The Emotional Pumpkin

ALERT ALERT ALERT

2005-08-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, that was quicker and easier than I thought. I have just finished importing all my Blogger posts into my new blog and am, as of now, stopping updates of this blog. For new updates, please go to the new site.

Everybody remain calm.

2005-08-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

So I've been tossing around an idea for some time, but didn't really have anyplace to go with it until my friend Arvind e-mailed me earlier this week. I'm thinking about defecting away from Blogger. Shocking, I know, but as good as it is for beginners and dilettantes (both of which I was not so long ago–and which you might argue I still am), Blogger definitely has its limitations: no search capability for the entire contents (including archives) of a blog, limited customizability, no integrated TrackBack functionality, no support for categories, etc.

Also, since I now have my own domain, I thought it might be nice to integrate my web presences in one place. In order to publish a blog on my own domain, however, I'd need blog publishing software. The main platform for doing this, of course, is Movable Type, but it is relatively expensive (read: not free), and therefore against the very spirit of blogging and the internet. Then there's iBlog for Mac, which is also not free. As for free publishing software there are Greymatter and, the one my friend e-mailed me about, WordPress. I was pretty impressed with WordPress when I checked it out, and now I've installed it on my domain's server, which was insanely easy (they advertise that you can do it in under 5 minutes).

Now for the hard part: making the decision. I'm all but ready to do it, except that I'd like to find some way of porting my old posts over, if possible. If not, it's not like I'll be deleting this blog anyway, so they won't disappear. Hmmm.

Have you seen this?

2005-08-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

The new Flag button on the Blogger bar? I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but I am cautiously optimistic. It does not promote censorship, but does remove them from liability quite neatly and also provides a clever way for them to find spam blogs.

Big pimpin'

2005-08-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

So I have got to share this with you. Did you know that Häagen-Dazs just came out with a light ice cream, with 1/2 the fat content of their regular ice cream? I had taste-tested a couple of flavors at a local festival a few months ago, and promptly forgotten about it. But when I was walking through the grocery store last week, I noticed that it had finally hit store shelves, so I got myself a couple of pints. One was vanilla bean, and the other dulce de leche. The former is really very good, but the latter is simply divine. Just amazing. Go out and get some right now. I mean it. Get in your car, go to the nearest grocery store or ice cream purveyor of your choice, and get some.

So my sister just got

2005-08-17T11:59:00.000-07:00

this nifty new tablet PC. You know the ones? Where you can write on them like a notebook and have the data digitized? And in an effort to christen it, she and I had a deep philosophical discussion over e-mail (she's the one in red):

BBCR

2005-08-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

Well, it's done. I've added Blogger bar color recommendations to my blog templates site.

D'you know what makes me completely INSANE?

2005-08-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

What makes me gnash my teeth and want to PULL OUT MY HAIR? #*@&%(*U@ people who leave their #$(*@)(* shopping carts in the middle of the grocery store parking lot. People who can't walk 10 feet to the @*#*!#U@*$ cart corral to drop it off, so that, you know, others can drive through, or god forbid, actually PARK in the parking lot? I was just walking out of the grocery store and some Mensa member had left a cart sitting right behind my rear bumper. !! My car was literally 10 feet from the cart corral. 10 feet! GRRAAARRRRRGGGGHH. Excuse me. I have to go punch something.

I've been rejected!

2005-08-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

:( Lilac Moon is no longer using one of my templates. I am devastated. Well, OK, you caught me. I'm not that devastated. She is, after all, an artist, and the days that she would use someone else's work were bound to be numbered.

Anyway, in other news, my OCD is manifesting itself again. I am giving serious thought to adding a section on my blog templates site giving recommendations of blogger bar colors to use with each of my templates. Why? Because I'm unreasonably bothered by people using entirely the wrong blogger bar color choice with templates that would clearly go better with another color. What do you think? Should I do it?

Pretty damn cool

2005-08-09T17:02:00.000-07:00

Computer-assisted origami. (Thanks to Matt for the link.)

On the perils of living in California: item #58

2005-08-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

It must be the newest thing in cheap marketing, but for the last year or so, I've been noticing that local businesses have been hiring people to stand along major thoroughfares waving signs and arrows advertising them: Quizno's Subs, Computer Repair, Fresh Flowers. Some of these sign-wavers really get into it; they'll bring headphones and some portable music device and be dancing around, waving their signs, waving to passing drivers.

As a way of getting people's attention, it's both low tech and amazingly effective. It's also a dangerous distraction to drivers. This may have something to do with my unfortunate tendency to look with the entire car and not just my eyes, but I can't imagine that anything that suddenly takes a driver's attention off the road can be good for the overall accident level.

On the perils of living in California: item #16

2005-08-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

I paid almost $40 for a tank of gas yesterday. For my 4-cylinder car. Granted, it was mid-grade gas, but still.

Let me begin by apologizing in advance to

2005-08-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

all of my out-of-state friends. You know, the ones I am about to make fun of.

You ever notice that people who don't live someplace tend to give it nicknames or shorten its name? But the people who actually live there don't do it? I don't know what it is, but for some reason, a bunch of my out-of-state friends call California "Cali". Now, I don't know one person who actually lives in California who calls it Cali. It's just not done. They'll use the whole name more often than not, or CA, the state abbreviation, in a pinch. But never Cali.

Take San Francisco. No locals or city residents call it "Frisco" (I have met someone from the East Bay who called it Frisco once, but I put that down to a moment of insanity). Usually we just call it the city. San Francisco, sure. SF for short, or even, rarely, San Fran, but never, ever, Frisco.

What's up with that? Weird.

Update 08/05/2005 12:15 - Case in point: The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Going Back to Cali". He used both "Cali" and "Frisco" in that song. Where was he from? Wait for it...Brooklyn. I rest my case.

Here I come to save the daaaayyy!

2005-08-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Well, it's about goddamn time.

Netflix update

2005-07-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005): 4 stars

A no-frills action movie (actually rated R, if you can believe that) that admirably avoids needless theatrics. Beautifully understated performances from Hawke, Fishburne and Byrne.

ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone

2005-07-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

I am just mean to do this to you, but I predict that you will have this song stuck in your head for the next week, at least. (Thanks to Arturo for the link.)

Stop me if you've heard this one before...

2005-07-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

So I mentioned some time ago that I had kicked off this massive redesign effort to make all my various websites cleaner and more user-friendly. As of this morning, I am mostly done with that effort:

I've rewritten my personal website to be XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant and use CSS positioning for page layout. Same thing for my blog templates.

In an effort to make my code cleaner and easier to maintain, I did some stylesheet reorganizing, and commented the hell out of my HTML code (particularly by marking closing tags with the ID or class of their opening tags, where applicable).

Finally and most importantly, though, I paid attention to three things. Readability, readability, and readability. This is pretty important in and of itself, but especially for my websites, since most of my content tends to be written and rather long-winded. To that end, I paid particular care to font choices. It basically came down to two choices: Verdana for sans-serif fonts, and Georgia for serif fonts. Both are supremely readable and very comfortable to read for long periods of time. Both are, moreover, recommended as good on-screen font choices. Trebuchet, FYI, is another good sans-serif one.

Speaking of fonts, I'd like to note here that font size is another important factor. I rarely use fonts smaller than 9pt, and will usually use 10pt for maximum readability. I admit that in the past I've liked to use smaller fonts for aesthetic reasons, but the amount of time I spend reading online content (and, I cringe to say, my ever-increasing age) has skewed my opinion in favor of what's easiest to read.

Another important factor in content readability is, IMO, page width. You never want to keep lengthy written content too wide. It makes it too easy for your eyes to wander away and lose your place in the text. You'll notice that most (well, well-designed ones, anyway) newspaper sites and blogs keep the content width down to around 500 pixels. You'll notice that in all my blog designs, the maximum page width never exceeds 800px, and the actual content width stays somewhere between 400 and 500px.

Speaking of dimension, let's not forget line height. Extending line height by as little as 20-25% can make a huge readability difference in long pieces of text. Keeping line height to the standard 1 em can make text look too cramped and make it very difficult to read. To that end, I've made sure that all my blog templates, like Blogger's default templates, use a content line height of 1.1-1.25em.

I guess if any of you readers are web design professionals, you know most of this from various books you've read, or just from experience. I'm more of a hobbyist, and I'm sort of putting this together as I go along. So even if you think it goes without saying, I'd like to take the time to mention it. UI design on the web is still, even with ever-increasing attention paid to improving the user experience, on the whole appallingly bad. So here's me doing my little bit to make the (online) world a better place.

Templates alert

2005-07-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't been to my blog templates site lately, please take note: as of Monday, August 1, 2005, I will no longer be hosting template images. From here on in, template users will download a compressed archive containing the template code and the images, and they will be responsible for hosting the images themselves. Existing template users have until the aforementioned deadline to replace their templates with the new format (or at least host the images themselves and update their templates with the new URLs). FYI.

First, I want you to know

2005-07-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

that I am totally and completely making this up. Out of whole cloth. But you know how in the past few years, like every website on the entire internet has used the blue + orange color combination (witness the Blogger homepage or the Travelocity site, or even the application icon for Mozilla Firefox)? I predict that the next big thing in color schemes will be lime green + turquoise. You think I'm nuts, I know, but you'll see. You'll all see, when it's too late. Mwahahahahahaha.

The title says it all, really

2005-07-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

From Gizmodo: Blu-Ray is Good, HD-DVD Kills Puppies Sez Sony

This just in: Indian food stops cancer!

2005-07-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

Well, sort of. According to this, curcumin, a spice found in turmeric and curry powders, has been proven in laboratory tests to stop growth of melanoma and other cancers. Guess I know what I'm having for lunch!

Pretty neat

2005-07-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

ZDNet reports that Google, Hearst and Goldman Sachs are investing (approx. $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal) in Current Communications Group, which offers broadband over power lines. (Via Slashdot)

The London bombings

2005-07-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

Here's InstaPundit's roundup of information on today's London bombings, and one from the Wall Street Journal.

I bet you've been wondering

2005-06-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

why I haven't posted in so long. There's a good reason, and his name is Jack Reacher. Earlier this month, during the first of my sister's weddings, I found myself stuck at the arrivals hall in the international terminal of O'Hare airport, waiting for an incoming relative whose flight kept getting delayed (every 10-15 minutes, for a total of over 4 hours. I am not kidding.).

Now, since I was driving, and I thought we'd be in and out quickly, I neglected to bring anything with which to occupy myself. No iPod, no PSP, no books, no nothing. About an hour into my interminable wait, I went upstairs to the departures area, where I reasoned there'd have to be a bookstore. And sure enough, there was.

I wasn't expecting to find a book to read, since as some of you may know I mostly read (and can't usually keep a long enough attention span for anything but) sci-fi. I took a look at the bestseller rack, though, just for the hell of it. At number 26 or 27 was a book called The Enemy, by some guy called Lee Child. All the quotes on the front and back covers bore effusive praise to the tune of: "this guy is the best thriller writer you're not reading...yet", or "he's the next Tom Clancy", etc., etc.

The blurb on the back seemed interesting enough, but it had yet to pass the real test. I've learned the hard way, being so picky about writing, that I have to pick up a book and read the first page or two of it to make sure the writing doesn't annoy me before I plunk down the money to buy it. So I cracked it open. Inside, I found a treasure. Brutally spare prose, tight plotting, an absolutely gorgeous mastery of dialogue, and film-like editing. And as simple as that, I was hooked.

The Enemy is the eighth (of nine) in a series of stand-alone novels, all featuring a main character named Jack Reacher. As it happened, this book was actually a prequel to all the rest of them, so it was a good place to start. Tonight, I finished reading the last of the books that have been released in paperback, and am waiting on my local library to get a copy of the ninth one (newly released in hardcover) back in so I can read it. Very, very good stuff; highly recommended.

I've recently posted

2005-06-27T22:44:00.000-07:00

a couple of new Blogger templates: Deco and Retro. Check 'em out!

Close, but no cigar.

2005-06-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

Looks like someone was listening: there's now a Google Maps widget available for Dashboard. Unfortunately, it does not provide for driving directions, just for looking up single locations. Seems to me that's the whole point of maps websites.

Good grief!

2005-06-10T07:11:00.000-07:00

Oh HELL yeah. That's all I have to say.

OMG!

2005-06-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

Apple's ditching IBM to switch to Intel? Say it ain't so.

This is intriguing

2005-06-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

From Slashdot:

According to an MSDN Channel 9 interview with an Office file-format developer, the next version of Microsoft Office (Office 12) will default to newly-developed XML file formats in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new formats will apparently include XML files along with other files (images, etc) inside of a Zip file. Microsoft will also be providing extensive documentation of the new format to the public through MSDN.

Neat-o.

This just in:

2005-06-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

Apparently Microsoft will be dropping the "My" prefix (e.g. My Documents, My Pictures) from Longhorn. (Via Slashdot)

Ha! I knew it.

2005-06-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

From Slashdot:

An interesting study made by to two Penn State researchers shows that increases in homework may actually hinder educational achievement (Coral Cache) instead of improving it.

Like I needed someone to tell me that.

Not to put too fine a point on it,

2005-06-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

but this is big news:

A group of scientists have developed a mathematical method to fight certain forms of cancer. The study has taken the team several years, but the first trial on a human has been successful.

The actual paper can be found here.

And if that didn't make you

2005-05-31T14:53:00.000-07:00

paranoid enough, check this out.

I'm not sure how I feel about this

2005-05-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

From Wired News:

Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi.

The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.

I could see why this has Madison Avenue salivating, but (and here's that slippery slope argument again) what about all the potentially bad uses of this research? What do you think?

The effort to ban

2005-05-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

municipal wireless networks in Texas has failed.

They're at it again

2005-05-31T12:38:00.000-07:00

From Slashdot:

Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour.

...

The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 20 billion words worth of content. It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages.

Pretty cool.

In today's NYT:

2005-05-31T12:05:00.000-07:00

Former FBI official W. Mark Felt says he was Deep Throat.

So I've got this song stuck in my head.

2005-05-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

It's the new one by Nelly & Tim McGraw. You know the one? Where they sing "over and over again" over and over again? It's driving me CRAZY. Thank you.

While we're on the subject,

2005-05-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about the mechanics of inspiration. More specifically, the mechanics of my inspiration, since it is, of course, a highly individualized experience. I'll focus on poetry here, although I think this should apply to prose as well; I tend to write more poetry because, well, I'm better at it than prose, and because poetry is like instant gratification to the writer. It's quickly done and edited, quicker for the reality to match the vision, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, back in the day, I used to think of a topic I was inspired by and write on it—pretty straightforward, sure—but more often than not that came out as rambling, melodramatic drivel (you have noticed my tendency toward melodrama?). Of course sometimes I came up with something I really liked, but my yield was pretty low. And, engineer that I am, I am constantly dissecting and studying the anatomy of my ideas to see if I can more efficiently harness my creativity (is that even possible?).

Looking back over what I've written, I've noticed that the stuff I like best is more or less the stuff that was produced under pressure. Something written with a specific goal or parameters in mind. Let me explain: as an example, let's look at one of the exercises I did in a creative writing class I took in high school. I was to use the following words in a poem: finger, voice, mother, needle, cloud. Moreover, I was to take a proverb and paraphrase it somewhere in the poem. Here's what I came up with:

The Ghost Ship

Black cliffs rise, stern and forbidding,
through the reaching fingers of the mist
Echoes of voices
voices of the disappeared
lost in the clouds of memory
Their mothers sit quietly in the howling wind,
mending with needle and thread the tatters of lost souls
The ghost ship passes by in dead silence,
its passengers screaming soundlessly
The sea is the death of a thousand loves.

Now, call me arrogant, but I was very happy with that result. The same is true of the love poems I mentioned earlier. In fact, the last 5 or 6 poems I've written have been done with that sort of under-pressure writing style, and I've been happy with all of them (and if you'd seen some of my earlier stuff, you'd know that is pretty rare). What I've been doing is this, and it sort of came about naturally. I'd find myself somewhere, maybe driving down the highway late at night, listening to music, and suddenly a word, or a phrase, or a stanza would pop fully-formed into my head, and I'd rush home (or wherever) and write it down. More often than not it'd be a line or a collection of words I thought sounded particularly, for lack of a better word, poetic. But, and this is the most important part, it had no context. It would just be something evocative of an emotion I wanted to capture, or a pleasing combination of sounds. Also more often than not, I had no larger purpose for this phrase.

And so I started amassing this collection of rootless words. Eventually, I compiled a file of them, and occasionally I'll come back and look it over. Then, like scrabble tiles, I'll pick some of them, rearrange them this way and that, maybe add some connective tissue, and presto! I'll have a poem. Here's one like that:

suddenly incomplete

awoken by
the temporary grace
of a breath of your skin
as you passed by on the street

I didn't know you
but you were all that I dream of
in the dreams that
come morning
I can only remember
as impressions of color and emotion

you were not real
in the way that children
are seeds of people
who do not exist, yet
you were the promise of meaning
and the suggestion of joy

you moved too fast
for my mortal eyes to see
leaving only brilliant,
fading afterimages
photo-flashes of vivid life
in a monochrome existence

I was left blinking,
confused
my eyes trying to readjust
to the dimness
of my everyday world

made slack-jawed and slow-witted
by the blinding vision
of unfulfilled possibility
I stood still, there
making small ripples
in the river of people
that flowed around me

I was stunned by
whispers of what-ifs
given a glimpse of the realization
of a wish I didn’t know I had

and all of a sudden
I was unfinished
made somehow less
than I had been
a moment before

I had not missed
what I had not known
what you had just shown me

and I didn’t know which was worse
the loss
or the never-having

and now
when it is all
nothing but a memory
that has not faded
I am still amazed
that something so little
isn’t.

It was built around the phrases "temporary grace" and "children are the seeds of people...". Pretty cool, huh? I find it unbelievable that I could do something that...random, and have the result be something I like. Here's a snippet of an unfinished poem, another one of those collections of rootless words:

light splatters across my room
like a paint spill
an accidental luminosity
a fortuitous geometry
of moon and star and window-pane

That's the beginning of a poem that's been almost-finished for months now. I'm just missing the connective tissue between a couple of the stanzas. Maybe one of these days I'll get another phrase and boom, it'll be done.

What inspires you? More importantly, how does it inspire you? How do the mechanics of your inspiration work? Comment; let me know.

Love poems

2005-05-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

So as some of you may know, my sister is getting married in a few weeks. For the ceremony, she and her fiancé wanted to do a couple of readings, and she asked me to help her find one. So we searched around and found some good candidates, but then she thought, knowing that I dabble in writing, that it might be cool to have me try and write something, and we'd keep her final 3rd party provider (Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou) as an understudy if I wasn't able to come up with something satisfactory; creativity on demand does not always work well, you understand.

Now, I hadn't ever written a love poem before, and hadn't, to be frank, historically been a big fan of the genre; the subject is pretty trite, and I have read very few love poems that I actually like. But where there's a need...Anyway, I came up with a couple of poems that, after some editing, I am pretty happy with, and she ended up picking one of them. For your reading pleasure (?), I've posted them here. First, the runner-up:

Two together: a song of devotion

We came up out of the dark
and found the world free of shadow
found joy where we had not imagined a lack

We exorcized the ghosts of memory
shed the legacy of our past sorrow
and armed ourselves with conviction

Travelers both, we two
now unburdened, now prepared
for the terrain of our lives together

Our ideas of ourselves,
half-formed and shapeless,
only together are made whole
made sharp
made strong

Disbelieving the good fortune
of this chance-met circumstance,
this coincidence of moon and stars,
we come to the truth,
that we are better together than apart.

Though it demands a heavy price
love is the sweetest sacrifice we can make.
This is my pledge:
This is the ink of my love and my loyalty,
tattooed here across my heart,
indelible.

Credit where it's due: one of the lines in the poem is a paraphrase of a snippet of a poem I saw on TV. I'd like to credit it more fully, but it was a poem written by a fictional character on a TV show, so I guess I have to thank whoever was the poem writer on the "Best Friends" episode of Cold Case:

I came up out of the dark without you
and every day since has been in shadow

Another line, my favorite, is a paraphrase of some song lyrics (really, it's a poem)—from Walking Through the Empty Age by Chris Mosdell:

I dip my hands into this darkness
This is the ink of all our lifetimes
Here in this world of utter silence
Let the stones speak to me

Tattooed here across my skin, "I will live"
Like a rose that grows from the wreckage
Blood red, beautiful
As the storms all around me are now breathless

Beautiful, ain't it? Brings a tear to my eye. No, really. Anyway, moving on. Here is the winner:

Influence

It is tempting to consign love
to the banality of daily existence
another of the petty magics of our lifetimes
just, or mere, or only
another meaningless, overused word

But let it come to us
and even the air is sweeter
every instant touched by fate
every breath invested with meaning

Flushed with the happy circumstances of our meetings
the serendipitous confluence of our paths
we dare to believe
that we should be so fortunate
to have found our complements in each other,
that the burgeoning excesses of others
could fill the lack in ourselves
that we could deserve these wondrous gifts
love gives us:
connection where there was a void
hope where there was despair
courage where there was fear
self-sacrifice where there was conceit

Love makes angels of us all,
and only in its arms are we free to fly.

From E3:

2005-05-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

XBox 360 vs. PS3.

I am so downloading this

2005-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

as soon as I get home: Taboo. According to macosxhints, "Taboo is a plug-in for Safari that warns you if you hit the red close button and you have more than one tab open." It's the little things, man.

Sorry 'bout all those

2005-05-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

test posts. I was doing some investigation for someone who was reporting posting problems when using one of my templates.

Test post from Netscape 7.2 for Mac OS X

2005-05-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Mozilla 1.7.5 for Mac OS X

2005-05-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Firefox 1.0.1 for Mac OS X

2005-05-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Safari 2.0 for Mac OS X

2005-05-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Netscape 7.2 for Windows

2005-05-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Mozilla 1.7.5 for Windows

2005-05-15T20:10:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Test post from Firefox 1.0.4 for Windows

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Please ignore.

Test post from MS IE 6.0 SP2 for Windows

2005-05-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

Please ignore.

Looks like one of my wishes came true

2005-05-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Behold: the RPN scientific calculator widget for Dashboard. And it's RPN! How could they have known I was a die hard HP calculator user? This is great!

And speaking of great things, here's the RSS feed for new Dashboard widgets.

This is exciting:

2005-05-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

The teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (my favorite of the 5 books thus far) has been posted on Apple's trailers site.

When was the last time you

2005-05-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

watched a really good movie where Stuff Blows Up? For me, it was about 5 minutes ago; I just finished watching the super ultra triple platinum THX mastered DTS version of the first Die Hard¹. It is arguably—and I know this is a strong statement—the best action movie of all time. Sure, there are some great ones: True Lies, The Rock, Bad Boys (although that's really more of a comedy, even though lots of Stuff Blows Up in it), The Killer, just to name a few². But this one...this one is the best.

I mean, they just don't make 'em like that anymore. All the so-called action movies that come out these days are CG-heavy, poorly-written, PG-13 mockeries. Come on: PG-13? Please. Everything's PG-13 nowadays. Even Alien vs. Predator was PG-13³. Who ever heard of a PG-13 monster movie? If you cut out the blood and guts, where's the fun in it?

I don't know, action movies these days seem to be nothing more than a bunch of fast cars, cheesy one-liners and special effects cobbled together, with all the objectionable bits cut out so that teenyboppers can go see them. They have no teeth. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I really miss the good old days. Sigh.

¹ Die Hard, in case you're interested, ranks as number 4 on Men's Journal's list of The 50 Best Guy Movies of All Time, after Dirty Harry, The Godfather part I, and Scarface. I must here take exception to the fact that MJ says

a true guy movie is a movie only a guy can love. A crucial distinction. Pop one into the DVD player and your wife or girlfriend should run screaming from the room.

I am living proof that this is not true. Granted, I am one of the only chicks I know (among 3, I think) who is a sucker for action movies, but one exception is enough to disprove that assertion. Another thing I have to take exception to: The Matrix and Caddyshack (don't get me wrong; they're great) make it into the top 10, but Star Wars doesn't? Where's the justice?

² You'll note that I am only mentioning strictly action movies. No sci-fi, no comic book movies, no fantasy. Just straight up, cops-and-robbers, cops-and-terrorists, hitmen-and-hitmen action movies.

³ Note that this is why I never saw it.

On Engadget:

2005-05-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

Canadian "scientist" says "God Light" cures cancer. Heh.

Have I

2005-05-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

mentioned that I love Billy Collins? Oh. Yes. I have. Here's one of my favorites: Litany.

Doom and gloom!

2005-05-09T09:41:00.000-07:00

Evidently some websites can automatically install annoying (but not, apparently, destructive) widgets on your computer if you're running Tiger and have Safari's "Open 'safe' files after downloading" feature enabled. The only way to remove these widgets is to manually delete them from ~/Library/Widgets. FYI. (Thanks to Matt for the link)

Tiger: first impressions: Dashboard

2005-05-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have to say it. I am loving this Dashboard thing. I mean, before when I read that it was going to be a feature of Tiger, I thought it was a pretty cool idea, but the reality is so much more. Widgets I have on my Dashboard: the yellow pages, clock, stickies, calendar, address book, dictionary and weather. The weather one is hands down my favorite. I press one key and I have the weather forecast for the next 5 days. I love it!

And the dashboard widget download page at apple.com has a bunch more. Some of my favorites: TV Tracker, Battery Status, and the wi-fi hotspot finder (!).

Widgets I'd like to see:

A Google maps widget
A Zagat widget
A calculator widget that can do scientific functions. A calculator that only performs arithmetic functions is useless to me.

And another thing:

2005-05-05T08:19:00.000-07:00

I noticed today that in Safari, where I do most of my posting from, if I preview my post and then hide the preview, the options to allow comments and set the time and date of the post below the post content field disappear. Is that intentional? Hmmm. I can't believe that it is.

OK, gotta take a break

2005-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

from all this Tiger reviewing for a couple of things:

First, happy Cinco de Mayo!
I am peeved at Blogger and have to gripe. I had intended to start my last post last night, and so had loaded the Create Post page in Blogger, but never came back to write it. So this morning when I sat down at my computer, I just started typing in the post content field and thought nothing of it. Of course, when I went to publish the post, Blogger said that since I had left the session running all night, my login session had expired, and asked me to log in again. I did. But instead of continuing to publish the post, Blogger just displayed the dashboard, and when I went to check my list of posts, the latest one wasn't there. Why doesn't Blogger continue a task it's been asked to do through login? That's just dumb. Luckily I was able to hit the back button on my browser, and the contents of my post were still cached, so I was able to publish the post eventually, but I could just as easily have lost the contents forever. Arrrggghh. This is an obvious functionality gap, and I, for one, am going to write them a nasty letter/bug report about it.

Tiger: first impressions: Spotlight vs. Quicksilver

2005-05-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

You've probably already heard me raving about Quicksilver. With the release of Tiger, its continued existence has come into question, since you can search for and launch applications from Spotlight, as well. Does this mean that Quicksilver is totally obsolete and I'm not going to use it anymore? Absolutely not. Although the application launching capability of Spotlight is nice, it's primarily a search tool; it's not as flexible as Quicksilver:

First, Quicksilver is primarily an application launcher; thus, it's automatically configured to launch the application you search for. Basically you type the name of the application you want to launch and hit return, and you're done. In Spotlight, although Applications come up first on the list of search results, you always have to do some cursoring down the list to find the item you want and launch it. For efficiency Quicksilver is the way to go.

Second, Quicksilver goes one step beyond Spotlight; it can perform more tasks once you find something. You can also find applications and folders quickly, but once you do, Quicksilver has an adaptive list of tasks; for example, you can get info on a folder, or search its contents. For an application, you can choose to open a file in the one you searched for, or move it to another folder, or a whole host of other things. Spotlight, in comparison, only finds things and opens them.

In conclusion, although Spotlight has some nice capabilities, it's meant to be a search tool, and that's what I'll use it for. I'm keeping Quicksilver around for my application-launching needs.

Tiger: first impressions: Mail, Address Book and iCal (and, indirectly, Spotlight)

2005-05-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

Most faithful readers of this blog will know that I'd had it up to here with Microsoft Entourage months ago. Other than its cool correlation between address book contacts, e-mails and calendar events, it had nothing going for it. Not search, not (surprise) interoperability, and not usability. Especially not usability. This is why, with Tiger's promised Spotlight search capabilities, along with improvements in Mail and Address Book, I had determined to switch away from Entourage once and for all.

The thing I was most concerned about transferring from one program to the other was my contact list. The new version of Address Book has the capability to import contact information from a tab-delimited text file, which is (go figure) the only way Entourage will export its contacts. God forbid Microsoft should write software that will play well with others. Anyway, I figured that once I exported the information, only half the battle was done; getting the fields to match correctly in Address Book would be the real challenge, I thought. It turns out, though, that Address Book is smarter about field-matching than is Outlook 2003 for Windows. With a few corrections here and there, I was able to get my contacts loaded into Address Book with a minimum of fuss. Note, however, that even though I matched up the birthday fields properly during the import process, none of my contacts' birthdays were imported properly into Address Book. I had to put in the birthdays manually, but there were few enough entries that it wasn't a big deal.

Next, of course, is the actual e-mail transfer. I am once again pleased to report that it went off without a hitch. Mail imported my messages from Entourage and kept them in their respective folders, which made my post-import clean-up much easier. Previous versions of Mail have not been as smart or tidy about this. A note on aesthetics: I don't happen to agree with John Siracusa that the new version of Mail "got beaten with the ugly stick," but I'd have to say that with Mail, iCal and Address Book working so closely together thanks to Spotlight, it'd have been nice to see all three programs get the same type of facelift, so that they at least look unified.

On to iCal. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any easy way (that works in Tiger) to import Entourage calendar events and to-dos into iCal. However, iCal 2.0 has the nifty feature of automatically creating a calendar of birthdays from the information stored in Address Book. This is nice, but not fully featured enough--it's enabled by a check-box in the iCal preferences, but is not otherwise configurable; you can't edit the calendar, and there is no capability to set alarms for those events. Also, there is no likewise provision made for anniversaries. I can only hope they have plans to fix this inconvenience.

Finally, after I got all my information migrated over to Mail, Address Book and iCal, I tried a Spotlight search to see how it all worked together. I started Spotlight and searched for the name of one of my contacts. In the blink of an eye, it came back with documents containing that person's name, mail messages from that person (with the latest message on the top of the list, which I like), her card in Address Book, events and to-dos involving her, and even (this is the kicker) files I had sent to her over e-mail. How cool is that? I mean, wow!

And the coolest thing about all this, of course, is that you can save that Spotlight search as what's called a "smart folder", which will constantly update itself with the results of the search. I could come back 6 months from now and look for an e-mail I sent my friend yesterday, and I'd find it in seconds. Isn't that the best?

More to come...

Tiger: first impressions: installation

2005-05-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

So I had a minor apoplectic fit last night. High off the almost laughable ease with which I had installed (upgrade, not clean install) Tiger on my slower Mac (a 667 MHz/512 MB RAM G4 TiBook), I did a cursory backup of the data on my faster machine (a dual 1.42 GHz/1.5 GB RAM G4 desktop) and set out to install the new OS. And that's when my troubles began:

The installation kept crapping out on the part where it verifies the destination volume (i.e. the hard drive) and telling me to try again. After about 3 tries and no successes, I got the brilliant idea to run Disk Utility to see if there were any problems with my main hard drive. Note that one of Disk Utility's most unfortunate shortcomings is that it can't verify or repair the disk it's running from; since I had booted off the installation DVD-ROM, I could run verification and repair processes on the main hard drive from the copy of Disk Utility located on the DVD-ROM. It turned out that there was a problem with the disk, but when I tried to repair it, the repair failed. So, now what?

With barely-restrained panic, I did some Googling, and came up with this article, which basically told me to reboot in single user mode and run the fsck utility, which is better at fixing problems, apparently, than the asr utility that Disk Utility uses to fix hard disks. So I did reboot into single user mode, and ran fsck -fy at the command prompt. Sure enough, it found problems, said it repaired them, and that the disk was now fixed. So then I rebooted and tried installation again: same problem. Huh?

OK, back to the drawing board. This article said that I needed to keep running fsck -fy from the single user prompt until it showed that no errors were found. So I did. 5 or 6 tries later, I still kept getting the message that errors were fixed, but not that no errors were found. Then I noticed that I kept seeing the same error whenever I ran fsck: "Overlapped extent allocation (file 2684056d)". So I did a Google search on "overlapped extent allocation", and hit the jackpot (search for "Manually fix Overlapped Extent Allocation Errors without Diskwarrior" on the page).

Apparently, fsck can't fix overlapped extent allocation errors (basically this is when two files seem to be sharing the same memory space); the only way to fix this error (well, the only way to fix this error without buying expensive disk repair software) is to remove the offending file (identified by the number in the error message above). This, as you might imagine, could be troublesome if the file in question is a system file. So, to find out the path of the file, I ran find / -inum 2684056 -print. Note that I changed the -inode attribute in the article to -inum; there is no -inode attribute for the find command. More details can be found by running man find at the command prompt.

Anyway, to my everlasting relief, it turned out that the file was an audio file in my iTunes library; I had actually caused the problem myself earlier that day by backing up my iTunes library (which is on an external firewire hard drive) to the main hard drive on my computer. So, again from the single user mode prompt, I mounted the hard drive (mount -uw /) and removed the troublemaking file. After rebooting, the installation went off without a hitch. Hallelujah!

All told, the installation was actually very smooth. More first impressions to come...

It's here:

2005-05-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica's official review of Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4, which should be arriving at my door any minute now). Obsessively detailed, comprehensive, and chock-full of such insights as: "The whole Mail application looks like it got beaten with the ugly stick in Tiger,". Check it out!

Temptation: 2, Me: 0

2005-05-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

Well, now I've done it. Not only did I go to Super 7 this weekend and happen to find another signed copy of Fragments that I just had to buy, but I ordered the PSP a couple of days ago. Now I'm just waiting for Wipeout Pure to arrive. In the meantime, I've got Ridge Racer to keep me occupied, and, very soon, Lumines. Aww yeah.

Well, it's day 4 of

2005-04-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

the 48th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, and I am irritated. Not with the movies, of course. Just the organization of (some parts of) the festival. Now, seeing as this year was the 5th year that I went to the Sundance Film Festival, the 2nd that I went to the San Francisco International Asian-American Film Festival, and also the 2nd that I'm going to SFIFF, I consider myself a seasoned film festival goer. And in my informed opinion, the organizers of all these festivals should get together and take lessons from one another, because not one of them gets it right completely. There are too many small annoyances to count, but the focus of my wrath today is the audience award ballot used by SFIFF. It is incredibly poorly designed. Let's take a look:

So, what's wrong with it? A better question would be: what isn't? You have to write on the ballot; you need to fill in the film's name, as well as circle your rating. You need a writing utensil. This means that either you need to carry a pen with you, or the festival needs to provide pencils for you to write with. This is a pain for you as the film goer and an unnecessary expense for the festival organizers. What they should do is follow the Sundance balloting method:

Use tear-through ballots: print the 5 numbers in a large font, well spaced from each other. Then the viewers can just tear through the rating number; no writing implements required.
Print the category of award the film is competing for on the ballot.
Finally, make a bunch of ballot boxes, each labeled with the name of the film; this means that the viewer doesn't have to write in the name of the film on the ballot, again obviating the need for a writing implement as well as making it easier for the organizers to organize and count the votes later.

Oh, and one more thing; this is not related to the ballot design per se, but they shouldn't hand out ballots for shorts programs. How the hell do you give one rating to a collection of films? I mean, what would you be rating? The ability of the programming team to put together shorts that complement each other? Come on. You'd think they'd been running this festival for 48 hours, not 48 years.

(More rants to follow.)

Temptation strikes back

2005-04-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

I am so jealous. I was talking to my little (8th grade) cousin a couple of days ago, and he told me he got a PSP. I want one. I might even go so far as to say: waaaahh!

So I went to get a haircut

2005-04-10T16:44:00.000-07:00

on Friday, and as I was waiting for my hairdresser (stylist?) to finish with her previous client, I was flipping through the magazines they had there. Now, as you might imagine, the normal fare at a salon is of the Vogue or Cosmopolitan variety, so I wasn't expecting to find anything interesting. Then I found the latest issue of Soma magazine. I had not seen nor heard of the magazine before (still don't know much about it, actually), but I was impressed by its sharp, minimalist design. The latest issue, which happened to focus on fashion¹, had a little section talking about cool fashion-oriented blogs. Two of the four mentioned struck me as especially interesting:

Tokyo Street Style, a photoblog showcasing the latest in Tokyo fashion, which is arguably the most bleeding-edge, if strange, streetwear around these days; most of it seems to make its way over to the US eventually, which is sometimes unfortunate.
Manolo's Shoe Blog² - This is just...great! Hilarious and stylish at the same time. Plus, Manolo talks about himself in the third person. Beat that.

¹ Evidently each issue focuses on some theme or other, e.g. film, music, or sports. As far as I can tell, it seems to be the official fashionista magazine. It seems to cover all the latest so-cutting-edge-they're-not-even-trends-yet, and the one word that comes to mind when you see it is hip. Regardless, it is remarkably well-written and, if you can say such a thing without getting struck by lightning, unpretentious.

² No, not that Manolo.

Temptation revisited

2005-04-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

So I spent most of last weekend in San Francisco. While I was there, I did two really cool things:

I went and saw this gallery showing by Ronnie del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa, two artists who work for Pixar. Both of them are exceptionally talented, and I was sorely tempted to buy Fragments, their jointly-published book of their sketches. Practicality eventually won out over temptation, but I am sort of regretting it now.
I went to the Metreon and gave the PSP a test drive. With Wipeout Pure, naturally. For the most part, I agree with the reviewers: the screen is simply a thing of beauty--sharp, crisp and saturated, with a great response time. The analog joystick (it's actually more of a sliding button) is in an awkward position, and the d-pad is much easier to use, at least at first. As for the game, it is just gorgeous. A bit slow, but it gets faster as you unlock higher levels. I am still tempted to buy it, but that $300 price tag is a hefty deterrent. I guess I'll just wait a bit, which is easy to do, since it seems to be out of stock at most if not all of the online retailers.

20% more free!

2005-04-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

In my ongoing quest to make my webpages more user-friendly, I've just added a FAQ to my blog templates site.

Mark Steyn on

2005-04-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

John Bolton's appointment as US ambassador to the UN:

Sending John Bolton to be ambassador to the U.N. is like ... putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam's Iraq chair the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man U.N. operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else.

All of the above happened without the U.N. fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the U.N.'s expense?

Steyn is, as usual, brutally sarcastic, heartlessly honest, and...absolutely right. Read. The. Whole. Thing. (Via VodkaPundit)

Sin City update

2005-04-03T10:56:00.001-07:00

I saw it Friday, and liked it. It wasn't quite what I expected, but very stylish film noir, just the same. 3 stars.

Temptation

2005-03-30T14:21:00.000-08:00

Seems I'm fighting a lot of it these days. This time I'm trying to avoid reading the Sin City graphic novels, of which I have received 6 of 7, before the movie comes out this Friday. I am likely to enjoy both immensely, but I think it's best not to read the books before I watch the movie. To be scrupulously honest, I did give in a bit with the first book, The Hard Goodbye, but read only to the last point that I already knew about (for those of you who've seen the trailer, up to where Marv goes: "I'll be right out"). The movie looks promising, from what I can discern from the trailer; a number of the scenes look just as they've been drawn in the books. Good stuff. I can hardly wait until Friday.

Bad news

2005-03-28T10:52:00.000-08:00

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A massive 8.2 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra Monday close to where a quake triggered a tsunami that left nearly 300,000 people dead or missing across Asia, residents and officials said.

The latest quake had the potential to cause a "widely destructive tsunami" and authorities should take "immediate action," including evacuating coastlines within 600 miles of the epicenter, the Pacific tsunami warning center said.

Full text of article here.

Here's one of the first

2005-03-25T21:01:00.000-08:00

hands-on reviews of the PSP. I gotta tell you, if the console didn't cost so much ($259 MSRP), I'd get it and Wipeout Pure in a heartbeat.

All this (to my mind, premature) talk of

2005-03-24T17:37:00.000-08:00

the domino effect in the Middle East aside, here's an interesting (and these days, increasingly common) take on the historical perspective by The Functional Ambivalent:

So, as a Democrat, I'm wondering: What do we do if President Bush was right? What do we do if the Mideastern dominoes start falling and President Bush goes down in history as Winston Churchill, while we go down as Neville Chamberlain, howling weakly that diplomacy works and military force is no longer necessary? What if our most conservative President goes down in history as a great contributor to the liberal ideals of freedom and tolerance, while we Democrats -- we liberals -- go down as cold-hearted and fearful, unconcerned about the suffering of our fellows while we sit contentedly in our affluence?

If that happens, are we even liberals any more?

Read the whole thing. (Via VodkaPundit)

Can I get extra credit for this?

2005-03-24T17:04:00.000-08:00

As Stephen Green puts it, "Coolest. Project. Ever.":

As US coast-to-coast crimewaves go, it is not in the league of Bonnie and Clyde. It lacks both violence and avarice and is further hindered by an overabundance of pre-publicity.

Undeterred, a couple of students from Cornwall are intent on making American criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible.

Starting in the liberal state of California, they hope to evade the attention of local police officers when they ride a bike in a swimming pool and curse on a crazy-golf course.

In the far more conservative - and landlocked - state of Utah, they will risk the penitentiary when they hire a boat and attempt to go whale-hunting.

If they manage to outwit state troopers in Utah, and perhaps federal agents on their trail, they will be able to take a deserved, but nevertheless illegal, rest when they have a nap in a cheese factory in South Dakota.

"There are thousands of stupid laws in the United States, but we are limiting ourselves to breaking about 45 of them," said Richard Smith, from Portreath, Cornwall.

Original article here.

VodkaPundit's Stephen Green

2005-03-24T16:55:00.000-08:00

writes an interesting essay on the similarities between the war in Iraq and the battle for Iwo Jima¹ during WWII:

Today's atom bomb is democracy in the Middle East – and it's been dropped on Iraq. The fallout has spread far and wide, to Saudi Arabia, to Egypt, to Palestine, and perhaps even to Syria and Iran. Its effects could well bring an early conclusion to today global war, sparing thousands of lives on each side.

Read the whole thing.

¹ "Iwo Jima" is the common romanized spelling of the island's name. Taken exactly from the Japanese, it is actually one word: "ioujima" (long "o" sounds are commonly romanized as "ou") or 硫黄島, which means sulfur island. FYI.

Another suspicious memo?

2005-03-24T12:45:00.001-08:00

Power Line has more. The evidence on both sides is mostly circumstantial and inconclusive, but keep watching. (Via InstaPundit)

UPDATE: More here.

If you haven't heard about this already,

2005-03-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

here's an interesting article about the Times of India's shutdown of a media criticism blog through legal threats. (Via InstaPundit)

Not to be alarmist,

2005-03-22T12:44:00.000-08:00

but this is pretty scary:

At 35 000 feet above the Caribbean, Air Transat flight 961 was heading home to Quebec with 270 passengers and crew. At 3.45pm last Sunday, the pilot noticed something very unusual. His Airbus A310's rudder -- a structure over 8m high -- had fallen off and tumbled into the sea. In the world of aviation, the shock waves have yet to subside.

Mercifully, the crew was able to turn the plane around, and by steering it with their wing and tail flaps managed to land at their point of departure in Varadero, Cuba, without loss of life. But as Canadian investigators try to discover what caused this near catastrophe, the specialist internet bulletin boards used by pilots, accident investigators and engineers are buzzing.

One former Airbus pilot, who now flies Boeings for a major United States airline, told The Observer: "This just isn't supposed to happen. No one I know has ever seen an airliner's rudder disintegrate like that. It raises worrying questions about the materials and build of the aircraft, and about its maintenance and inspection regime. We have to ask as things stand, would evidence of this type of deterioration ever be noticed before an incident like this in the air?"

(Via InstaPundit)

More good stuff

2005-03-22T11:53:00.000-08:00

on Big Journalism and its ever-increasing loss of credibility.

One more time, with feeling

2005-03-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

So I got a call yesterday from the California chapter of NOW. They were looking for donations to help them lobby against conservative judicial nominations for the Supreme Court by the Bush administration. Now, I'm a single female living in one of the most better-dead-than-red¹ areas of the country. I have a more-or-less solid Democratic voting record, and have been known on occasion to contribute to charity. I'm pro-choice and against the Bush administration's attempts to get the Christian right a stronger foothold in the highest court in the land². They should have had me in the bag. Instead, the NOW representative began by reading some inflammatory and blatantly false anti-Republican rhetoric about the "false election" and "losing Roe v. Wade". And within 5 seconds, she lost me. I was disgusted. I don't want to keep harping on this, but here it is again. Even given my demographic information, I think it's folly for these far-left political groups looking for my money or my vote to assume that I agree with them. It's the complacency that kills me. If they are so good at alienating someone who is pretty close to exactly ideologically aligned with them, how will they be at getting the support of someone who's more moderate than me?

¹ A clever turn of phrase borrowed from this Rolling Stone article mentioned in a post I linked earlier.

² For the record, I'm against the far left getting more of a foothold in the Supreme Court, also. Most of America is solidly between the two extremes and I think that ideologically, the Supreme Court justices should represent that. Besides, ideology should not make much of a difference when getting into the nuts and bolts of interpreting law.

OK, so as you have probably noticed,

2005-03-22T10:52:00.000-08:00

my blog posting frequency in the last six months has dropped off drastically. This is mostly due to a significant reduction in my web-surfing time, some intentional and some not. As a result, I am getting ever further behind in my monitoring of my favorite RSS feeds. Why am I telling you this? Because it's my excuse for posting on old stuff. Here's an interesting post on the increasing influence MoveOn wields in the Democratic party, and why it can only be bad news for the left. It harmonizes quite nicely with my liberal-disgusted-with-the-Democratic-party song.

I have fixed the

2005-03-22T10:25:00.000-08:00

Flowers template so that it works in the latest Windows and Mac OS versions of Internet Explorer.

You may have noticed that

2005-03-21T13:42:00.000-08:00

I made some minor changes to the Spring template. One was a redesign of the banner graphic, which I felt was too busy. I opted for something more stylized, and in my mind at least, much more attractive. The second thing i did was to lighten the top and bottom blocks of color on the sidebar. To update your template, you can either re-download the source, or if you've made customizations and don't want to mess with them, do the following:

In the style descriptions for the .sidebar-top and .sidebar-bottom classes, change the background image from leaf_green_bg.png to lt_leaf_green_bg.png. It's that simple.

Oh this is so cool!

2005-03-19T11:46:00.000-08:00

I Like Your Colors! is a web tool that will extract the colors from the CSS of any website you specify, and display swatches thereof.

Where am I finding all these cool links? From What Do I Know, a design-oriented blog I found from the links section on squidfingers. Make sure to check out the links in the Enjoying section, especially this and this. Jieun, you especially will like this.

Whoa.

2005-03-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

Check this out. Very sexy.

This is pretty cool,

2005-03-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

even if it doesn't much benefit Mac users:

Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.

This is especially timely for me, since as you know I've recently been redesigning/restructuring my various websites for cleanliness and user-friendliness; I have spent much of the past few days worrying about font choices and ease of reading for users, since most of my content is written and long.

Most people probably know about this already, but

2005-03-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

here's a pretty neat blog/website: Cooking for Engineers. It's cool not just for its content, but the way the website is programmed.

While we're on the subject of cooking and geeks, I have to admit that I am a Good Eats junkie. It appeals to the engineer in me. If you don't watch this show regularly, you should.

Seems like

2005-03-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

Blogger has fixed the timestamping bug.

And in the spirit of

2005-03-18T13:03:00.000-08:00

early mid-life crisis, here's a link to Bowling for Soup's hilarious video for 1985 (Quicktime required; go here to select another format).

I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork.

2005-03-18T12:54:00.000-08:00

For the second time in as many days, I was contacted this morning by a friend from high school whom I hadn't talked to in at least 5 years. It was...surreal. This is also, by the way, the year of my 10-year high school reunion. And as stupid and cliche as it is, I can't help but start thinking about where I am in my life and if it's what I wanted. Luckily I didn't think about it too long. I guess I didn't have much expectation one way or another back then of how my life was going to be in the future, so what my life is today has no dream to be compared to, and found lacking. In case you're wondering, that's a good thing.

Gasp! Can it be?

2005-03-17T21:42:00.000-08:00

According to this article (thanks to Matt for the link), Microsoft plans to release an IE 7.0, which should support tabbed browsing and transparent PNG rendering. Unfortunately, it is as yet unclear how much of the CSS2 standard they plan to support. This last would have been the most important feature in my book, but evidently Microsoft doesn't seem to think so.

Is liberalism dead?

2005-03-09T16:02:00.000-08:00

Both liberal and conservative pundits seem to think so. I don't know that I would agree, living as I do in that unassailable fortress of liberal thought that is northern California. Do I think liberalism is dead? No. Do I think the liberal movement is a headless, directionless mob of elitists? Hell, yes. (Via InstaPundit)

Blog templates alert

2005-03-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

I've had several e-mails from template users that the comment links in the post footer don't work. In all cases, the reason seemed to be an extra greater-than symbol (>); more on this later. So I checked (and rechecked, and checked again) my template code. It looked fine. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Today, however, I noticed that, even though the code on the server looks fine, most browsers seem to add the extra > character, I guess because they think the code is wrong. Here are the gory details: according to the Blogger reference on comment tags, the comments link in the post footer should look like this:


    <a href="<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>" 
        <$BlogItemCommentFormOnClick$>>
    <$BlogItemCommentCount$> comment(s)
    </a>

And this is what I've put in my template code. Browsers seem to think the syntax is wrong, however, that the opening <a> tag is never closed properly, and add the extra > to fix the "error". So when you view the source for the template, you'd see the following (only sometimes, though, and this is another mystery to me):


    <a href="<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>"> 
        <$BlogItemCommentFormOnClick$>>
    <$BlogItemCommentCount$> comment(s)
    </a>

So the moral of the story, kids, is that when you copy the template source, watch out for that extra > symbol and remove it if a good samaritan web browser has added it. Note that I've also posted this information on the blog templates download page.

CSS, templates and more IE frustrations

2005-03-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

So I've recently kicked off a massive effort to rewrite all of my various websites, and yes, some blog templates, to use CSS positioning instead of tables for the layout, and XHTML 1.0 Strict syntax. I already finished one part of my personal website, with near-success. Typically, IE for both Mac OS and Windows does not display it properly, or at least, does not display it like all the other standards-compliant browsers. It could be that it's wrong, or that it's just stricter than the other browsers. I'm leaning towards wrong: I've got an element that has a higher z-index than the rest of the page inside a fixed-height div, and which has both its and its parent's overflow properties set to visible. So if its content exceeds the fixed height of its parent, the element should still be fully visible, floating over its parent element, right? That's how Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape and Safari render it. But not IE, oh no. IE cuts off the element where the parent div ends. Just lovely. Did I say "AARRRGGHHH" already? No? Well, AARRRGGHHH. Thank you.

What I'm reading:

2005-03-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

So after a long hiatus in my reading activity (movies were my main source of entertainment for a while), I've recently finished a few books:

Guardians of the Keep by Carol Berg: I got started, got sucked in, broke off for a while at a good spot, got sucked in again, and finally finished it a couple of days ago. Another worthy effort from that always excellent author. I think I'll take a bit of a break before I start Soul Weaver, the next (3^rd) in the series.
Monstrous Regiment, the second-to-latest Discworld novel from Terry Pratchett. I am a big Terry Pratchett fan, and have read every (or at the very least, almost every) Discworld book he's written. Moreover, I have loved all of them. This one, however, was a cut above the rest. But I say that every time.

Next up: China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, which is much-hyped, and promises to have a Neil Gaiman/William Gibson/Neal Stephenson kind of aesthetic; I believe the word is steampunk. More later, but I have to say that although I'm only a page or so in, the beauty of the writing tells me I'm going to like this one:

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in.

See?

God, I'm frustrated (or, Why Microsoft Will Lose the Browser War)

2005-02-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

I bet you thought the browser war was over. It isn't. Microsoft just got complacent. Once they had won out over their biggest opponents, the (obviously crappy) Netscape 4.xx browsers, they stopped innovating. They stopped releasing new versions of IE except to plug various security holes. In the meantime, a bunch of other companies/groups have released newer, faster, and just plain better browsers (better from both the user's and programmer's perspectives). It has gotten to the stage where IE is clearly (at least, to me) the least usable and most difficult to program for browser out there.

From the user's perspective:

It doesn't support tabbed browsing
I originally had something here about how IE does not have a pop-up blocking feature. It was pointed out to me (see comment below) that IE 6 with SP2 does, in fact, have a pop-up blocker. Consider me corrected. [Original text: It doesn't have popup blocking built in (intelligent or otherwise, but that's another post)]

From the programmer's perspective:

It has, bar none, the sloppiest standards support (especially CSS) of any browser

I don't imagine that Microsoft is expending (or planning to expend) any intellectual capital on improving IE before whatever they release along with Longhorn. Strategically, I figure they can probably get away with it. Or they could have, if the field still looked like it did 6 months ago. Now, though, with the emergence of the two (again, in my mind, at least) best browsers for Windows and Mac OS--Firefox and Safari, respectively--and moreover the continued defection of Microsoft's users to both of these, Microsoft may find itself in the position of having to earn back user loyalty with the next release of a browser.

So what brought this on? I've been working, for the past few days, on using CSS positioning (rather than a table) to make a blog template where there are two sidebars that look like they overlap the main blog content. After much tweaking, I've gotten to the point where the template looks great in all* browsers except for IE for Windows (yeah, even IE for Mac, while not perfect, does an adequate job of displaying the page). It is driving me up the wall. I am ready to pull my (or more accurately, someone's) hair out. AAARRRGHH.

* By all I mean: for Windows, IE 6.0.2, Netscape 7.2 and Firefox 1.0, and for Mac OS, IE 5.2 and Safari 1.2.4.

Netflix update:

2005-02-20T01:42:00.000-08:00

The Quiet American (2002): 3 stars.

I know this one was critically acclaimed, but it was like Seabiscuit in that it was well made and well acted, but I didn't really get into it. The characters seemed a bit thin to me. I think this is because the film is based on a book, and it's hard to get that same level of dimension in a 2 hour movie. The other problem is that its true strength, the writing, cannot be satisfactorily conveyed in the film medium. It's kinda like White Oleander that way.

Just call me Walt

2005-02-12T23:11:00.000-08:00

Another product evaluation. On the advice of a friend (who is even worse of a neat freak than I am), I went out today and got the Swiffer Duster. Historically, I have not been a fan of the disposable (vs. reusable) cleaning products, because I don't like to generate unnecessary garbage if I don't have to. However, that little thing is worth ten times its weight in gold. It actually picks up dust and doesn't just move it around. Plus, one disposable duster head can usually do your whole place if you dust regularly; since I hadn't dusted for a while before today, it took me two dusters to get through my whole place. Anyway, it worked like a charm. Like buttah, I tell you. My electronics have never looked so clean!