Kevin Zak

I am the type of person who is interested in the statistics of my website. I find tracking my referrals and outgoing links can be a fascinating look at human mentality on the web. I have been in search of a superior alternative to the free solutions provided by most web hosts, AWStats and Webalyzer, for quite some time now. While both services provide intricate data, they also present appalling designs with very little intuitive usability. Customization is a no-go for both of them; neither offer plugins and both have very limited settings.

As such, I set out on a quest. My grail? A customizable website statistics system with an appealing design. I began research about five months ago. I consulted with friends, professionals, and the owners of some popular websites. I learned that many were in the same boat as I — they had not yet found a suitable replacement. I read articles on the subject, user-posted messages on forums, and compared reviews. With all my research and new-found knowledge, I still had not been fruitful.

Then, by a stroke of coincidental luck, a friend of mine started using a new statistics manager. Not only was he using it, but he was obsessed with it — to a near comical degree. I knew that Kyle, a user interface designer, would not be so involved with something that had a sloppy design, so I was quite excited. He provided me with screenshots and links to information, both of which I was thoroughly impressed with. However, it looked too good to be true, and even when disproving that by playing with the demo, I put off paying for a license. I recently purchased one, though, and after a week of use, I feel I understand the ins and outs of it.

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It seems as though I have been neglecting this place a little too much. Two weeks without a blog entry is unacceptable, especially when you consider that I set a goal of two posts per week. That said, I have been busy with work and school, so I haven’t just been playing my FPS game of choice (America’s Army). I will attempt to make up for my absence by detailing the events that caused it.

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Whenever Ben and I have a conversation late at night, it’s usually pretty odd. Tonight was a little more off-the-wall than usual.

Read the conversation here: The Plan

No, I’m not switching keyboard formats. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of research concerning typography and its uses when applied to the web. It is an interesting look at how type should be displayed and formatted in terms of web design. Unlike most web-oriented learning adventures I partake in (I am notorious for learning the basics of a coding language and then getting bored with), I am actually intrigued by typography and find myself wishing to learn more of the concepts behind it.
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When I switched web hosts a few months ago, I had my heart set on buying kevinzak.com as my domain name. However, someone was sitting on it. It was registered, but not pointing anywhere. Recently the domain became available again, and tonight I pounced on it. Starting as soon as possible, kevinzak.com will be the primary domain of this site. TechnicallyFoul.com will still be under my control and will forward all traffic to kevinzak.com, so you don’t have to worry about losing me. In the next few days you may have to change your feed URLs to the new domain.

On a side note, the theme I mentioned previously is going well and I have already begun coding it. I’m nearly half done with it, and when I get a few more things done, I may show you a preview.

I usually use Google Reader to manage all my RSS feeds, and check it through my iGoogle page or Reader itself. Lately, though, I’ve been getting lazy and started adding feeds to my bookmarks toolbar. Just today I noticed that they have literally taken over this very toolbar. I thought it would be interesting to show you all which feeds I read each day.

(Click to see full image)

This excludes the ten or fifteen tech deal sites that I read, as I have a separate folder in my Bookmarks menu for those.

Which feeds, if any, do you read?

Recently I have been working on a very minimalistic design for a family friend that requested I make a website for her husband’s business. I started work on one last week and even half-finished I believe it is probably my best work. They recently backed out of the job, saying they’d need a little more time before they would have the information that I would require ready and usable. So I decided to use my design for this site, instead. It is very simple, but I’m fond of what I have done so far, something that has never happened to me before now; I always hate my own work. I think the key was that I designed it initially for someone else. Anything I’ve designed for this blog thus far has been with the blog in mind and I’ve always disliked the final result, and thus decided not to use it.

The theme concentrates on simplicity and typography more than being graphically “enhanced” and fancy. I think that it will be classy and dignified, yet still maintain the atmosphere of this site: a blog that no one reads by a guy who has no desire to be read. I am pretty excited about it so far, but I’m having a bit of designer’s block (if that exists, that is; I initially wrote that as “writer’s block” but thought that this made more sense). The header isn’t coming around as quickly as I would like, but I have a few good ideas for the lower region of the design including the footer.

I will try to keep you updated. As of right now, it is merely a Photoshop design. I want to make sure that I like it before I put effort into coding it. I’m not sure how long it will take to finish, but I will be disappointed if it is not done by the middle of next month at the latest.

The theme I’m currently using, Simpla, is great and I adore it. However, it is not my own creation and thus I feel like a personal blog should have a personal design.

Recently a good friend of mine, Kyle Meyer, created a new website with a unique premise. Kyle is a user interface designer at Clockwork Active Media Systems in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is also the author of Astheria, a blog focusing on design, but specifically the usability and typography of design, which (in my opinion) happens to be his forte. This new site would focus on reviewing sites across the web that exceed in just that forte, typography and usability. He spoke of his ideas to create such a site to me previously, but it just recently became a reality.
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I’ve been following the 2008 elections as closely as I can. I still cannot vote, but I’ve been interested in politics since I was a child, and this is the first election I’ve lived through w ere it felt like more than a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. Normally, I consider myself open to both parties. I feel that if someone represented my beliefs, I’d support them regardless of party affiliation. Since Bush took office, many of us have seen the lies spew out of his mouth and this nation turn into a joke. It’s enough to make a person crazy. Now, with the 2008 elections and his regime coming to an end, we have a light at the end of the tunnel. We have a chance to elect someone to fix what Bush has broken. I firmly believe that repairman is Barack Obama. You will always have cynical people tell you that an inspiration such as Barack Obama isn’t the real deal. They will tell you that you are naive to hope — naive to believe. They will tell you that he is just another lying politician with a nice smile and a competent writing staff. I believe he is more than that. If it is naive to have faith in a candidate, then you can take a giant red stamp and mark my forehead with “naive”. He has truly been an inspiration to me, as well as others. I encourage you all to watch this video, which features celebrities and others singing along with the Yes We Can speech delivered by Obama in New Hampshire. Normally I’m the type of person to mock these “We are the world!” endorsement videos, but this one genuinely moved me.

http://www.dipdive.com/

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Just before Christmas I decided that I needed a bigger mp3 player. My music collection was growing and my 8GB Rio Carbon just wasn’t cutting it anymore. With this in mind I set out to find a ridiculously cheap player with nice battery life. I needed no special features like video playback (that’s what my laptop and PSP are for) nor a nice LCD screen (it just needs to play my music, not look pretty) nor did it need to be tiny (it would sit in my lap or in the cup holder of my car, not in my pocket). Unlike the vast majority of the population, I do not support overpriced iPods (or other equally overpriced Apple products) and thus was not ready to purchase one.

I began reading reviews on several major brands. While all of them had unique features that made them appealing, only one brand had the thing that caught my interest: battery life. Supposedly Creative destroys other mp3 players’ battery life by a wide margin. The only problem was the price. While they were reasonably priced for their caliber, they weren’t quite in my price range. Then I stumbled upon the Creative Zen Touch. It was not nearly as pretty as Creative’s other models, yet it had an interesting concept with it’s vertical scrolling device and it had amazing reviews on battery life. Best of all, I could get a factory refurbished 20GB model for only $49.99. I convinced my parents to order me one and they ended up buying one for my brother, as well.

Size Doesn’t Matter After All

It came via UPS four days later. I quickly opened up the box and was slightly surprised. This thing was by no means small. When I researched it, I didn’t pay much attention to the dimensions or weight. I was more interested in the things I cared about (battery life and capacity). I expected it to be a little bigger than normal mp3 players, but this was a bulky, beast of an mp3 player and that bothered me a little at first. When I held it, though, I found that it fit my hand perfectly. It did fit into my pocket (as well as my car’s cup holder), and although it was bulky, I liked the feel better than my friends’ skinny iPods. I knew that if I dropped this thing, it wasn’t going to break. It’s as solidly built of an electronic device of its size as I’ve ever seen.

<3 Storage

With 20GB of storage, it can hold my entire music collection with plenty room for growth. This was nice, since at about 12GB, I had to carefully choose what I wanted on my previous mp3 player and what I did not. With my entire library on it, I can fire up Winamp, head to the portable devices section, and hit the nifty sync button whenever I buy a new CD. It’s nearly a flawless process.

Firmware should be more Soft

My initial reaction to the firmware was that this was going to suck. I despised the menu layout. The vertical scrolling was either too sensitive or not sensitive enough. Then I read the manual. It turns out that different parts of the scrolling area are for different speeds. This made all the difference. I could now navigate through menus flawlessly. It turns out that the menu schema Creative designed was actually very nice once people understood how to use the scroll pad.

I <3 My Zen

Overall, I couldn’t be more satisfied. I can get 24 hours of battery life while continuously playing music, which is great for me because I forgot to recharge things every night. It syncs flawlessly with my Winamp collection. 20GB of storage is great for me, and this way I can keep adding music to my collection. Once I got used to the scroll pad, the firmware was great. It’s a great mp3 player. It’s not for people who desire these tiny players that are as small as memory cards, but it’s great for what I use it for. It fits in my cup holder while I’m in the car, on my desk while I’m at home, in my pocket when I’m at the mall or walking elsewhere, and in the stuff-holders that my workout equipment all use. I would definitely recommend it to anyone not obsessed with iPods. The one bad thing I could find about it is that the headphones that come with it are terrible. Luckily I still have my $70 noise canceling ear buds from my old mp3 player.