CV of Justin Lang

As I was driving into work this morning, I heard on WTOP that Virginia is going to make a stiffer penalty for underage kids that have a blood alcohol level of .02 or higher to lose their drivers license for one year automatically.  .02 BAL is about the equivalent of 1 drink.  One DRINK!  I can see the argument on either side, .02 is nothing. But why not any traces of alcohol and make it illigeal.  First of all, underage drinking is illegal on a national level.  so with a BAL of .02, the kid has had something with alchol in it, thus he is “drunk” or has had a drink.  So why not make it .01 or higher?

The other side could be that the kid took something with alcohol in it that is leagal, such as medican or something along those lines.  No that one is a tough one that I am not going to even TOUCH!  Just know it out there.

Anyways, my flip side of the story is that I was reading an article out of time magazine this morning waiting for the coffee to start up about Steve Carell and 10 questions people asked him.  Funny stuff!  Well I finished that and flipped the page and read another article with the headline, “Society: Drinking Do it With Your Kids, They won’t get tipsy if they toast with the folks”.  What kind of message is that sending?  Now Jimmy, you can’t drink on your own or with your friends or drink after that, but it ok to drink with mommy and daddy because we can monitor your alcohol.  What kind of Bullshit is that?  I remeber my parents having parties at home and of course we were not allowed to have drinks.  But we still snuck them when they weren’t around.  In the mean time my parents were working on forgetting their own names.  Now I am not saying I have bad parents, but were checking every now and then to see wht we were doing.  When they weren’t looking, that is when we struck!

So what is my point?  We have one side of the society saying kids should not be drinking and driving.  Then the other saying, it is ok for the kids to drink, but only with their parents.  Shouldn’t we be saying as a whole that kids should not be drinking period?  If we all look at the federal law, it says it pretty clearly, you must be 21 years of age to legally drink.  I am not saying that we can control underage drinking easily.  Hell, just look at me, it wasn’t to difficult in high school or my first two years at college, but I did drink before I was 21.  I just don’t think we should be putting it out there glorifying or saying it is ok to help your children drink, they will find other means of percuring the good stuff.

Every single mac product with a built in display has an iSight built right in the enclouser.  I can understand the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini not having an iSight built in as they do not have a monitor or display.  But Apple has line of Cinema Displays that are really nice, but lack the iSight.  Why is this?  There are a couple of arguments that I have been running through in my head…

1: Mac Minis are design to use a monitor, keyboard and mouse that you already own.  Thats all well and good, but what if my grandma wants to buy a complete system from Apple and use that system to have video chats with her grand kids across the country?

2: Mac Pros are designed for higher end users, graphic designers, video editors and other creatives.  Most creatives that purchase a Mac Pro will most liekly purchase a complete system including an Apple Display. That being said the system is intended for work and not “entertainment” things such as video chatting. But with travel and gas prices getting so expensive, it seems like video conferenceing would be a cheaper alternative.  So again, why not include an iSight into the display instead of making a customer going to a third party hardware?

Apple, get it together!

While at NAB Show this past April, I was asked to go around to exhibitors that we, (Barbizon) represent. And one of those companies is Spider Support Systems. The owner is a gentleman names Charlie. To help promote and demonstrate how easy it is to setup his product, he does it blind folded. Well, I just happen to get it on tape. I just got around to cutting it and put it together. So with out further ado, I present Charlie and the Spider Pod. What is awesome is I got a shout out on our corporate blog here.

I just recently (April) went to Las Vegas for the first time, and all for work! I got out there two days early to help set things up and to help get Vegas out of my system early. Man, what a good idea that was! On the second night, a couple of co-workers and I went to Rub BBQ resturant in the Rio Hotel where we stayed. Let me tell you, AWESOME. We got an appitizer of bacon chunks. It is excatly like it sounds, huge chunks of bacon deep fried. DAMN GOOD.

Well, getting back on track here… In the lobby of Rub BBQ is an awesome motorcycle/smoker. It defiantly got our heads turned. I wish I had gotten a better photo, but you get the idea here.

I just went to Dr. Emery’s office for a consultation on getting all four of my wisdom teeth removed. First, let me tell you, I am in the WRONG business. This guy is going to be pulling in more then I make in a month for about 3 hours worth of work. I really think I need to go back to school for this kind of stuff!
Anyways, I have to say, I was pretty impressed with Dr. Emery. Not just his professionalism, but also his office setup. His entire office is ran by 24″ iMacs, (pictured left). He is totally tring to go green. While I still had to fill out about 5 pieces of paper, he is trying to cut down on paper by having new patients fill out all the info on his site which in turn automatically goes into his system. TO COOL! What I thought was really interesting was that he uses MacPractice DDS software for all patient history and appointment notes as well as prescriptions and everything like that. Even cooler was the X-ray machine. I had to get another Pan Scan of my mouth. Rather then developing an x-ray, the scan automatically goes into a program which is ran on a PC (to bad). Well, to pull those up on any of the iMacs in the office, they use VMware that runs WindowsXP and then pulls up the pan scan image from the PC server. I have to say, that is to damn cool.

Talking a little with Dr. Emery, he said if the system works correctly, he can quickly pull up anything he needs to about any patient history in his system and view it all on his iPhone. NOW THAT IS AWESOME!

it is no wonder getting my wisdom teeth pulled is going to be so expensive!

Funny man George Carlin has died at age 71. I truly will miss his comedy. I have only a couple of his albums, but I can listen to those over and over again. One of my favorite bits of his is flying on the airplane. It’s a little dated, but HILARIOUS! daringfireball.net puts it best….

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/06/23/carlin

We’ll miss you George. Don’t forget to tell God the F word!

I was doing some searching through old photos again this morning and came across some beautys! I have added them to our photo gallery over at the wedding website (photos.justinandrenee.com). I created a new album of just images of me. Not that I am vain or anything, but I have some gooooood camios! The one posted here… I have no idea where that came from but damn, it makes me giggle every time I see it!

I’m sure your getting sick of seeing post about my re-design. But I wanted to document it progress so you can understand my process. I think this is the direction I am going to go with. Needs some tweaks here and there but I have a good feeling about this one. Again, nothing fancy as in Flash and crap like that, it may come later, but not now. Let me know what you think in the comments.

I am not 100% on this design. But I do like it over the last one. Just something with this one is not jiving with me. But I think this will work better. Lets see what comes up next.

I have begun the process of re deigning my main design website (jrldesign.com). It is the face of my company and needs to be clean and simple to navigate. Simple is easy enough, but how simple do I want to go? I want to keep the flash and trash to a minimum. Of course it will show off my design work, but not the flash stuff. In the next couple of days I hope to finalize it and get down to programing and laying it out. Let me know what you think of it in the comments.