I’m sitting near B10 in Seattle/Tacoma International, starting my recovery from one hell of a trip. If you don’t follow my pseudo-miniblog, you’ll probably be wondering how we popped up in King County. For the last 72 hours, Jen and I have been on a non-stop, point-to-point, apartment search. Yes, that means that Team Revyver is moving to the Emerald City.

The prospect of moving to the Seattle Area has been floating for a few months¹. Before then, Seattle had never crossed my mind. However, ever since I had a particular conversation with Mr. Newsvine about his new condo earlier in the year, the seed was planted. It sprouted a few months later when Jen and I decided that we couldn’t live comfortably in Silicon Valley. Call it a fault of our personalities or our stubborn nature, but we couldn’t see me going back into the workforce to justify staying—the novelty would fade pretty quickly.

We threw around a few ideas, striking out Los Angeles and moving back east pretty quickly. All we knew is that we wanted to stay on the left coast. As we studied the prospect, we got extremely excited quite quickly but managed to keep things quiet to reduce the risk of jinxing anything (don’t laugh).

The reasons we’re moving to Seattle are two-fold, the first being what I just wrote. The second is the fact that Jen recently changed her educational focus from art to Japanese. As a quick aside, obviously people who know me personally know my love for Japanese music—the explosion of which is courtesy of Jen. Jen’s been interested in Japanese since she was 13, and has always had a love for anime and more recently, Japanese pop music. When we first met, she was already in school studying art and continued to do so while we were in the valley. However, she got more and more frustrated with it as the terms passed. It was a hard decision to make, but in the end she made the change to Japanese, putting her dream of being a magna-ka as something she can pursue after becoming fluent in the language. Baring any major roadblocks, she’ll be attending the University of Washington in the winter pursuing a degree in Japanese Linguistics.

Even with all the excitement around the move, I’m going to be leaving behind my first after-college home. I love Silicon Valley and definitely saw Jen and I settling down in the area, it’ll just take a little longer to actually happen. I’ll be leaving behind two great experiences with two great companies, awesome friends in people like Scott, Jina, Dustin, Chris, James and the atmosphere that has made living in the Bay Area so awesome. I’ll miss the ability to pass Yahoo, Intel and Google or enter Infinite Loop. I’ll definitely miss the great stores that knew us by name and the arcade that brought me back to the world of DDR.

This will be the first move that Jen, myself and our four cats make together. It’s really the start of something new for us, and as I said, we’re really excited about living in the area. This holds especially true after seeing it for the first time over the last three days.

Jen has been in awe over the surroundings, as they are completely foreign to her after growing up in Los Angeles. Myself, well, (specifically) Mount Rainier leaves me with a bit awestruck since I’ve never lived next to any majestic mountains like that living in New Jersey, Rhode Island or Southern California. We’ll be looking forward to taking everything in and maybe plan a trip to Vancouver while we’re at it. Oh, and I have to admit, I’m pretty anxious to sneak into Newsvine and Blue Flavor.

Our journey to Seattle starts around September 1st, and we both feel like August is going to go by extremely quickly².

We recently helped to launch a new Social Media Blog to talk about all things having to do with AIM and social media. It comes by means of aggregating a few previously existing blogs namely the AIM Buddy Blog, AIM Pages Blog and some of Joe Loong’s long running Magic Smoke. The premise will be to inform AIM users of new features, known bugs and running discussion points as well as looking at the landscape of social media and its impact on the community space. I’m proud to say it was designed by the AIM Product Design Group’s very own Justin Kirk master of pixels and style sheets.

-Tom

Leading up to the release of the iPhone, I joined the fray of hype by publishing a few predictions and musings. The first post, "Why iPhone won't revolutionize the mobile web landscape", was published on January 10 of this year, just a few days following the iPhone announcement at MacWorld. In it, I break rank as Apple aficionado and argue the iPhone will do little to change the way we interact with web content using mobile devices. Following is accounting of my predictions.

Content zooming isn't new.

REFUTED. While other mobile browsers have attempted content zooming, none execute it anywhere close to as well as the iPhone. Full stop.

Data costs will continue to plague subscribers.

NEUTRAL. Yes and no. While unlimited data plans are becoming increasingly common (and you can't activate iPhone on AT&T without unlimited data), "cost" refers not only to the actual cost of data but also the time required to download that data. AT&T's Edge network is painfully slow, and unfortunately I'm fairly certain they're not the only carrier worldwide with less-than-desirable data speeds.

Context is still king.

RATIFIED. Yup, dead on here. Context remains, and will remain for the foreseeable future, a most critical consideration when developing, consuming, and exchanging web content. Gaddo F. Benedetti, in his article "Mobile First, Web Second", perhaps says it best:

[W]hat sells the mobile Web is not how it is similar to the desktop Web, but how it differs. The mobile Web is a phenomenal platform to build and exploit applications. But until even we, the industry who build them, stop thinking of it as primarily "the Internet on your phone", both users and clients will see it as little more than a poor man's browser, making it a far harder ROI to sell to potential clients.

For me, this very argument remains the crux of needing a mobile web of some form or fashion. Let's take advantage of the unique opportunities afforded by the context of being mobile, rather than merely struggling to reformat the experience we're used to on the desktop.

And of the iPhone web experience specifically there has been considerable debate about whether optimized sites/apps for iPhone are necessary, but for me the heated exchange only emphasizes the importance of context. I'm not sold on the idea of creating content optimized for a single device, iPhone or any other, but I am sold on continuing to create content optimized for the mobile experience. For example, I frequent popurls.com often, and I'd much rather visit popurls.mobi -- available by and formatted for any mobile device -- as the incessant zooming in and out, scrolling, and small hit targets on the full site are almost unbearable with MobileSafari.

iPhone owners won't be the typical mobile web user.

REMAINS TO BE SEEN, though I imagine it will take a good year or two before anything that resembles critical mass is reached, if that even occurs.

A second post, "iPhone musings", was published a few weeks before the release of iPhone, as I casually pondered some of life's most important questions:

At what time in the morning or day before will I be in line to buy one?

Oops, I should have asked, Will I pay someone to stand in line for me?

How high will the bid price reach on eBay on June 30?

The highest bid price -- not asking price -- I saw was right around $900 the day after launch. It seems those who posted 24-hour listings right after buying were able to reap the biggest rewards. Prices fell soon after that, as there wasn't the shortage of phones at retail stores most of us were expecting.

How long before someone finds a way to unlock the iPhone and the first unlocked one shows up on eBay?

Not much longer. However, no cases of successfully unlocking at the SIM-card level have been reported yet.

Will the iPhone eventually cause an industry shift in advertising ... directly to the consumer instead of the operator/carrier advertising their network price/features/gimmicks?

Yes.

As for the iPhone overall -- hardware, software, user experience -- I remain completely satisfied and even in awe in some instances. The deeper I dive into the UI, the more I'm impressed with decisions made at every level within the experience of using it. Simply stated, this is one killer device.

On a site I'm making I added a table of available smilies on one of the pages in the help section (similar to the smiley list my daughter has on her blog). It's part of the site's help section. The audience will be a mix of somewhat savvy surfers and complete novices. Many I'd say won't know what a blog is. Thus I'm offering a lot of passive site support. While making this table of smilies I decided to add three of my own. It's really quite easy. Here's how I did it:

A position in Iraq and openings for a tiny coffee company in Seattle and smallish football organization in California round out some of the recent listings posted at Authentic Jobs. And don't miss the position at Jive Software, a former client and great company to work with.

Full-time (International)

• (Baghdad, Iraq) Front End Developer at SYColeman
• (London) Web and Flash developers at Ymogen Ltd.

Full-time (U.S.)

• (Virtual, US) Senior UI Designer at SitePen, Inc.
• (Culver City, CA) Senior Designer at National Football League
• (San Diego, CA) Contract Portal Developer at UCSD
• (San Francisco, CA) Flash Developer at Cisco Systems, Inc.
• (Chicago, IL - River North) LAMP Senior Web Developer at Dynamic Management Soultions, Inc.
• (Minneapolis, MN) Interactive Developer at Valtira, LLC
• (Minneapolis, MN) Web Developer at Fredrickson Communications
• (New York) Software Architect at The New York Times
• (New York, NY) Web Developer at Mogulus LLC
• (New York, NY) CSS Designer at KickApps
• (New York, NY) Director of New Media at City of New York/Parks & Recreation
• (Portland, OR) Sr. Web Designer at Jive Software
• (Seattle, WA) Sr. Web Developer at Starbucks Coffee Company

Freelance

• Web Developer at dotglu
• Experienced News or Portal Developer at Good Company
• XHTML / CSS / e-commerce Developer at Keyfax NewMedia Inc.
• CSS E-Commerce Templates at BV Software

In compliance with, what I think is California State Law, Airbag Industries LLC initiated a random drug screening late last week. Since fifty-percent of the work force are not in California, not even in the same office, administering the test was not as easy as maybe it could have been and perhaps a little less scientific than the law requires.

The results are still pending (though I suspect that Ethan has an addiction to NyQuil as his IM status is always set to: "heading to sooth this cough with a little Romulan Ale" and I don't need a masters degree in management information systems to read between those lines) as I am still waiting for at least one specimen to arrive via FedEx Ground. I hope they haven't lost it, do you know how hard it is to go through a jar of mayonnaise, sterilize it, and pack it in the absolute center in a box of those styrofoam peanuts?

When everything gets here I'll run through some tests I found on Wikipedia. I might not be a scientist but I've watched enough Miami Vice to know how to check if white powder is cocaine so I figure this other kind of drug test can't be that much more difficult.

I'm utterly swamped right now, but as I get a breather now and then -- which is a few hours at a time -- I still want to write short posts (or are they articles?) to let you know I'm alive. One of the things I'm doing is building a rather large site using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). I can't show you anything yet, but it's a good one I think. On this site I have an instance where I use the <q> element to markup an inline quote. I don't use it often so I wanted a simple solution to the matter of that element not being supported by Internet Explorer (IE) -- including IE7 if you can believe that. I started thinking about the situation.

Check out the videos that’s posted in the Prada website (Info | Production Movies). Its amazing to watch how these ingenious products are made. I love the sketches and perfume finishing video. Also check out the stencil video, they look so serious with Lab coats on, like they are in a surgery room or something!

-Valli