Sat, April 30

Gmail is just fine

The privacy nuts are after Google's e-mail service, Gmail, for letting robots scan your correspondence. As long as those robots aren't voiced by Robin Williams, I fail to see the downside. (Read more.)

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Fri, April 29

Can The Simpsons Ever Improve?

For a day or two, I was pretty sure The Simpsons had a good chance of being great again. Then I started watching recent episodes of The Simpsons. (Read more.)

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Wed, April 27

That's why all those mysterious things are happening!—10:31 PM

I was watching the cheap-ass rip-off clip-show version of Lost this week, just as a thing to do, and fast-forwarding through as much of it as I could once I realized they weren't going to add any new footage. I wanted to watch some of it though, especially the first half, as a recap. And, the cryptic semi-British narrator was kind of fun. Maybe he would say something interesting, or phrase things in a way that might prove enlightening. (He didn't.)

Towards the end, though, while screening footage of Jack closing the eyes of a newly deceased Boone, the narrator asked, "What if you failed and lost your faith?" (And if I'm ruining the Boone thing for you, you obviously haven't seen the giant splash cover of "EW" from that week!) Anyway, as this was happening, I noticed something – I don't know if they were slipping this in as a hint, but I think it explains a lot.

You see? The reason for all the craziness on the island, the reason that Jack hasn't really managed to save any of the lives he's tried to – he's not really a doctor, he's faith healer Tor Eckman from the early years of Seinfeld! So, you heard it here first: that's where they'll be taking us for the final three episodes before the cliffhanger, where he turns Kate purple like an eggplant.

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"Buzzworthify" bookmarklet—2:43 PM

As I mentioned before, one of the new ways that I'm motivating myself to complete the onebee overhaul as quickly as possible is by making the new system so much easier and more fun to use that my desire to switch over to a new and better future compels me to finish the work as fast as I can. The newest little tidbit of the strategy is a "bookmarklet" that I've created to speed up the process of posting the Buzzworthy links.

A bookmarklet is a little snippet of code which can be stored in your web browser like a regular bookmark but, when clicked, it invokes some kind of dynamic action. Easily the most primitive bookmarklets are those which copy some information from the current broswer view and pass it to another page. They have 'em at del.icio.us and TinyURL: install the bookmarklet, then click it while viewing any page and it'll automatically fill the proper information into the form on their site.

So now (not now, but soon!) I'll have the same capability, making it that much easier for me to share things in the Buzzworthy box as I'm surfing around the web. Already, I groan every time I post links using the "old" (current) admin site. The "old baby" mentality has set in, hard core. But I'm restraining myself from adding the feature to the current site – it's the yearning for the wonderful newness that spurs me on!

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Knight in Flannel Armor—9:41 AM

Wired has an article that stands out from the typical Star Wars glut in the run up to Episode III (The lines! The Sith! The O.C. guest spot!) – discussing director George Lucas's desire to return to the avant garde filmmaking by which he defined himself at the very start of his career.

When Episode I was so awful, I was groaning that Lucas took the wrong tack. He's built an impenetrable financial security for himself – why should he make bad movies that attempt to pander to the lowest common denominator? Now, it seems like maybe he agrees. Making better movies was his plan all along, but he wanted to get Star Wars out of the way first.

"I've earned the right to fail, which means making what I think are really great movies that no one wants to see."

Wouldn't it be hilarious if in the long run he turned out to be my hero after all?

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Mon, April 25

Arrested Development - never to return?—12:34 PM

Defamer, which isn't always right but is at least entertaining in the meantime, has had its eye on the impending cancellation of Arrested Development for some time. (After all, just because Fox is now learning the mistake of canceling a brilliant comedy with Family Guy, why should they apply that knowledge to a hypothetically identical situation? No, clearly more shows like Stacked and Life on a Stick are called for – tout suite!)

Arrested Development Finally Canceled? [Defamer]

There's still wiggle room in this prediction, but it's looking pretty grim. You can tell the show's writers aren't too confident in a renewal, because they did their best to tie up a few loose ends (like George Michael & Maebe – yay!) at the end of the current (truncated) season. But still, as with Ed, I'll hold out hope as long as I can.

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Sat, April 23

Stop the Presses!—12:41 AM

Work on the onebee overhaul continues at a furious pace. I finished laying out some of the upgraded back-end pages (where I go to post entries and upload photos, things like that) and they're so much prettier and more usable than the current set – now I'm extra-motivated to get things up and running quickly, so I can move forward into the future.

I mean, honestly, who wouldn't want to spend all their time in a cool place like this?

Especially when the alternative is this ugly junk heap?

This evening, I spent all my time troubleshooting some glitches in the "publishing" process. This is the part where the system writes an entry out to a file and stores it on the server where it can later be retrieved and read by your web browser. (Storing the files, rather than retrieving them from the database on the fly, makes the site zippier in periods of high traffic – if we ever had any periods of high traffic.) One of this project's major revisions is the transition to "object-oriented programming," which is more efficient because the code is grouped into tightly constructed bundles ("object classes") which describe discrete types of data. (For example: if I want to display an entry, I create an entry "object" which contains all the attributes of that entry, and then I can move that object around and do stuff to it. The "object class" is like a set of instructions, telling the computer how to create the object and how to respond to commands like "display the title of this entry," or "add a comment to this entry.")

However, the object-oriented approach is still somewhat new to me, and what makes it more efficient in the long run is much more rigorous programming in the immediate short term, which means a lot of headaches. I spent most of the night hammering away at the problem of multiple columns with the same name – ensuring that they don't overwrite each other. It begins with making sure that no two posts in the same folder have the same filename (for example, since S.W.A.T. and S.W.A.T. were published in different months, they're in separate folders and can have the same name – if not, one of them would end up with a name like "swat-235"); but, it gets a little more complicated. If I want to be able to move or rename a post, I have to make sure that I won't overwrite another page with the same name. It would be an unlikely coincidence for me to move a post into a folder with an existing post already using the same filename, but it's better to work this out now than worry about it later. The main goal of this overhaul is to hopefully never have to tinker with onebee's underlying code again – so the sturdier I can make it, the more casually I can use these admin tools in the future. I won't have to give a second thought to filenames, because I can trust that the system is keeping track for me.

I'm delighted to report that the filename issue has been completely resolved – after looking at it from all angles – and now I'll be able to move and rename posts willy-nilly with no fear of losing anything. It was just under a year ago that I stayed up all through the night to get onebee online, then scurried off in the pre-dawn light to help Arksie move into a new apartment. Since I'm helping another friend move tomorrow, I think now would be a good time to sign off in the hopes of not repeating the same sleepless ordeal. (Although I was at the top of my moving game that day – maybe there's a lesson there.)

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Wed, April 20

Scrubs—7:31 PM

Just catching up on last night's Scrubs. (If McRace is good for nothing else, it's good for postponing all of Tuesday night's programming until another night.) (And when a pair of queens turn into a diamond flush that gets beat by a higher flush and knocks you out of the poker on the fourth hand, it's good for pretty much nothing else.) (Although the brownies were excellent – thanks, Karen.)

One of their better episodes in a while. And there's a scene in the cafeteria that was so funny I had to go back and watch it again after the episode was over. Putting Neil Flynn and Josh Randall on the same screen – why didn't we think of this years ago?

0 comments

On Iteration—11:59 AM

Since I'm in all-redesign all-the-time mode, I've been clicking on the blog links that refer to the design process a little more often than I usually do. This one is about whether you should present design clients with multiple options, or put all your energy into one and then convince them how great it is:

One Idea is Better than Three [Garret Dimon]

I definitely agree, although I'd hesitate to hire this guy as a consultant based on all the spelling mistakes. It got me thinking, though, about what a difference it is when the designer is the client (as in my case, currently). You can't generate a bunch of concepts internally and only show the client the best one if you're also the client. As a result, I'm not sure if my process is faster or slower. I do sometimes notice myself stepping back and putting on the "client hat" to evaluate the different options I'm generating. But a lot of the time, I'm designing, considering, rejecting, and reworking all at the same time. Which is nice in some ways, but frustrating in others. You don't have someone pushing you to consider a completely new approach. I've tried creating that pressure artificially, which has worked to some extent – especially when going "back to the drawing board" with a method like the "Patterns in Web Design" article I mentioned previously.

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Tue, April 19

Grey's Anatomy

I watched the first two episodes of ABC's Grey's Anatomy – herewith, a smattering of random reactions. (Read more.)

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A Gala Day—5:30 PM

As predicted, the gallery page was easier since it built on the framework established by the individual page. This one only took about half a day. Also as predicted, there were many glitches and unforseen "gotchas." Dear Lord, why is CSS support so befuddled across browsers? And why is IE such a pain in the ass all around? You tell it, "I want to put this box of text right here" and it comes back, "How about HERE?! Mwa ha ha!" It makes you long for the days when it looked like it was about to be litigated out of existence.

Does 20 pictures a page look like too much? I could cut it to 16 to ensure that the entire gallery stays "above the fold" for all users, but that seems like a small amount to have on one page. Then again, most people will open the gallery, click on the first picture, and navigate the rest of the way directly from photo to photo.

Is all of this intensely boring? I try to ensure that no more than half of any given update is devoted to techno-babble. I'll be going to McRace in an hour or so, which will be the first time I've seen another human being since Friday. Perhaps that will offer a much needed re-education in interacting with others.

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Mon, April 18

Organizing the Redesign

It's begun: the big push to update onebee with all the features I ever wished it would have. (You can read along with me in your book; just turn the page whenever the chimes ring, like this!) (Read more.)

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Fill your day with Picture Pages!—7:51 PM

For those of you knuckleheaded enough to be considering a future in web design, this ought to be enough to slap that notion out of your minds! I spent the entire day working on this one page (minus the hours from 8-6 when I was diligently working at my day job, of course!). And that's just the layout – I won't tie it into the database until a few weeks from now when I've built the new photo management tools. Plus there's a gallery page that needs to be laid out, too – although fortunately that layout is pretty similar to this one.

I'm really delighted with the final product, though, and I hope you will be, too, when it's time to start showing photos in it. As with the other major sections of this redesign, I'm hoping that having a proper venue for showing pictures means I'll take more and share more.

In keeping with our new "Love all. Serve all. Show all." philosophy, here's what the new photo pages will look like once the redesign is through.

The idea of the redesigned photo pages is to devote as much of the screen to the photo display as possible, while making it super-easy to navigate through the gallery to the next picture, or back to the last one. As usual, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, here – incorporating the concept of clicking half of the image to navigate forward (and the other half, back) which comes from kottke.org and Doug Bowman's StopDesign. (It's an idea well worth borrowing – it's simple Fitts's Law, adding such a big click target makes a huge difference when navigating a photo gallery.) Of course I've added a few tweaks of my own, to make a better fit with onebee – and, wouldn't you know, those tweaks were the most maddening part of today's ordeal.

I have to agree with the 37signals folks, though. Typically, I would have mocked this page up in Photoshop before coding it in HTML and CSS, but today I followed their credo of "Get real fast," and went straight from pencil sketches to code, and it was grueling but it gave me a better idea of what was possible, and allowed me to turn things on and off to show how the page will look in different states (gallery vs. standalone photo; larger version available vs. not; horizontal vs. vertical). Their essay on patterns in web design was a big help too. Is there anything they can't do?

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Fri, April 15

Cast Away

Hoo! We at onebee sure do take on a lot of pro bono work – probably more than is good for us. But it was the right time to skip a few episodes of Survivor: people left the game in the exact order I would have predicted, anyway. (Read more.)

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Thu, April 14

Prey. Slay. Display.—10:47 AM

That's the slogan which accompanies the disturbing image (with the strong Bukkake overtones) on the billboard for House of Wax – following in the ultra-hip, way-original "three periods" school of marketing. (e.g., "Rip. Mix. Burn." – or any of these.) That's fine, but it kind of reminds me of Kyan from Queer Eye with his tips on applying cologne: "Spray. Delay. And walk away." (Or that scene from Happy Gilmore.)

Anyway, I'm not seeing this movie and I'm not even in their target demographic, so I shouldn't care how it's marketed, but I think they're missing a key opportunity that might snag a huge portion of the market who wouldn't go to horror movies otherwise. Their banner for this movie should just be a photograph of Paris Hilton impaled on something. There's a lot to be said for the "wish fulfillment" approach.

1 comment with related links

Tue, April 12

It's sure easier than herding them!—6:29 PM

Wisconsin is considering joining South Dakota and Minnesota in declaring that feral cats – stray cats or other free-roaming cats that are not collared or not under the direct control of an owner – should be listed as unprotected species, thereby making them legal for hunters to shoot just like skunks or other rodents.

It's a perfectly reasonable proposal to control population overgrowth, and the only reason anyone is arguing against it is that kitties are cute. The fact that someone protesting the decision would show up wearing a sign that reads, "Too Cute To Kill" pretty much sums it up for me. Cuteness doesn't factor into it, dopes! Take a rational look at the situation and figure out the best solution. If locusts were causing the same problems nobody would bat an eye at slaughtering them. (They'd even make a CBS movie about it!) But just because kitties are fuzzy, they should be spared? That's preposterous. "Too Cute To Kill" is dangerously close to the argument posed by the defenders of Terri Schiavo's right to not die. Nobody's disputing that they're cute, but this is a larger issue than that.

Unprotecting feral cats and strays represents a viable solution to a serious problem, and I'm no fan of hunting, but these aren't wild deer. These are animals whose population explosion is a direct result of human intervention in the form of domestication. If cat fanciers are too horrified to let them be shot, they should round them up, adopt them, and spay/neuter them. It's the same as pro-lifers: okay, fine, we'll save every fetus; but then you have to raise them, rather than consigning them to some orphanage, or crack whore mom, or worse.

And another thing: this is exactly the same fallacious logic that makes people rail against gay marriage or abortion or anything else. They're not coming into your living room to slaughter your tabby. (Although, if I could, I would.) They're not forcing you to marry a gay guy or terminate your pregnancy. They're just opening it up so that in a situation where it's appropriate (hordes of strays spreading disease, killing native species, tipping over trash cans, howling at the moon), somebody with a 12-gauge can go out there and make things better.

11 comments with related links

Random link—3:01 PM

In order to try to build a little more forward-looking longevity into my HTML code, I have been using decimal references instead of name references to refer to non-standard characters. For example, ♥ for ♥ and – for – instead of –. I don't know where I got it, but I have this unfounded fear that the name-based references will be decremented in future browsers and then all my © references will look weird.

Anyway, the downside of the decimal references is that they're impossible to remember. Some Google search a year or so ago yielded the following listing, and I still refer to it every once in a while: http://www.tntluoma.com/sidebars/codes/

Today, I was back at the list (looking up … for an unrelated project) and I got to thinking, "Just what the hell does 'tntluoma' mean anyway?" It sounds like a cross between dynamite and cancer, but that can't be it.

So, I went to http://tntluoma.com/ and found out; it's the site of Tim 'n' Tracey (last name, presumably, Luoma). Lots of pictures on the home page of their cute kid. Good for them.

Then I noticed this, among their latest entries: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It's unremarkable (for our purposes, I mean; all the best to Tim 'n' Tracey, of course) except for the following snippet from the opening paragraph:

TiVo recorded The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. I wasn’t sure why at first, I didn’t remember setting it to record. Turns out Julianne Moore has a supporting role in it, and as you know I’ve asked our loyal TiVo to record anything with her in it.

Hee! I've been described before as the Bizarro Lileks. I think we've found the Bizarro Onebee!

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iPod One—12:51 PM

CNN, "The London Times", and a slew of other media outlets have pounced on the following story about the playlist on George W. Bush's iPod:

Bush bares soul with 'iPod One' [CNN]

This is exactly the sort of non-news "journalism" that should be eradicated completely. CNN should fire Peter Wilkinson and anyone else up the editorial chain who approved this story. Let them work for Drudge, or Page Six. If this is an example of the news media trying to "beat the bloggers at their own game," it foreshadows a pretty hilarious reversal in which the bloggers are the only ones investigating actual news from actual sources, and CNN and the networks are digging up gossip and making dick jokes.

I dislike our president intensely, but there's absolutely no merit in culling through is iPod playlist for a window into his personality. If he'd sat down and filled the thing up with thousands of MP3s off of Kazaa, maybe. But it currently holds only 250 songs, which have been downloaded by a staffer at Bush's request. That's not how you collect deeply personal music; that's how you put a few songs into a cursory playlist for show – either to politely express interest in a gift from your daughters that you wouldn't otherwise care about, or to seem "hip" to a nation of iPod-loving constituents. (And decoding the lyrics is preposterous – if I deleted every song with lyrics I don't agree with, I'd only have a few dozen tracks on my iPod, too.) This has nothing to do with the music he really cares about – and furthermore, it simply isn't news. If he's storing PDBs on there, that's a story.

Interestingly, this tidbit was linked alongside a comment from some indie record honcho:

I feel like there has been created, in the past two to three years, an indie-yuppie establishment. Bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Iron and Wine, the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, they are great bands, really great bands, with great albums, great songs, high quality. And to me, it’s just so fucking boring. It’s like fancy-coffee-drinking, Volvo-riding music for kids. And kids should be listening to music that shakes them up more, makes them uncomfortable.

Granted, I've only heard of two of these bands, but I still think this is absurd. (And I'm going to let the Volvo crack slide.) I like a lot of music, and I always like trying new music I haven't heard before. But to sincerely suggest that people should be paying good money for music that "makes them uncomfortable"? I'm sorry – that's absurd. I don't even know what that means. It just seems antithetical to listen to a song that you don't like just because you don't like it. Where's the benefit in that?

I'm sure there are people out there who like every kind of music, otherwise those artists would starve. But I'm not going to buy a CD of Björk banging a tire iron against a toilet bowl and squawking meringue recipes in Yiddish just because it makes me uncomfortable. I can be uncomfortable on my own.

4 comments with related links

Fri, April 8

Sin City

Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez team up to bring Sin City to the movie screen – unlike anything we've ever seen before. It'll grab you and take you for a ride... but where will you be when that's over? (Read more.)

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Thu, April 7

Maggie on SI—12:25 PM

Spring: a young man's thoughts turn to crushes past. Guess what! Maggie Haskins has a column on SI.com now.

From her Final Four column, pleading with sportswriters to retire the cliché of creating four-pointed lists when writing about the Final Four:

1. It's not that witty, everybody does it.
2. Too much alliteration with the letter "F" doesn't make it any cooler.
3. A writer usually only has three good points to make about any given subject and the last one is usually a filler.
4. See No. 3.

Gotta love it!

2 comments with related links

Street Un-Sweeper—11:03 AM

Here's something that happened to me on the way to work this morning. (Has it come to this? So busy am I that I haven't seen Lost in two weeks and I've resorted to telling stories about my commute!)

I was driving along Venice between Western and Normandie, this delightful little stretch that they just resurfaced and it's like smearing your ass with butter and sliding across a glass table – super smooth. While I waited for the light at Harvard to turn green (I timed it with my Oscar stopwatch once because I had it in the car with me for no reason: 21 seconds), I saw a street-sweeper turn right (west) on Venice from Harvard. Its little sprayers were spraying and its brushes were churning. As I watched it driving by, I noticed that the previously pristine street was becoming littered with trash and leaves that were falling out of the hysterically spinning brushes of the street-sweeper.

I've never really understood what the street-sweeper is meant to do. If it includes a vacuum system, it's not a very strong one. Mostly it just wets and redistributes the existing dirt, swishing it around with those whirling brushes. (I mean, I know what the street-sweeper is really meant to do: provide a flimsy justification for expensive parking tickets.) But as I watched all this trash fly off the hulking machine – like those little animated squiggles that always follow Charles Schulz's Pigpen around – it seemed to me like it was not only defeating the purpose of the street-sweeper, but actually counteracting it.

If you think about it, there are lots of things that we seem to do because that's how we're used to doing them – not because we've thought it out and determined that it's the best way.

1 comment

Tue, April 5

Effin' A!

GMail knows everything about you and everyone who's ever sent you e-mail. DirecTV.com can't tell the difference between being selfless and wantin' some lovin'. (Still, get DirecTV. And tell 'em I sent you!) (Read more.)

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Veronica Mars—5:33 PM

Alicia's got it right: Veronica Mars is the best show you're not watching, and the rest of the country with you. Give it a try people! Would I steer you wrong? Was I wrong about Boston Legal?

Rob Thomas, a distant pal of comment denizen "AC", is the show's creator: he's had more excellent shows undeservingly canceled than almost anyone, including the sublime Jeremy Piven/Paula Marshall vehicle Cupid. He's probably headed for one more early termination, but if you get a chance to watch Veronica Mars before it's gone, you'll be glad you did.

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Mon, April 4

Strongly Agree—11:37 AM

The "Entertainment Weekly" Front Row Panel contacted me again today to get my take on the new magazine "Look". They asked my opinion about the design and features, and I gave them all the same stuff I gave you guys back when it first came out, then just pasted in a link to that entry.

Then they asked a lot of questions about what kind of moviegoer I am and what kind of DVD collector I am. My favorite question was:

I look forward to awards season and participate in an Oscar office pool every year

I had to put strongly agree on that one!

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Fri, April 1

Cease and Desist

Try as I might, the Mrs. Butterworth's people won't take "Yes" for an answer. I've been told to take down their takedown order. (Read more.)

9 comments with photos