Zigbot Media Design Blog

So after months of waiting after the announcement sometime seemingly forever ago, Sirius XM finally released it’s iPhone application, freeing up millions of listeners to abandon their old hardware. So it’s out now, and it works great, EXCEPT it is missing a core piece of Sirius XM programming, the Howard Stern channels! Unbelievable.

So what do you do? Skip the official app and use the one I’ve been using to stream Stern for months now:

1. Make sure you are a Premium Subscriber, which allows you to stream over the internet. I believe it is $2.99 per month on top of your usual subscription fee.

2. CLICK HERE to download and install Pocket Tunes Radio. The current price is $9.99.

3. Open Pocket Tunes Radio and touch the “Web” icon, in the bottom bar.

4. Navigate to the Sirius media player, which currently would not work in iPhone Safari.

5. Enter your username and password, fill in the capcha, just like you would online. It will save this, and you won’t have to log in again.

6. Find the Stern Channels, as you normally would. Load the audio. It works! But you’re not done yet …

7. Touch the “Now Playing” icon in the bottom bar, and you’ll see the name of the channel playing. On the near bottom left, there is a Star with a “+” on it. Touch it to “Add to Favorites”. Now it’s in your list! Touch “Favorites” and you’ll see the stream saved. Do this for any other channel you want to add.

Even better, this doesn’t fall outside the terms of service for AT&T, Apple, or Sirius XM. 100% legal and works great. Happy listening, and bobabooey to you all.

Oh boy, I hear this soooo much. Blogs, Tweets, Threads all alike shout “Help! I’ve got a client who is being difficult!”. Really? Every time? Time for some reevaluation of method.

We creative professional types need to remember that our job is much more than just being the hands-on part of some software. It is our time, our talent, and so much more that gets the big bucks in the door, and it is puzzling to me why so many of my peers decide to end the skill set at those places. We have to keep in mind that our clients aren’t supposed to know how to do what we’re doing; they hired us to do that. Be a guide; a translater between their objectives and the creative solution to get them there.

Recognize that you may, at times, be in direct competition with a lifetime of social training that values opinions on equal basis. Realize that clients are just people who need something to be done, and you’re just part of the process.

So designers … “Bad Clients” … please. That’s like calling a pot of soup you let boil over a faulty meal. What you do at the computer is the tip of the iceburg. Look at your process and see how you can better move ideas down the line. It works; try it.

I was working out a few project details today in my preferred invoicing software, Freshbooks, and noticed that they had an application available for my iPhone. This makes both Freshbooks and my phone more useful to me, and is a perfect example of how the free/open development culture is so helpful.

Here’s an interesting article about how quality sleep is making a come back into productive society.

This is a particularly compelling statement to us creative types:

“Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.”

Photo by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/BPLOL

I’ve been looking for a real reason to kick the major caffeine habit I’ve developed over the last year or so, and this looks like it’s it. Sleep is as essential to productivity as being awake. Something I’ve always said about design … we get paid to have a good idea. That can happen in 5 minutes or 5 weeks, and there is no clearly defined start and end of this development. If I can do this 33% faster by going to bed a little earlier and taking small steps to have a better night’s sleep, that potentially has a major impact on the success of my business.

Good to know. Best of all, unlike gallons and gallons of coffee … sleep is free.’

*Photo courtesey of BPLOL

Look at this shirt I just bought here. Very simple, and very me.

Also, let me clear this up really quick. A Skeptic is NOT the same thing as a cynic. The word has been trashed by the fun tv culture. Where after discussing the wonderous possibilities of alien life or any other number of fanciful conspiracies, the party-pooper skeptics are always called in for some quick snarkification.

A skeptic views the world objectively and realizes that he/she can be wrong about anything, and invites it! A cynic is the opposite. A cynic observes the world through a filter of their own expectation and ego. A skeptic does not consider their opinion as part of the truth; a cynic does not consider anything but their opinion as truth. Polar opposites; yet forever-siblings in the eyes of society. How?

It was interesting to me that when I wrote an email to marketing master Seth Godin awhile back asking that he change a title of a post where the words were clearly mistaken in their pop-culture form, he added ‘cynic’ to the title (appreciated!) rather than just replace the word with it’s proper term. Though the post is absolutely great with the latter, it remians categorically false. The real marketing lesson for me is this: even those who expertly nagivate the flashing world of marketing fall prey to its power to corrupt purpose. Skepticism is a major part of my life … a philosophy derived from the core of ideas responsible for every bit of progress we’ve made as a species. Objective, pure, reason. How quickly can even a master of branding turn away an entire group of people by one seemingly small oversight? INSTANTLY. Ironically, the biggest lesson I’ve learned from Mr. Godin comes not from the portion of his work I’ve gone through to this point, but this tiny little deal that has ended up high on that shelf of ideas I keep that shapes my daily view of branding.

Here’s the post if you’re curious. Subscribe to his feed while you’re at it.

I’ll be wearing this shirt around town in a few days. I look forward to the opportunity to reclaim the word … at least within my radius.

This is some seriously great news. For all the designers and developers out there that will tell you that Flash is not a major part of the Web these days … well, try cruising around the WWW without it for a few days. This is the nail in the coffin for my poor laptop, which once warmed my lap nearly nightly and now sits dusty in a bag under other miscellaneous previously-useful stuff. 

Anyway, check it out: http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/flash_for_the_iphone_confirmed_at_fotb/

I was pleasently surprised in my evening feed cruising to see my most recent logo project for Chase Mitchell Music featured on one of my favorite inspiration sites, faveup.com (from Envato, formerly Eden). It was my first submission and I’m glad to start trickling into this amazing community of designers I’ve found myself a part of in recent months.

Saw this site mentioned today on Freelanceswitch.com, and whoa. How useful! I don’t know how many times I’ve annoyed my IM list with “Hey, can you see blahblahblah.com?”100% Awesome bookmark for anyone that works on the web: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com

I finally went out to see the new Batman movie Tuesday night. I liked it. There were of course, as there would be with any movie of this sort these days, those places where someone who’s involved in the making-of-things may cringe and mutter internally about the impossibility of most of the technology. It’s a movie, so who cares.

There was one part in particular though that made me laugh a little. Near the end of the movie, when (spoiler alert, I guess) The Joker is spotted on the multi-screen sonar contraption, the screen starts flashing red as ‘alert!’ jumps up and blinks. At this moment, I thought of Batman sitting at a computer, deciding on the right HEX color to use for that alert mode. Even if he programs the whole system in about 15 minutes as the movie suggests, he would at some point have to open a color dialog and select the right color values for his ridiculously overblown interface.

Anyway … made me feel funny to myself for a second or two. You other nerds out there will get it.