Maniacal Rage

Young Girl by BBCComedy

“I think I’ll just have a pint of juice.”

Parks and Recreation

• Me: Man, there's this one Doctor Who thing I want to talk to you about, but I know it's going to be 2 years before you're caught up and UGH
• Shawn Morrison: Yeah...
• Shawn Morrison: Well, I'll just have to start watching.
• Shawn Morrison: However: if there's any awesome Parks and Recreation season 2 stuff you've been dying to talk to me about, now would be a good time, we're watching it.
• Me: Is it good? I HATED the first few episodes of that show, so I gave up.
• Me: Just felt like really shitty version of The Office.
• Shawn Morrison: Yeah, the first few episodes definitely felt like a poor man's The Office, but by the end of season 1 (only 6 episodes) and especially season 2, it's found itself and it's really funny.
• Shawn Morrison: Louis C.K. has a recurring role.
• Me: Interesting.
• Shawn Morrison: Lots of good comedians make cameos.
• Shawn Morrison: It has almost become like a mix between 30 Rock and The Office.
• Shawn Morrison: It can get pretty absurd.
• Shawn Morrison: And Amy Poehler is really good in it.
• Shawn Morrison: On Netflix streaming too.
• Me: Jesus, what are you, the executive producer or something?
• Shawn Morrison: Actually, yes. It was one of the perks of our apartment lease.

Anonymous asks: "Why did you stop posting on Prettify? :("

It’s not that I actively stopped posting on Prettify* so much as it has been hard to find high-quality wallpapers and icons recently. I’m sure there are a ton out there, but with my busier schedule I don’t have as much time to devote to it.

My specific tastes and standards make it such that most user submissions don’t pass muster, which means I have to go out and find this content. Lately that’s been more difficult with the shuttering of MacThemes and the general state of free icon releases.

I do have a small backlog of items to post and I’ll continue to meter them out.

Update: It has been brought to my attention that this answer makes me sound like an elitist asshole to some. I didn’t mean for that to happen, and I think it’s probably the line “my specific tastes and standards make it such that most user submissions don’t pass muster.” So I should clarify: I’m not saying I’m some sort of special, awesome guy who has better taste than everyone else. What I’m saying is that the whole reason I started Prettify* was that most wallpaper and icon sites just take anything and everything. I wanted to create a specially curated site where things like poor antialiasing, blurriness, incorrect or missing sizes and bad alpha transparencies weren’t acceptable.

My tastes and standards in this case refer to high-quality, well-produced wallpapers and icons. No exceptions. If it doesn’t contain a size that fits 27-inch Cinema Displays, I don’t let it in. If it is grungy when viewed 1:1, I don’t let it in. If the icons look funky against white but okay on black, I don’t let it in. I’m trying to make Prettify* a place where you can find great stuff that will look great on your machine. It’s that simple. If you want anything and everything, there are a million resources for that. I’m not being a dick, I’m just trying to create a nice collection.

→ Ask me a question

Credit Where Credit is Due

People who read regularly know that over the past seven months or so I’ve been very critical of Tumblr, the service that has powered my site since 2007. Starting back in January I wrote a post titled “Time for a Change” wherein I lamented the downtime and feature bugs and announced my plans to move to a different service. Then, in March, after a period of several weeks of many outtages and lots of downtime, I snapped one morning and created a jokey-but-scathing alternative error page for Tumblr. I knew it was harsh, but I also knew that for several months my website was down all the time and it was taking its toll on me. That post received a total of 612 likes and reblogs, which told me I wasn’t the only person fed up.

This led, that same day, to me posting a followup explaining how badly I wanted Tumblr to charge for their service, and why I thought it would lead to a better, more stable platform. This post received nearly 300 likes and reblogs once again confirming I wasn’t alone.

And so it went. I continued to bitch and moan, and the service continued to suffer. After my critical posts, the entire team at Tumblr unfollowed my account (and those following me on Twitter also unfollowed there). David Karp used to like my posts regularly and give me nice comments and feedback occasionally. We exchanged emails here and there and we were on very friendly terms before all of my complaining. Jacob Bijani would occasionally @reply me on Twitter and like my posts on Tumblr. These guys are very nice and I respect all the work they do. So I felt terrible as I watched them systematically unfollow me, but at the same time I couldn’t get past the simple truth that the service they were providing was failing me on a daily basis.

“I’m not here to make friends” has crossed my mind many times throughout my career in this industry, because it’s the opposite of how I feel. I’m here to make friends. I’ve made friends with so many fantastic people over the past 10 years, and I can’t imagine my life without these folks. So when my actions directly correlate to good, smart people turning away and never looking back, it’s a hard pill to swallow (related to this is the group of amazing people at Facebook whom I’ve also offended in various ways across the years, but that’s for a different day).

I sent David several emails about the problems with Tumblr and he continued to express both sympathy and urgency and an overall “we’re working on fixing it ASAP” message, but it just didn’t feel like anything was happening. For months, uptime was a roller-coaster and features would work sometimes and not others. It was initially frustrating, then angering, then infuriating every time I saw that goofy error page. Reports of Tumblr hiring more engineers kept surfacing, but no real-world results were visible to me as a user.

Under all my complaining and joke-making was a real, genuine message: I love Tumblr and I want it to be better. I kept mentioning that I wanted to pay for the service, pay to make it better, pay to support it. I reiterated to everyone who asked why I liked the service so much to begin with that the people who were building it were doing fun, interesting things and that the likes/reblogs system was great for getting your content in front of more eyes. I continued to preface every complaint with “I love Tumblr and I want to keep using it, but…”. But eventually I ran out of energy and gave up.

So here we are in June, just three months later. And what’s the situation like now? I’m happy to report it’s much better. Downtime and outtages seem very rare these days—I’ve only seen the error page once in two months. And, just recently, Tumblr has begun adding new features and redesigning the UI again. The new Messages functionality they released last week was a huge change that I immediately appreciated (I was finally able to answer boatloads of questions privately), and the new Dashboard design is refined and svelte. The future looks very bright for Tumblr, and I’m glad I didn’t jump ship back when the skies were darkest. That doesn’t erase what happened, but the team is doing a hell of a job handling the load and getting new stuff out. Credit where credit is due.

I’m sad to have lost the potential friendships, but I’m glad Tumblr is getting better. Just last week, in an Adweek interview, David said:

You get error messages at Google, you get exceptions when accessing the Facebook API. At this scale there are way too many moving parts for it not to happen. Desktop computers still freeze. When people post a screenshot of an error page and we know that they hit refresh once and happened to get an error, that does frustrate me.

He probably wasn’t thinking of me specifically, but I’m in there. While he’s perfectly within his right to be frustrated by complaints about a service he has poured his heart and soul into—and while I understand how crushing it can feel being a software developer myself—the other side to this is that if you act like there isn’t a problem or you take too long solving it, users don’t feel like they can trust you. Tumblr is earning back that trust now, I’m just sorry for the collateral damage.

Brooklyn to Hear

• Shawn Morrison: I've just got to get this office in shape.
• Shawn Morrison: So much stuff and nowhere to put it.
• Shawn Morrison: I just want to burn it all.
• Me: I will admit that me moving from Brooklyn to hear first was a big help.
• Me: Because I cut my stuff down by like 80%.
• Shawn Morrison: Yep, Brooklyn to hear sounds like it helped.
• Me: GOD DAMN IT
• Me: I swear, lately I'm really having trouble typing.
• Me: I don't know why.
• Shawn Morrison: Do you smell burnt bacon when you type and see dead celebrities?
• Shawn Morrison: 'Cause I may have a theory.
• Me: I'm eating bacon with Elvis right now.
• Shawn Morrison: Hmm, actually that seems fine, I guess my theory wasn't correct.
• Me: Whew!
• Me: Whew!
• Me: Whew!
• Me: Whhehhhehhhwh
• Me: Wehweorihsdglksdjg

FedEx Drivers Are Islands Unto Themselves

In our current apartment building, the call-box at the front door doesn’t call us when you ring our unit number. The box has to be manually updated, and the management company refuses to come and fix it. Stacey has lived in the building three years, and in all that time ringing our unit number calls the woman who used to live here (on her cell phone). She occasionally answers, perplexed. Poor lady. In the mean time, this means no one can ring our bell to get in. This plays havoc with any deliveries for us that require a signature.

We placed a note on the front door saying the buzzer doesn’t work and requesting delivery people to call my cellphone if they need to deliver a package for either of us. For the most part, UPS drivers do this without issue. We’ve only missed two UPS packages in the past few months, and in both cases it was a temporary driver.

But FedEx. Oh, these bastards simply see the note as a challenge. We miss three out of every four FedEx packages on the first delivery attempt, and 50% again on the second attempt. Most of the time, FedEx deliveries have to be watched for like a hawk, and I have to go out and meet the driver to receive them when I see the truck pull up outside.

Every time I see a door tag I call FedEx and go through the same nonsense:
“Can they re-deliver today? I’m here.” No.
“Can I pick it up at the local center?” No, they’ll re-deliver tomorrow.
“Can you have the driver call me when he attempts to re-deliver?” No, drivers don’t have cellphones.
“Can you tell the driver to just knock on the window, we’re on the ground floor.” No, we can’t communicate with the drivers.

It’s 2011 and FedEx drivers aren’t provided with communication devices, and the main call center has no way to talk to them. They must call through the local distribution centers, who take at least an hour to get back to you, and who also refuse to give the drivers specific requests. I’m sure this is very convenient for FedEx, and it reduces the management overhead (no one can talk to the drivers, so we don’t have to worry about talking to the drivers!), but for customers it is infuriating.

scottthought asks: "Are you using the MacBook air for full time development? If so, how is the power. Do you notice any lag coming from the MacBook pro?"

I use the MacBook Air whenever I’m not at my desk, which is about 30% of the time. I’ve been absolutely astounded by how capable this machine is. I have the 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo model with 4GB of RAM, and this thing is quite the little workhorse. I’ve been able to work in Xcode 4, Photoshop CS5, Illustrator, etc, all at the same time, with no trouble. The only issue with it is screen size (Retina-size graphics don’t fit easily), but otherwise it’s fantastic.

Oh, and the battery is lasting from 4 to 6 hours in normal use for me. Incredible.

→ Ask me a question

Anonymous asks: "What do you have on your iPhone's homescreen?"

You can see an up-to-date shot of my iPhone 4 homescreen on Homescreen.me. I don’t change the layout very frequently these days.

Download the wallpaper I’m using from FiftyFootShadows.

→ Ask me a question