It has just come to my attention that I have not been receiving most of my incoming email over the course of the last 24–48 hours. After some preliminary investigation, the opportunity for a solution appears to reside with the .mac/.me imap server(s) administrator(s). I’m working with Apple support now to understand and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. I’ve already been through a round of first level support and will be escalating first thing in the morning. I apologize for any inconvenience and will follow up with another post as soon as the issue has been worked out. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter for updates. Believe me, this hurts me more than it hurts you (or at least that is what I hope).

Update 9/2/2008, 6:30am: My email volume is back up to about 3/4 of normal and I have successfully received several test emails that I sent to myself through various channels, however it took nearly 20 minutes for the test emails to find their way to me. If it’s urgent, probably better to not rely on email yet, please call instead.

Update 9/2/2008, 11:14pm: I’m fairly confident that the folks over at Apple have gotten my email account straightened out now. It appears as though the email woes are over for the time being. Sorry again for any inconvenience this caused anyone.

After spending a full day working with Firefox 3 in conjunction with Firebug 1.2.0 Beta, I have formed some initial qualitative impressions. Overall, Firefox 3 feels like an upgrade over the previous version of the browser. It seems snappier and more responsive and in general I am getting used to the new skin fairly quickly. The new Firebug beta is definitely still a beta (more…)

A few days ago my brother turned me onto a really slick little freeware application for Mac OSX that I think is worth mentioning. It’s called iStat Menus from iSlayer. It’s a cool little tool that allows you to monitor the vital signs of your mac in real time (more…)

Something I’ve been meaning to post about forever is one of the podcasts that I most look forward to every week: The MacCast. As host Adam Christianson exclaims each and every week, it’s the “…show about all things Macintosh” – and it really is. (more…)

In the spirit passing along some of the web design and development tools that I just couldn’t live without, I wanted to mention another plugin that works great with Firefox that is created by Chris Pederick – The Web Developer Toolbar. This is another one of those amazing little gems that has been around for quite a while and has proven to be invaluable to me for both getting work done on a daily basis and learning from time to time. The toolbar has a ton of useful features that can be life savers during the design process. There are options which allow you to, among other things, very quickly enable or disable images, css, and javascript, precisely resize the browser window, quickly validate code (HTML and CSS), and even outline various elements right in the browser window to graphically see how a document is built. (more…)

Needless to say, Firebug is not new news these days. It’s been around, widely used, and in my opinion, very excellent for quite some time now. Occasionally, I have found Firebug to be a handy tool for deconstructing and understanding Web pages that have been mysterious to me in terms of their functionality or design. Historically, Firebug has not been a primary tool in my daily workflow, but rather a little gem that I employ every now and again when I need it (kinda like decaf coffee – admit it – you know what I mean). (more…)

A List Apart’s annual survey for web professionals is available. The survey is anonymous and painless (and beautifully designed I might add). I managed to get through it in just a few minutes. I really enjoyed looking over the results from last year’s survey and am eager to see what’s new or different or surprising or otherwise in this year’s results. If you’ve got a few minutes to spare I recommend participating in the survey.

This may be old news to some of you, but I thought it worth a mention nonetheless. I found an excellent online reference for standards aware designers. Sitepoint has published nicely organized HTML and CSS references worthy of bookmarking. If I understand correctly, they will be bringing developers into the fold before too long with a Javascript reference as well (at the time of this writing the Javascript reference is not yet published but I believe I have the url correct). I am finding that an online reference is much less disruptive to my workflow than a trusty reference book. Its lighter too carry too! Hope this benefits somebody out there.

Lighthead Software has developed an awesome little freeware application for Mac OSX called Caffeine that I am finding really handy and wanted to pass along. In a nutshell, Caffeine places a little coffee cup icon in the menu bar that provides quick access to override any screen saver and/or energy saver settings you’ve chosen in your system preferences. By clicking the coffee cup icon, you activate Caffeine and your Mac stays “awake” without any user input. Clicking the coffee cup icon again to deactivate Caffeine allows your screen saver and/or energy saver settings in system preferences to work as they normally would. Really simple and effective - me likes!

On the long journey back to Florida from Hawaii, I found myself trying to enjoy a seemingly endless layover in Atlanta. Thankfully, I had decent connectivity to the Edge network via my iPhone so I was able to read some of my favorite sites and surf a bit. As much as I love my iPhone, I can only stare at it for so long before I have to look at something bigger. I opted to look at a big cup of coffee, yum! While sipping away at my newfound, delicious, scalding hot beverage, I got to thinking about how convenient and nice it was that the coffee cup had one of those little cardboard sleeves on it so that I could accomplish the simple task of holding the beverage without discomfort to my hand. Simple and effective. Shortly after that, I was sitting at the gate waiting for my next (and thankfully last) flight when an airline employee wheeled up the wheelchair pictured (ok, it didn’t actually have a PixelLevel logo on it) above. That got me thinking about how nice it was that we have things like wheels attached to chairs and ramps to help people who need a little help getting around. Again, simple and effective. I was beginning to see a theme here which got me thinking about web standards and specifically about web accessibility. It was a reminder to me that as web designers and developers we need to be mindful and remember that we too have our own cardboard coffee cup sleeves and wheelchairs and ramps (metaphorically speaking) that we need to use in our daily work in order to make the web sites we build useable by everyone.