My neighbor’s niece, Brittany Vega, was run down in a Long Island crosswalk last week. Her friends got together to write and sing her a song called Heartache and they’re selling it on iTunes and Amazon to help the family out with expenses during this trying time. You can pick it up on iTunes or Amazon and it’s quite beautiful.

Introducing OmmWriter D?na from herraizsoto&co on Vimeo.

I’ve been hunting for a writing tool that won’t distract me from the task(s) at hand and I think I may have found something that will work. It’s called OmmWriter Dana II and it essentially creates a blank slate to write. There are no distractions – all of the Growl announcements are turned off automatically at start-up and turned on when you’re done – and the app includes a nice, lilting musical score.

The app “costs” $4.11 but you can give them as much as you see fit, which is pretty hippy dippy but fine by me. Give it a try and see if you can keep your “wild monkey” caged as you write.

Clearly my life is totally badass. As you can see, I’m a very careful listener. Thanks, @yaelbeer and @inbalhotel as well as @mayerreich.

More photos here…

Hangin’ with Clayton Morris, Jeff Jarvis, Dan Benjamin, Joanna Stern, and Hulu Plus for the iPad. What a team of rivals!

I’ve been using Aperture instead of iPhoto mostly for the potential editing functionality I have available and found that when I imported files from the iPhone they wouldn’t delete and I’d be stuck with a load of images I could never get rid of. I looked around and found out that Image Capture, a standard OS X tool, handles most of this stuff behind the scenes and the only way to make things kosher is to add a little automator program to import the photos, delete them off of the iPhone, and then stick them into Aperture. Kind of a PITA, but whatever.

Go over here to see the full instructions but you basically download OpenWithAutomator.zip, unzip it, and place the enclosed file into /System/Library/Image Capture/Automatic Tasks/.

Then you set Image Capture to handle the iPhone import and set “Import to:” to the OpenWithAutomater script.

One of my favorite programs is now QuicKeys. It allows you to turn shortcuts into full lines of text. For example, when I type “ahr” and hit space, it turns into:

<A HREF="">

I use it for basic things like italicizing in HTML and I even programmed a macro to create “quick tags” to tag things on CG. You can even type “snmn” to make a ?. Because I’m a total ninja, I symlinked ~/Library/QuicKeys to a folder on Dropbox so I can sync my shortcuts across computers. Essentially you’d quit out of QuicKeys and open the terminal and type:

mkdir ~/Dropbox/Library/
mv ~/Library/QuicKeys ~/Dropbox/Library
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/QuicKeys ~/Library/QuicKeys


You can buy it here for $59.95 and there’s an almost endless trial available here. It is totally worth checking out and it’s improved my blog writing times immensely.

And here’s the video!

A new set of baby pix.

Just FYI. I’ll be dumping smaller things that interest me into my Posterous page. I’ll use this for longer form stuff I’d like to share. You know me. I like to share.