CompassionateChild.com Launched

Designer: Bowman Design, Arlington, MA

Project Description:
CompassionateChild.com was launched to provide a stronger focus on Suzanne Reese’s work in the field of Infant Massage and Compassionate Touch, while her original site, Body, Mind & Breath, will continue to focus on therapeutic massasge and bodywork.

The site uses the Joomla! content management system, with some custom components used to provide features such as a CSS drop down menu system and integration with ClassCalendar.net for schedule management.

Moving to OS X Mail app

Since moving over to the dark side last year (using a PowerBook as my primary laptop), I’ve still kept Thunderbird as my primary email client, having used it on Windows since its first release. But at some point, it seems Thunderbird stops learning when I mark a message as junk. No matter how many times I tell it a piece of mail is junk, a duplicate of that shows up in my Inbox. I tried the default OS X Mail app when I first switched to Mac, but didn’t like the way it treated my two primary IMAP accounts differently. One would put all the folders under the Inbox folder, and the other kept all the folders outside the Inbox in a separate heirarchy. However, I just realized why, and now I think OS X Mail app might work for me.

I decided to try to live with the difference between the way the two IMAP accounts were handled, and give Mail.app a shot at handling junk mail. After a couple days, I rarely receive the same piece of junk mail twice. Only problem is I keep seeing the error “This message could not be saved” when editing a new message. I assumed that it was trying to auto-save a draft, but I haven’t been too concerned and was content to ignore the message a few times, not wanting to break the flow of whatever I was doing at the time. Then I noticed that my sent mail was not being saved. A quick search found a few references to this error in relation to the Cyrus IMAP server. The suggested fix is to set the “IMAP Path Prefix” in the Advanced tab under Accounts preference settings to “INBOX”. I wasn’t 100% sure the server was Cyrus, but gave it a shot.

Not only did this fix my error, but now my two IMAP accounts are handled the same in Mail.app. The top level Inbox has a subfolder for each IMAP account, as do the top level Drafts, Sent and Trash folders. All the other folders are under a separate top level folder for each account. Very cool. Checking for new mail now requires looking in two folders right next to each other (under the top level Inbox), rather than scrolling through a bunch of folders from one account to get to the Inbox for the other. And now that I’ve got Mail.app hooked into Growl notifications, my email experience has improved for the first time in years.

It’s the little things in life that make a difference. While I’m mucking about in preferences, might as well set up a rule to highlight email from the CEO.

Jazz and Biodiesel

So What played its first book signing party. During the week of the National Biodiesel Conference, author Josh Tickell celebrated the release of his new book, Biodiesel America at the Omni Hotel in downtown San Diego. I met Josh through mutual friend Emily Richards, who introduced us after I bought my 2001 VW Golf TDI.

We had a great time at the book party, and everyone seemed to enjoy the mix of standards, a few orginals, and even a Black Sabbath cover. We made the conference blog (light jazz? never!), and Josh gave us a signed copy of his book. Thanks, Josh! It’s a great read.

BTW, we have a new live stream on the So What site. It’s a demo we recorded in late 2005.

Photos and notes from Belarus

Suzanne and Maxim in the high dependency unit.Suzanne has organized the photos from her trip with the Chernobyl Children’s Project to Belarus in October, 2005, where she stayed in one of the children’s asylums and traveled around Belarus. The photos speak for themselves; there is not much more I can say about the conditions under which these children live and suffer. Amazingly, as the photos show, the children are positive and often smiling.

For more details, please read Suzanne’s essay on dougandsuzanne.com. A brief excerpt:

Since my return from humanitarian efforts with the Chernobyl Children?s Project International (CCPI) at the Vesnova Children?s Asylum in Belarus, this past October 2005, I?ve been asked to write about my experience. For someone who enjoys writing, this has been the most difficult experience to write about. I?ve lost count of how many times I?ve started, ending a few lines later with no where to go but just to sit with the feeling and most of the time?cry.

I am incredibly proud of my wife and the work she is doing with this organization.

Oboe Launched

There wasn’t much fanfare, really. In fact, there were only a few of us left in the office at 3:00am Wednesday morning, November 30th, when the new MP3tunes site was rolled out. The east coast was just starting to come to life, and the initial articles would soon be hitting news sites. The speculation would come to an end, and the scrutiny was about to begin.

After verifying the deployment of the new site, I logged into my locker, already full of music from months of development and testing, then clicked on a track in the web interface. A brief pause, and the music started playing. Countless man (and woman) hours of development time, many meals in the office, nights and weekends away from home, all leading up to the moment when Project Oboe would become a real product. Quite satisfying, actually.

Bleary eyed, everyone still hanging around dragged themselves out the door and headed home, knowing the work was not ending, but in many ways just beginning. The Michael’s Minute would soon be published, picking up the story of Oboe where the press release left off. I spent a little more time verifying everything was working, taking note of the traffic starting to trickle in. The sun was already up as I pulled out of the parking garage and headed home.