You know you're a designer when you line up your MSN windows to the grid of whatever website you have open in the background.

Either that or you've got OCD :)

About a month ago while doing some hardcore overtime at work, I became obsessed with the Idea of being able to turn on my electric blanket remotely so that I could come home and go to sleep straight away. (a little sad I know...)

So anyway, my research on the topic eventually lead me to X10 Home Automation units, which aparently everyone but me had heard of before.

If you're one of the people who hasn't heard of it, its basically a standard protocol for controling the on/off state (among other things like dimming lights) by sending signals through your standard electrical wires.

So now that I'd found my technology, finding it in the 240v variety proved a bit trickier, but I eventually ended up at Whome.com.au who were cheaper than anywhere I could find in NZ, and have had excellent service so far.

I bought a USB control unit to plug into my iMac at home, and a few appliance/lamp modules to test it out with.

Setup was unbelievably easy after downloading Indigo 3.0 (mac based home automation software, as the unit only came with windows sofware). About an hour later I'm turning my lights (and electric blanket) on and off with my iPod touch via a web interface, and I'm a happy man :)

It sounds like when the iPhone 3G comes out there will be all kinds of people writing native apps for controlling this stuff, I look forward to automating my home further.

Thanks Vodafone.

Vodafone announced their iPhone plan pricing today, which allows you to have a whopping 1GB of data a month for the small sum of $6200 NZD (4700 USD) over 2 years.

Seriously. Wtf.

Digg: Sorry for the blogspam, the vodafone site was down at the time of posting

I'm very proud to say that Bruce Dennis (my Dad) picked up the award for Country Music song of the Year at the NZ Country Music awards a few days ago, for his song "Ain't Gonna Run".

You can listen to the winning song, as well as a few others on his myspace page here:

http://www.myspace.com/brucedennis

I'd be a bad son if I didn't also mention that CD's are available for purchase through paypal.

The talented team at Enlighten has recently been investigating jQuery as a platform for enhanced user interface design and general ajaxy goodness recently, and I've been having the odd sensation that its actually a form of programming that I enjoy (wtf?).

However I recently ran into a huge problem when I was trying to do slideUp and slideDown hide/show of a div for the new Vadmin Email Marketing System interface. The slide's seemed to be really jerky compared to a fade or other jQuery animations. It took me hours but after not much luck searching the net, I figured out what was happening, so I'm posting this in hopes it will help ease someone elses frustration.

jQuery's slideUp involves finding the starting height of a div, animating that height to zero, and then setting display: none; on the div. Unfortunately if you are familiar with the correct HTML/CSS box model, you'll know that the height of an element does not include padding, borders, or margins. So say your box is 20px tall, with 10px of padding (making it essentially 40px tall), jquery will find the 20px height, reduce it to zero, and then hide the whole div, even though there's still 20px of box padding still visible. This applies to margins and borders as well, and the only way that I could find around it is to nest a "padding" div inside the div you're trying to hide and apply your styles to that instead.

This is quite the pain in the arse for most applications of this, and I would be overjoyed if someone wrote a jquery plugin for an alternate slide that worked in a more usable manner.

I'm participating in the Relay for Life, to help raise money for the Cancer Society this Saturday. If anyone is feeling charitable, I'm accepting small donations via PayPal here:

Donations are closed now sorry, I just got back from the relay, it was awesome, and i'll post some photos as soon as I get to a card reader.

Thanks to all who donated to a good cause.

Photos here: Relay for Life 08 (Hamilton)

A few months ago I was asked to write an article for the Creative Coding newsletter.

You can read it here.

Sorry guys, I haven't updated like I thought I was going to. After taking a well deserved holiday over xmas, I've been thinking about work related things (including this site) as little as possible, and have been focusing a lot on home music recording. If I manage to fluke anything vaguely listenable, I'll be sure to post it up here.

A bit of patience and things will start to happen this year on Subcide.com :)