Archive for April, 2006

Cable & Tweed is apparently the blog of an alternate reality version of me. Really good stuff and lots of great tunes. Check it out. ~

I think it’s time to leave SprintPCS. I’ve been with them for several years now and have paid way too much for far too little. I’m browsing various carriers and trying to read as many reviews as possible, while trying to balance my needs and wants from a wireless phone. And I’m thinking I might buy this guy and sell my iPod. I recently saw a hack that doubles the capacity of the internal memory, so I’d have 1000 songs on my phone. Knowing me, I’d miss my iPod within minutes. Anyway, what a cool phone. Much cooler than my beat up, free Nokia. ~

Indie kids, meet the guy who wrote your bible. ~

I want to put this here so that I have proof if anyone wants to play “gotcha” later. For the record, I’m not very fond of Hillary Clinton. However, if she gets the nod, I’ll work tirelessly to make sure she gets to the White House. There, I said it. ~

I know the first major purchase I want to make once I have the opportunity is a Toyota Prius. Say what you will about them, but ever since riding in a friend’s several weeks ago I know my mind is made up. I like the idea of doing something practical about my oil usage—small though it may be—but I also love the idea of being able to hack my car. Joe tells me hackers are hard at work on mods for the Prius’ onboard computer system, and something about that just makes me happy.
Another reason to like the Prius is that it sidesteps all the BS about E85. GM is pushing corn ethanol as a valid replacement (and current supplement) to fossil fuels, an argument that made some sense at the outset but ultimately fails. A recent Cornell study showed that producing ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced. Read that again. That’s a pretty staggering finding. And it’s no doubt GM wants to push E85 since its use means zero modification to the powerplants they’ve already spent billions developing and testing over the last 40 years. E85 also (as the name suggests) still employs 15% fossil fuel. A strategy like Toyota’s where we reduce our footprint gradually until we don’t rely on any biomass fuel source is sustainable.
But we also desperately need to relearn how to plan our communities in the US. More so than anywhere else on earth our cities sprawl and specialize, forcing us to use cars for even short trips. Moving from a foot-friendly town like DC back to the sprawling south was a bit of a shock for me, and it’s gradually become a daily disappointment. The lack of consistent sidewalks or bike lanes and spotty bus service make a car an object of survival and tends to make a population overweight. Being fat and car bound sucks. I’d much rather be trim and have to plan a few extra minutes of walking into my day.
But as long as there are cars you’ll find me hacking Google maps into my Prius. ~

Hang the “W” off the yard-arm at Wrigley tonight. Sean Marshall took a no-hitter into the fifth inning before allowing a one out single. Your final score: Cubs 3, Marlins 1. ~

The Cubs will go into game two of this Marlins series tonight at 8:05pm. We’re starting against the D-Train tonight, which means we have to work the count and get at him within the first two innings. Here’s the scouting report on our starter, the youngster Sean Marshall:

In his second big league start on April 14, Marshall picked up his first win as well as his first hit and RBI with a run-scoring single. The lefty held the Pirates to four runs on five hits and one walk over five-plus innings. He struck out two, and departed after giving up two hits in the sixth, including Nate McLouth’s first homer. He retired the first nine batters he faced in the game, and showed incredible poise.

Let’s go, Cubbies. ~

I just came up with a way to make a million dollars really quickly. I’m going to download a bunch of slightly humorous video clips from sites like YouTube and CollegeHumor. Then I’m going to arrange them in no particular order and pay some unknown stand-up comic/starving actor to ad lib cheap topical jokes over them. I figure my production cost will be somewhere around $200. When I’m done I’m going to sell the thing to VH1, who will air it at 3 am amidst a bunch of Pantene commercials. Then, dear reader, I wait for the checks to roll in.
Seriously, how little does a network have to think of its viewers when its programming consists of Juliette Lewis talking about ‘My Little Pony’, or that girl I think I might have seen playing “Waitress #2″ on Gilmore Girls once talking over a video clip of Paris Hilton getting into her car? Please make it stop. Please earn the millions your advertisers pay you by actually making tv shows. Even when I’m just flipping by this garbage I feel dirty and used. ~

No, damn it. I don’t want to see “This American Life”, I want to hear it. That’s why it works. Oh, this is all wrong. Ira, what happened? ~

I just got through this two hour tech support nightmare, during which I realized that big companies have started training their people to know just enough to think they’ve trapped you in the act of lying. Case in point: BellSouth blocks port 25 like a lot of big ISPs. This means that if you use some other ISP (or your web host) for your email you must authenticate through BellSouth first, so they can see if your mail is some giant spam bomb or just pictures of the grand kids. I can live with that. I usually use Gmail for everything anyway, so no biggie. The only problem is that no one could tell me what to do. They all knew that port 25 was blocked, and gave me these heroic explanations as to why (”we’re helping to keep you safe from unwanted emails”). But no one could tell me how to get authentication working. So they’re all reading the tech manual at me (”tell the customer to go to ‘Control Panels’”), thinking I must be some spammer who’s mad that he can’t send out these 12,000 Viagara emails. So then this happens.

Tech Person: Change your password setting to “none”.
Me: Wait, “none” as in “none”? Like, no magical spam defeating powers “none”? Like, let me send any mail I want through your mighty gates, unbidden by any safety protocols whatsoever?
Tech Person: Yeah.
Me: Type type type click type send.
Tech Person: And?
Me: Thanks.

Disaster averted. Mail sent. Free-lance opportunity salvaged. I need a nap. ~

I decided in this redesign that I’d use some PNG graphics and a gradient to provide the illusion of a drop shadow at the edges of the main content DIV. If you view the site in a decent browser, like Firefox or Safari, you get the nice effect of continuously scrolling against a shadow. Because PNG files can use binary transparency the edges of the shadow aren’t affected by the variations in color, and the shadow doesn’t stick out. This is all well and good for decent browsers. IE doesn’t do PNG without messy hacks, though, so I’m using this to serve alternate graphics:


body {
background-color : #889FA2;
margin : 0;
font-family : Georgia, serif;
font-size : 100%;
background-image : url(/images/main.gif) !important;
background-repeat : repeat-x !important;
background-position : top !important;
background-attachment : fixed !important;
background-image : url(/dev/null); /* this is for IE */
}
#main {
width : 820px;
height : 101%;
margin : auto;
padding : 0 20px 0 20px;
background-image : url(/images/shadowBG.png) !important;
background-repeat : repeat-y !important;
background-image : url(/images/shadowBG.gif);
background-repeat : repeat-y;
}

At run time I’m swapping in a new URL (a fake one, natch) that IE can use to paint the page background. The second block of code actually serves something, in this case a gif version of the shadow for the content DIV. “Why does this work?” I hear you asking. Well, IE ignores the !important; declaration, and skips ahead to the directives below anything marked that way. It isn’t pretty, and it exploits yet another IE hack, but it does the trick. It really doesn’t seem to cause and significant performance hits either. Short of JS brain surgery it’s the nicest way to do the kind of the design I wanted to do, and not totally sacrifice IE readability.

See, this is how much I care about you—the Windows/IE user.

Any better ideas? You know where I’m found. ~

After struggling with the old design some yesterday I decided just to chuck it and redesign it for IE from the ground up. Here goes nothing.

**UPDATE***
Yep. About forty relatively painless minutes later things are looking much better for those unfortunate souls still using IE 6. Oddly enough, Safari is balking on a few things. But having Firefox and IE tied up is good enough for a night’s work I think. Have fun Saturday nights, kids.
~

I’ve been poking around with the site to make sure I’m not leaving any Windows users out. I’ve at least got the navigation bar showing up now but, of course, it’s floating about 18 pixels higher than it should. I hate IE. Well, enjoy. ~

If this doesn’t show in a nearby ZIP code, I’ll be a really unhappy camper. Gretchen Moll looks perfect, and I heard Mary Harron give a great interview on Fresh Air today. Harron chose to shoot each half of the movie to match Page’s pictures from that period, i.e., the Bunny Yeager years are in color, and Klaw years are in black and white. Neat. Other interesting choices on Harron’s part were a demand that no actors be cast who’d had plastic surgery of any kind (”people didn’t do that in the 1950’s”) and using a ring light on Moll (”female leads in the 50’s seemed to glow”). A good interview and possibly an excellent movie.

Fresh Air : ‘Bettie Page’: The Making of a Pin-Up Sensation
Yahoo! Movies Preview : “The Notorious Bettie Page” ~

Did I tell you I’m reading The Catcher In The Rye? Well, I am. I started it several times when I was a kid but–shocker–I didn’t finish it. And I have to say that even though this book would be of the most use to someone about fourteen years old, it’s meaning won’t dawn on you until you’re a good bit older. There’s poetry on these pages, and I don’t mean somber sing song words that don’t mean anything. I mean the hidden density of being a teenager; the inexplicable anger, the unassuagable rage and cynicism and the unbearable loneliness. All that is obfuscated in plain sight, and to decode it you have to be able to remember what it’s like to be sixteen, something I have no trouble doing. ~

This is going on my Amazon wish list to order as soon as it’s in print. John Snow made the first map of a disease’s victims when cholera broke out in and around Broad Street in London in 1854. In making the map he introduced the world to epidemiology, and saved hundred of Londoners from cholera by having the Broad Street water pump closed. He was also first to prove that cholera was spread by germs, and was not the result of a “miasma” as had been thought previously. Snow’s map itself is a masterpiece of information design lauded not just by Steven Johnson in the aforementioned book, but also Edward Tufte. Can’t wait for this. ~