I have decided to shutdown my web design business, Etation Media. Over the years my interests and priorities have changed, and while I still have ideas for websites I no longer have the passion and interest in spending all my free time making them. I especially have little interest in making websites for other people for profit. My focus is now on family, friends, work, photography, and my passion of the moment.

I will still work on sites from time to time, but it’s more to help out friends or worthy causes. It was a nice idea, but it’s time to put Etation Media to rest.

Threadless is having a $9 sale on all t-shirts for today, 9/9/09. I just bought a ton. Go do it!

Threadless Sale!

I just solved a problem and thought you may find it helpful. I couldn’t access the internet and pressing the little reset button on my D-Link wired router solved the problem.

I have multiple computers connected to a D-Link wired router. One of these computers stopped being able to connect to the internet suddenly yesterday. It just stopped working correctly and couldn’t even get to Google. I ran through more steps than I needed. I first checked that the software firewall on the machine wasn’t causing a problem. I released and renewed the ip address multiple times. And I tried Windows XP’s “repair connection” feature which flushes out some of the cached data and replaces it with new data from your connection, in the hopes that outdated data had somehow become stuck in the machine.

What had me stumped was that I was getting an ip address but I could not connect to the internet. I couldn’t even connect to the router. I was receiving exactly 1 packed from the router (presumably with the ip address) and nothing more (you can see this in the connection details where it shows Sent and Receive packets). Could squirrels have chewed through part of the cat 5 cable? Is that even possible with it still running, albeit incorrectly?

In the end the solution was pressing the little “reset” button on the back of the router. I have no idea what happened to it that would keep one machine working fine and one not, but it works again… for now. I hope that helps someone else out there. Always try resetting the router. But don’t hold down the reset button because it will erase your settings and bring you back to the factory defaults before you set things like passwords. So to recap: briefly press a router’s reset button whenever something weird starts happening with your connection. If that doesn’t solve it you have bigger problems to deal with.

What if Facebook was real-life? This video shows it.

I upgraded the site and started building a new design for it. Some parts are in place. A book library section for the books I read still needs to be setup. And I will be tweaking the layout over time. The key parts are in, except for the book library. Those would be a focus on my Flickr photostream, productivity, and a “more” dropdown that displays all other main categories. Hopefully this new design and focus will make it easier for me to post quick updates. Only time will tell.

I was just tinkering with an idea for a new site design. Take a look and let me know what you think. The third one is the same as the second one, but the “eyelids” in the o’s are more prominent. I see a mascot in the o’s.

Which do you like best?

First:

Second:

Third:

Check it out. Show comes online January 7th in the evening.

Issues: The Series

I just watched a great time management lecture from the late Randy Pausch. You can find it at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758. The slides are at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy_Time_Management_UVa_2007_slides.html if you want to follow along. The video is about an hour and a half long. It offers some great tips.

I had the idea recently to add circles to SightMapper. The way it works is that if you specify a radius in miles a circle will be placed on the map when you add that sight to the map. If you don’t want a circle just leave the radius field blank. Try it out at SightMapper. Let me know what you think.

The second promo from Issues the Series. Can’t wait till the real episodes go online. Go check it out.

Youtube Link