions

That’s the difference between Full Sail and other design schools in my mind – Full Sail will essentially let anyone with a pulse (and a decent credit line) through the door, portfolio/talent be damned. This dilutes the talent pool, harms their long term reputation, and will eventually make it difficult for them to appeal to young designers who want to get into the DM field quickly with a robust skillset. The people who graduate from Full Sail and succeed are the ones who were talented before they showed up, and I’m not sure their program is set up (or will ever have the capability) to allow up-and-coming designers that simply need refinement the time to blossom and be at their best. If they continue to have no admissions requirements, no quality control mechanisms, and continue to recycle former students as teachers (lab instructors mainly), the number of graduates who feel like they ‘got their money’s worth’ will remain quite low. With all of that said, I still feel the school is worth every penny if you are a very specific type of person — one who already has at least moderate amounts of design ability but lacks the knowledge needed to get all of that creativity out there. Full Sail’s Digital Media program definitely will empower you to take your ideas and express them in any number of fields — with careers involving motion graphics, video production, 3d animation, flash development, and web design & development being just a few. If you’re that type of person, you can handle long days (8+ hours a day of school is the rule, not the exception), and don’t mind living in Orlando, this is a school that will have you in the design world within a year and a half. And a lot of schools cannot say that.

Placement

I think the one thing that has never sat well with me was this unrealistic expectation that Full Sail was supposed to ‘place’ you in a job related to your field of study. All colleges offer some sort of job placement or career department, and I feel it’s any university’s best interest to help with job placement, as it reflects on their ability to educate their students. However, when the graduates stop taking the initiative and use the placement department as the solution rather than a tool, problems obviously will begin to show. It would seem to me that a disproportionate number of Full Sail grads have unrealistic expectations for what this department can do and should do, and when they are unable to help them find a job in the city of their choice in the field of their choice, they blame the school for the failing. As long as Full Sail touts this program to incoming students, they will continue to experience this problem, and get undue criticism from jobless students. It should be noted, of course, that most of the people with these complaints are not Digital Media, 3D, Video Production or Game Design students. The vast majority of these complaints are from the students that make up the recording arts program. If you’re a designer, or really a non-RA student, you have little to worry about. You will easily find a job right out of school if you have a good enough skillset.

Long story made very, very short: I do not regret going to Full Sail one bit. I met some amazing folks that I learned a lot with, and I know that I would not be where I am today without that education. During those short 13 months in Orlando, I learned ten times what I learned at the Art Institute of Atlanta. I’m not sure if that’s a huge plus for Full Sail or a huge negative for AIA, but I can say that I came out much better prepared for a career dealing with digital media after my graduation from Full Sail.

Leopard.

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In case you didn’t know, Apple’s newest OS is due to be released this weekend. I pre-ordered my copy, but will probably wait a few days before installing, just to make sure it doesn’t melt peoples computers or anything. However, there are a few new features I am really excited about with the forthcoming update to OS X:

Font Auto-Activation

Automatically activate fonts as you need them. When an application requests an installed font that’s currently disabled, Leopard activates that font and keeps it active until the requesting application quits.

This will negate the need for a lot of people to have to use separate applications just to manage and automatically activate fonts when working on larger projects with many different font sets.

Mail Data Detectors

Act on information in Mail immediately. Mail automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.

This is something I miss from Gmail, so it will be nice for this to be in Apple Mail.

Notes

Write handy notes you can access from anywhere — including graphics, colored text, and attachments. Group notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes that automatically group them. Your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, so you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC.

Notes & To-do lists synced between my home and work computer, and my iPhone? Not bad!

PDF Manipulation in Preview

Re-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.

I work with PDFs a decent amount at work. Acrobat Professional is garbage. This will allow me to use a bad application less. I like that.

Quick Look

Look inside any document without launching an application. Use Quick Look with documents, images, songs, and movies and get a large-size preview of the file. Flip through multipage documents, preview movies, even add images to iPhoto. You can use Quick Look in Finder, Mail, and Time Machine.

Description says it all. This will save me tons of time trying to find images and documents I need.

Spaces

Organize your activities into separate spaces and easily switch from one to another. Make a space for work or play. Choose from a number of convenient options that make moving from space to space fast and easy.

I used to use VirtueDesktops, but it’s lack of OS-level integration made it kind of flimsy when working with applications assigned to certain virtual ’spaces’. This should work a lot more cleanly.

Spotlight Network Indexing

Hopefully this will be able to index non-macintosh networked computers. If Leopard can index our windows server at work (which has all of our files) that would be worth the price of admission alone.

.Mac stuff

Back to my Mac (basically like Remote Desktop, but it lists the files of your remote mac in the file sources menu just as if it were a locally networked machine), .Mac synching of Dock items & System Prefs should make using more than one mac even easier.

Finder Improvements

See the path of a file when you view it in the Finder. Just choose Show Path Bar from the View menu and the path is visible at the bottom of the Finder window. You can also drag files to any location in the Path Bar.

Welcome to 1999. Finally.

Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes.

This should be outstanding as well.

Overall, it looks like a pretty impressive upgrade, but not earth-shattering (or Vista-killing) yet. I plan on upgrading within a week or so of it coming out, so I’ll post my thoughts then.

Refresh.

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I recently came across a really interesting article about Firefox 3’s upcoming UI refresh. That may sound boring to some, but to a interface snob like myself, knowing the Mozilla team is hard at work customizing the underlying XUL to allow for deeper system integration makes me a very happy person. One of the main problems with Firefox, especially on the Mac, is that it feels out of place, slow, and pretty ugly compared to other system applications. I’m a Camino user for this very reason, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about some of the fantastic extensions for the Firefox client (Camino, while based off of the same rendering engine as Firefox, does not support extensions). If they are able to modify the UI to match 10.5 (and Vista, XP, Ubuntu, etc) and speed things up a bit in the process, I think a lot of people who are Camino users might switch to Firefox – myself included. Developers are already working on making things like submit buttons, checkboxes and textareas respect the OS look and feel, so by the time version 3 ships, we could be in good shape.

Why is UI consistency important? From the author:

Fitting in to the visual appearance of the native operating system may seem like a reasonably obvious decision, but it certainly isn’t one that every cross-platform application or windowing toolkit makes. For instance RealPlayer (image) uses a custom appearance across operating systems, as do applications built using Java’s Swing windowing toolkit (image). Personally I think a unified cross platform UI results in applications that at best feel foreign everywhere, and at worst don’t even feel like real applications. 

He hits the nail on the head when he mentions that when using a default skin, at best the application looks out of place everywhere it goes. At worst, it looks like a flimsy Java app that nobody really wants to use. It makes the application easier to use and feel comfortable with when it fits into the operating system’s UI paradigm. This will be a big step in that direction.

I think it really depends on how far they go with it, and what parts they focus on, coupled with the limitations of Firefox as a non-native app. As long as we’re dealing with a cross-platform application, it’s pretty doubtful it will ever match the application (not rendering) speed of a Safari or Camino. But based on the few screenshots, it is looking promising. Firefox 3 is still a ways off, so we’ll see how this turns out.

Read more about the UI refresh here.