Lolita at 50 - Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking? By Stephen Metcalf

This one's going back on my to-be-read pile. Perversity just doesn't get old. Of course this is coming from somebody who has aspired to be a dirty old man since he was Lolita's age. Getting closer every year.

Flying With Scissors and Other Airport Updates - New York Times

Presuming that our budget will sustain it, 2006 looks to be a fairly flight intensive year. Not as crazy as people who fly for their jobs, but I'm looking at at least 4 flights, 2 of them international. Cybil has tentative plans for 3 or 4 more than me.

Along with the author of this article I am very dubious about these potential new security attempts. I too could very well come out a false-positive in a lie detector test, due to my fear/hate of authority figures. Conversely, somebody I know tells small lies all the time to practice for the big ones and has in the past lied to a lie detector test without being caught.

WTF Case: This Grid-based Font

WhatTheFont to the rescue! Their tool couldn't identify this font (since the characters aren't continuous) but I got a reply from the Forum identifying the font as Amber Angled by MADtype. If you enjoy fonts take a moment to look at the samples on the MADtype site. Gothico Antiqua, Rubba, and Shifty are particularly amusing.

CSS Vertical Bar Graphs

see also: CSS FOR BAR GRAPHS.

This is excellent timing. I had just started dabbling in building a vertical bar graph for my magic deck's Mana Curves. A couple years back I had done a horizontal bar graph using some DOM scripting (Table -> Bar Graph). This time the plan was to build it in CSS, and then calculate the bar sizes dynamically using JavaScript. And now I have these two excellent examples of the CSS, which will be perfectly adequate until I have more time on my hands and can automate the sizing. There are just too many decks in the archives to do them all by hand.

Sexy Smooth Curves

I've really gotta get my shit together and learn how to use paths in photoshop. Kinduv sad that I haven't yet.

The Other I.D.

Just got new wires on my braces yesterday. Under the increased tension one of my brackets decided to pop off, the one in the very back. Now I've got a half-inch exposed wire dicing the inside of my mouth. So this article lends additional (if ironic) weight to it when I say, "MY GODDAMN BRACES HURT!".

Psychology Today: Stirring Sound of Stress

neat little article about a german study where they looked at the biology behind people's internal alarm clocks.

Browncoats : Official Serenity Fan Site : a/v room

You have to sign in or join to see it, but here is one of those scenes with Inara that was cut from the beginning of the movie. The Quicktime/Windows Media links are switched, and Joss' introduction isn't worth watching, but if you can't get enough of Inira give it a watch.

Krautwald

There's so much good natural lighting here in socal, but sometimes I do find myself trying to rig up some indoor lighting for some product shot or other. this looks like a nice trick to bust those shadows.

Fuck Christmas

It's the fucking Pagan celebration of solstice. And those "Christmas" traditions? They’re not just like Pagan rituals, they fucking are Pagan rituals.

Love me a good rant.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web - a practical guide to web typography

at last, it's launched!

I Will Knot!

I've got my work cut out if I ever find the time to get back to my knot book. I was thinking I would do a google maps sort of thing, with "illustrated", "photographed" and "hybrid" as three views of each knot. But now that I've seen a couple good movies of knots I can't see doing it any other way.

Perhaps I'm thinking about it the wrong way. There are a few knots that I'd like to teach, Adjustable as a superior alternative to Tautline, but since there are so many resources on how to tie knots maybe my added value comes from somewhere else. Perhaps I'll have action photos of the knots in use. Or, if I'm still stuck in LA when I get back to this project (yes, it'll be a while before this project gets going again), I'll wind up going all acedemic and writing essays/stories about the merits and uses of various knots.

Smartcar "Fortwo" on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Saw a bunch of these around England. Although they're going to be sold in the US, they'd only make any sense if you're living in Manhattan or something. Here's an article all about their US plans: Will Smart's weird cars make it here?

New shop's use of live models draws mixed reaction - Boston.com

My dad just told me about this shop front in Augusta, Maine (the town where he works). He's driven by but hasn't had a chance to stop in and chat. Here's a photo from inside the store, still haven't found a picture from the front (but from behind is the best anyway).

Captain's Mistress Game

Saw this at a special exhibit at Blenheim. It's old-school "Connect 4", which we played later that day using the giant game board out by the maze. Check out the other wooden board games mastersgames.com has. One day I'll have to pick up their Chinese Checkers and Ludo boards. I'd also like to learn how to play Tablut and Nine Mens Morris before investing in a board like one of these. Oh man, and their Cribbage boards are to die for (though I really ought to build my own for Cybil and my two player solitaire variant).

Khmerang.com - CSS-Technique: Worn Type

Ah, the cleverness that goes on while I'm away. And I've not even opened my bloglines yet. (here's another page of decorating type using CSS demos)

Fab Labs (mp3 file)

A Science Friday segment. The idea that what happened with computers might happen with elecronics fabrication is so cool. Just stop for a second and think what you'd make if you could build anything. I'd probably make something trivial, some hybrid between electronic and old-school board games. But people with real jobs, proper artisans, could make some cool stuff with a lowered barrier to entry into elecronics manufacturing.

Google Sitemaps - Site Overview

As with what I've been reading about Google Analytics (comparison of Measuremap, Mint and Google Analytics) Google's tool has a bit of a learning curve to it, but how invaluable might it be to see your site through the eyes of the googlebot?

The 2006 Collection

New Demotivators calendar this year from Despair. Sucked that they copped out last year with a crappy "best of" calendar.

For the guys at work; speaking of Engineering…

GPS Technology Raises Concern on the Job - Yahoo! News

Hmmm, so the biggest objection that seems to be raised is that employees might be held accountable for their whereabouts and actions while at work, whereas currently they enjoy being able to break the law and shirk responsibility. Damn them for making me come down on the side of The Man.

Package Alert Service

Tracking a FedEx package with this service appears to stay one step ahead of tracking via Bloglines. Next time I'll do a side-by-side comparison of those two and FedEx's own tracking updates.

What is the weather like?

It is now 6:26am in Birmingham, England. And more significantly, it is 23°F and clear. Which is rather colder than it is here.

Google Search: 2005 in roman numerals

2005 = MMV. Google's calculator is brilliant.

Wayfaring Map - Castles in the heart of England

…and so the trip planning begins in ernest. Being able to see where the places we want to go are in relation to eachother is great. Like having a map and arrow stickers (oh wait, we already have that, and can take it with us). But it is cool being able to zoom in and out.

Wayfaring

So, google map's biggest missing feature is trip planning, right? Somebody used the open API to fill the gap with this app. I'm so making a "Castles in the heart of England" map. and here's a "Things to do while visiting NYC" map: http://www.wayfaring.com/maps/show/25

Valid downlevel-revealed conditional comments | 456 Berea Street

How about this?

<!--[if !IE]>-->
<html>
<!-- page goes here -->
</html>
<!--<![endif]-->

But seriously, it's nice to see the edge cases getting worked out as more people finally start moving over to conditional comments. Just proves once again that Mister Jon is ahead of his time. What was it, three years ago that I came here and he'd already switched over to using them for forwards compatibility?

BBC - History - A History of Britain

We've just started watching this excellent series in anticipation of our trip. The writer/host Simon Schama turns out to Cybil's favorite historians (yes, Cybil is such a geek she has a favorite historian). The guy is good. He is both impartial and impassioned. I didn't even fall asleep watching it. He reminds me a lot of Mr. Chase, my British History teacher from my first year at Hebron. The course was one of the hardest I've ever taken, but fairly so. He was more interested in teaching how and why than when.

stu nicholls | the CSS PLaY | an amazing CSS puzzle

again with the absurd talent. these internet people. crazy smart.

Daily Show: Celebrity Interview - Keira Knightley

I have extreme doubts as to whether a single movie could possibly be anything but a pale comparison to the '95 mini-series. But it's got Keira, so I have no choice but to see it, misgivings of "the attachment" be damned. ("the attachment" being not the dangly bits, but the rest.)

Crossroads – a redesign at the intersection of three blogs.

It's still a work in progress (what isn't?), but now that the MtG blog is integrated I'll take a break and introduce this new site.

Purpose & Audience

As I mentioned before, the functional purpose of this redesign is to highlight the range of content on my site by pulling everything together into one page. With this design I can set the home page of the website as the home page in my browser, and have access to all my bookmarks (previously kept on a separate links page) while being reminded of where I haven't posted recently. So yes, my first audience is myself, the second my visitors (hey, at least I admit it). Artistically, the design is a bit of a reaction to the 37signalifying of the "2.0" web. This is not a web app. It does not need a clear and single purpose. It's the personal site of somebody that does a bunch of stuff on the web, so there's a whole lotta stuff to explore.

Typography & Contrast

Given that there is a whole bunch of crap all jammed into one page here, and that I planned to use image replaced headers as my primary form of decoration, I knew that the typography of the content would have to be really solid. So I busted out my copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and started taking notes.

2.1.1 Define the word spacing to suit the size and natural letterfit of the font.

"A typical value for the word spacing is a quarter of an em." but examining the defaults of most browser fonts I found them to be less than that. Then I took a fresh look at the letterfit in some well printed books and noticed greater word spacing. It makes sense when you think about it. It's the words, not the letters, that we get the meaning from, so it makes sense that letter-spacing would remain tight and word-spacing would be wider in more legible text. Think about what happens when you increase the letter-space; you get a nice artistic post-modern look, but the legibility is trashed.

3.1.1 Don't compose without a scale.

I started at the bottom, with my smallest copy text. Since I'm using sane css sizing the size is technically 1em, with a base of 69% (nice and small to fit the short measure down where there are 4 columns) but since the design work happened in photoshop it's easier to translate that to 11px at the default browser size. I then proceeded to scale up to 13px, and 15px. This had me using the largest size I've ever used for body copy, but it worked perfectly for the primary blog where the text spans most of the page, and I stuck with it for the inside pages. For the blog titles I scaled the font size up two steps, so that the 11px has 15px, the 13, 17, and the 15, 19px.

3.5.1 Change one parameter at a time.

This guideline is elaborated to say, don't make the text larger and bold if just one will do. The contents of my site is plenty loud enough (by virtue of sheer volume if nothing else) so the text doesn't need to scream for attention. This guideline is a good one, perhaps if the original browser developers had heard of it people might have used H1s and H2s back in the day.

4.1.2 Don't permit the titles to oppress the text.

This is one I worried about. With 3 blogs and 4 levels of headers I had to play nicely with the typography to let people get down to the real purpose of this whole thing, to read the content.

I've still got a bit of work to do, especially around the comments, and with the various list elements, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the typography overall.

Contrast is another place I decided to be conservative, at least when it came to the text. I actually busted out the Colour Contrast Analyser and painstakingly adjusted the text colors until they met the minimum guidelines.

The background colors that separate the three sections, however, are not so friendly, and I may consider increasing their contrast at some point so that they are distinguishable on your average CRT.

Wicked Worn meets Bulletproof Liquid

I've always seen the predominance of fixed-width designs as a limitation of the coder's skill, or a lack of give&take between designer and programmer. Max-width to control line length can be achieved through various means, people just go fixed width because they are lazy, or lack the ability to translate a layered and textured design into a webpage.

Dan's book Bulletproof Web Design goes a long way towards transferring some of the necessary skills and knowledge to the masses. Every web developer should read it, you will learn something. The concept that really clicked for me in reading the book was that of opposing floats. Sure, I'd seen code samples and little demos, but it was Dan's illustration of the concept that made it really click.

I'm a fan of things made by hand. Real things of wood and leather. I knew I wanted to do something along those lines for my new site, so I pulled up Cameron's That Wicked Worn Look Series and dug in. The key I found after reading all four: skip it. Just cheat and grab these brushes.

Ok, if you're not looking at a really bright monitor you might not be able to see the texture I'm talking about. But fear not, in the process of building this site I also made a fully coded prototype page that is higher contrast and brighter.

Now to the point… the wicked worn look works surprisingly well in a liquid layout. The patterns are so rough and pixilated that you can only see the seam where the background repeats as you resize the browser window, something which we web designers do all the time, but is not a part of everyday web surfing.

Combining Multiple Blogs

Blogger users may want to know how I combined the Main pages of three blogs into one page, while retaining separate template Item and Archive templates. Blogger help got the basic concept right in their How do I include multiple blogs in a single page? article, but they stopped short of the full picture. The basic idea is that you strip each blog down to the basics, the posts, and then include those blogs all into a single static page. Go read the blogger page, they explain that better than me.

The key part that they missed was that you still need Item and Archive pages to have their own templates. This is done by using blogger's Conditional Tags to hide the template from the main page. Here's a simple example:

<ItemPage>
   <html>
      <head>
         <title>blog title</title>
      </head>
      
      <body>
</ItemPage>
<ArchivePage>
   <html>
      <head>
         <title>blog title</title>
      </head>
      
      <body>
</ArchivePage>

<!-- blog goes here -->

<ItemPage>
      </body>
   </html>
</ItemPage>
<ArchivePage>
      </body>
   </html>
</ArchivePage>

Why the redundancy? As far as I can tell Conditional Tags don't like to be nested (learned that one the hard way). I wonder if there is an undocumented ItemOrArchivePage tag?

StatCounter, Keyword Activity

Finally, site stats to obsess over. I haven't moved from my bare-bones FTP account yet, so no Mint for me, but I would highly recommend StatCounter.com, the service I went with.

The bulk of the keywords coming into my site fit into the following four categories: Richard Brautigan, Magic: The Gathering, erotica, and front-end technical issues.

The Brautigan is not surprising, that is the content from the very first website that I ever made. It is the largest collection of his poetry on the web, and I'm just waiting for his estate to contact me to take it down.

There aren't any other active MtG sites centered around the PC game, so that's why those pages do well. The cards I discuss in that blog are at least 7 or 8 years old, so nobody's talked about them in a while.

The erotica is surprising. There are only three stories on the site: Rob, Pierced, and Late, and the web is just crammed full of dirty keyword phrases, so I'm not sure why Cybil's stories rank so well. But the phrases people search for are just so great, I've got to share them (along with the site's current ranking):

• Google #1 "underside of her breasts suck"
• Google #1 "she sucked his dick blog"
• Google #2 "short blonde haired clit"
• Google #2 "his tongue in her butt"
• Google #3 "spread her legs tied"
• Google #3 "how to tie a bondage knot" (that one's actually mine, not Cybil's)
• Yahoo #3 "the punk chick licked her lips"
• Google #5 "leather cock ring" (ummm, mine too)

Moving on, there are also a few appropriate front-end tech searches, I hope people found what they were looking for (as I'm sure they did above):

• Google #1 “replacing line breaks from textareas”
• Google #2 “IE overflow”

Spoken by Firelight

This is actually the only new feature that I added with the re-design. I've been thinking of doing something like it for years, long before podcasting came about. Now that Odeo has finally launched the "Create" side of their application I ordered a $20 mic and started it up. I'll be posting every Sunday.

Ambigrams

Now that is skilled design work! I am in awe.

Hardy lichen shown to survive in space

This is pretty cool. That an organism such as this can survive in the vacume of space leads me to believe that perhaps the Flying Spaghetti Monster actually came from another planet and did not in fact create the universe. Blasphemy, I know.

Odeo: Shows tagged with museum

Taking some tours with us to NY. Didn't play tourist much when we lived nearby, but now we just might.

Duluth Trading Company

If the fire hose pants that came in the mail last night are representive of the rest of their products I've found my new favorite clothing store. A little rugged for the office granted, perfect jfred clothes (as long as he doesn't let his sister see the suede jacket).

Firefox Extension: Download Embedded

I fucking hate embedded movies. Ever since I "upgraded" to windows media player 9 embedded movies have stopped having any video component, just audio. Oh, and embedded movies usually attempt to stream, which unless you're on a faster connection than I've ever had simply doesn't work; it always has to stop at some point to cach up. But this extension is the perfect solution. You just right-click anywhere on the page (except for over the movie), choose Download Embedded, and it downloads the file to your machine.

End rant. I'm back to watching The F in FCC, and maybe catch up on my Daily Show.

30,000 calorie sandwich

Another in the "is it bad" department. Is it bad that looking at this makes me hungry?

Rabid vampire bats attack Brazilian children

Is it bad that my first reaction was, "Awesome!" I think it's because parents/teachers always say vampire bats aren't really bad like in vampire folklore, but now we can go, "you're wrong mom!"

www.myspace.com/harryandthepotters

This has got to be the dorkiest band I've ever heard. Lots of fun.

H & S Bicycles

…because I'm always forgetting the hours/phone#/address of the shop where I bought my bike.

flying lawn mower

whacky shit.

Leatherman e306x/e307x

drool

CUTCO Cutlery: Cook's Combo - Santoku Knife and Trimmer

For fun in the outdoors I enjoy swedish stainless steel, but for kitchen knives Cutco is unmatched. They're sharp, strong, easy to use (dishwasher safe) and guaranteed forever. We sent in one of Cybil's grandfather's knives after he died, the handle was chipped and the tip was busted off; they fixed it.

Now Cutco has this new combo that looks like the perfect way to introduce somebody to their knives. We usually just give people a trimmer, and it winds up becoming their favorite knife. Now with the new Santoku they could easily become their only knives.

QuirksBlog: ... and the winner is ...

No resounding, "AhHA!" but at least there is progress and the functions are tight. (context: addEvent() recoding contest)

Vitaly Friedman | Blog: 20 Best License-Free Official Fonts

I should never have followed this link. I've whittled my font list nearly down to only web fonts (those installed on most user's systems) and those in my Adobe folio that are talked about by Bringhurst. It is not easy to reduce one's list of installed fonts, but the only way I'll ever get any good with the ones I have is to continually shrink the list, not grow it. But then again with Bringhurst my list of modern and sans-serif faces is pretty short, so maybe I could…

CSS layouts: liquid, fluid, elastic, flexible, jello...

Very impressive CSS layouts, all using the same simple XHTML (no nesting), all (or nearly all) flexible layouts, and no hacks!

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Be Willing To Be Wrong

"People can scan disparate patterns more easily than homogenous patterns."

This makes perfect sense. As visual elements begin to look more like eachother, more uniform, the overall esthetic may be nice and soothing, but distinguishing the individual bits (which is the important part) becomes harder.

Very cool to hear about all the real user testing they're doing. I'm impressed. We might all learn something from it too.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

Eat your heart out Mr. Bailey, this crazy lady has not 2, but 3 side-by-side vertical flat panel monitors. Highlights of the article:

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

and here's a study to support our practice of starting work at 7am and putting in most of our productive time before lunch:

In the 1920's, the Russian scientist Bluma Zeigarnik performed an experiment that illustrated an intriguing aspect of interruptions. She had several test subjects work on jigsaw puzzles, then interrupted them at various points. She found that the ones least likely to complete the task were those who had been disrupted at the beginning.

Escape My Head: TTTk, Travel Tinker Trouble Kit

Add this to my preparations for pending travel. Which reminds me, I should move MacGyver up higher on my Netflix que. Hard to compete with Babylon 5 and Thundercats though.

Update: Here's another version. And here's a pro's Mini Survival Kit that's clearly been refined over time.

The Nexus of politics and terror

Conspiracy theorists eat it up. I for one believe it 100%. Our president is nothing short of an evil dictator, and to top it off I believe that he pretends to be even more fucking stupid than he actually is, to gain votes and also to put world leaders off their guard so that when the oil crisis hits and we take military control over the middle east nobody will see it coming. Or, more likely, when we place our man on the thrown in Iraq, errr, have our man voted in in a fair and public election, world leaders wouldn't suspect our horse's ass of a president of setting up a puppet dictator, even though the US has done it many times before. End rant. I don't know what I'm talking about. I just don't trust Mr. Cunthair.

Book thrown at proponents of Intelligent Design

Playing catch-up on last weeks news, this is pretty damning evidence against those neanderthal creationists. I like it.

Thinking Machine 4

brilliant AI visualazition. And it's done in the delightfully clashing orange+green on a grayscale interface.

PBF archive

Hilarious animal cartoons. My favorites: Zoo Keeper, Volcano Snails, Billy The Bunny, Bunny Easter, Gnome Bubbles, Freaking Vortex, Not Today Little One, Today is my Birthday, Eden, and Angry Hammer. via Centripetal Notion. If I filed things this would go under "twisted humor". There were a bunch that I really enjoyed but didn't feel comefortable linking to, which says a lot if you followed any of the above.

Justin Blanton | iPod nano + Brasso + invisibleShield

so here's the question, can I last the 4-6 without scratching the hell out of the thing (i left the original cover over the screen) until the official tube finally comes out, or do I go ahead and get this?

Google Reader

I'll give this try, subscribe to a few feeds and see how it compairs to the industry standard web reader: Bloglines. Some of it feels a little less intuitive and a little more gimmicky than I might prefer.

You know who I'd like to see make a feed reader? 37signals. A dirt simple bare-bones reader that my parents could use. Or, how about this, what if Gmail went ahead and integrated a reader straight into your email? The controls would be slightly different, the conversations would be one sided, and you'd have unsubscribe and such instead of reply. But I guess you're inbox would get rather cluttered really fast. It would almost need an automatic filter, applying the label "feed" or something, and archiving it. Anyway, just brainstorming how the whole feed reader concept might be made more accessible to the mainstream. Podcasts are making it big with their iTunes integration, maybe feeds need to piggy-back on something as mainstream as email?

Serenity Flanvention

UK Street Map Coordinate Converter

handy tool for dealing with various sorts of location finding data.

The National Trust

This site is the perfect comanion to the British Heritage Pass Attractions.

Knott's Scary Farm

Actually had a good time at Knott's Scary Farm Thursday night. It was early in the Halloween season so it wasn't too crowded. The shows were great, a little improv group, a magician with a twisted sense of humor, and a higher budget illusionist with sexy dancing/singing/half-naked women. The hanging didn't have the best dialogue, but the fight choreography was better than usual.

The highlight was this ride, the Xcelerator. It goes from 0 to 82mph in 2.3 seconds, then ascends vertically, and makes an immediate vertical drop of over 200 feet. I actually bought the cheesy ride photo. Cybil was quite scared. The girl in front of her blacked out during the initial acceleration, and woke up at the top, just in time to drop 200+ feet. Any ride that makes people lose consciousness is a good ride in my book.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Just found out they're making my middle-namesake into a movie. I should have read the book long ago. Maybe I should wait now until I've seen the movie, so as not to ruin it.

CSS: Specificity Wars (JPEG Image, 900x900 pixels)

Now this is how specificity should be taught. While I appreciate the whole multiply IDs by 100, classes by 10 and add them up along with the html elements, I don't like that teaching method because it just isn't accurate. 11 HTML elements won't take precedence over 1 class. So that method, while a quick and dirty hack easily understood by math geeks, is not technically accurate. But this way of teaching it is accurate, and far more logical. I mean, 11 Storm Troopers aren't going to beat Darth Vadar, right? Obviously.

CSS branching techniques

This article nails just about exactly how I do my CSS patching. The only difference being that I have little love for IE5 on the Mac, so I haven't been importing an ie5mac.css file. Same goes for version 4 browsers.

Orson Reviews Serenity

"And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made."

Almost makes you consider forgiving him for his Homosexual Marriage and Civilization bullshit. But then again, not really. At all. I do however share his sentiment that Ender's Game must be made this good, or not at all. Now we'll just have to see if he get over his whole mormon affliction and let the best person possible make his movie. Might have to wait until he dies.

Sheldon and ProFont

Setting up a new programming environment, but I'd misplaced my Sheldon Narrow. So here's the link again so I can download these excellent little programming fonts. Of course I'll have to run them through the encoding test to see what their foreign language support is like. But I'll have to switch over to MingLiU (or some such unicode font) anyway when it's time to play with trad chinese again.

PSPad editor supports UTF-8

I've been looking for a simple editor that supports UTF-8 encoding without adding a BOM (byte order mark) for two or three years now. To have at last found an alternative to UltraEdit is a releif. I won't even care if it sucks.

Update: as I'm figuring out how to use this app I'm compiling a list of tips/tricks on ta-da: PSPad tips/tricks

ViewSonic: Products: Desktop Displays: CRT Monitors: Graphic Series: G220fB

When I get the check for my next project this is what I'm going to get. Jeff got his for $650 (w/ free shipping) a year ago, the price looks like it has dropped a couple hundred (based on a froogle search), if I can find someplace that has one in stock that is.

find your whiteboards

…for when you lose the obscure address.

Dash It All

From The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst,

5.2.1 Use spaced en dashes – rather than em dashes or hyphens - to set off phrases.

Background

I'm re-reading The Elements of Typographic Style for the third time. Every time I learn new things based on what I have been working on in-between readings. This time the section on Dashes, Slashes and Dots really caught my eye, since I've been trying to learn how to more appropriately use these analphabetic symbols. Here's what Bringhurst has to say about a bad habit that I'd picked up somewhere:

The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed by many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

And here is what he recommends instead:

Used a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.

With that advice in mind, here are a variety of HTML experiments:

em dash, no space

some text—some more text

en dash, non-breaking space

some text – some more text

hyphen, non-breaking space

some text - some more text

en dash, thinspace

some text – some more text

en dash, en space

some text – some more text

en dash, em space

some text – some more text

hyphen, thinspace

some text - some more text

Note: It shouldn't be a big surprise that Internet Explorer doesn't support thin space or en space, instead inserting what appears to be an em space.

No Rest For The Wicked -- an online comic

I haven't read enough of the comic to give an endorsement yet, but thought I'd blog this for the typography, and the interesting sentence structure navigation, something I've experimented with but not yet had success. In this case it comes off as almost a "cloud", which were trendy for like 2 days, but I never really bought as a navigation tool. Just let me sort the damn tags by frequency. Back to the sentence structure nav – I like the concept of integrating the navigation into the contents of the site. I'm starting to have my doubts as to whether people even use navigation (outside applications), since searching is so much more efficient. If it is true that people don't use navigation as much as search, then putting the navigation in with the content might catch a visitor with their brain actually turned on, not just in scan mode. Or it might even catch them scanning, a process during which normal nagivation bars may be ignored. Anyway, Something to be experimented with on personal sites, not professional work.

SabrinaJeffries.com Redesign Is Live

Here's what I've been working on in my free time for the last 6 months (ok, so maybe only 3 count since I took most of June, July and August off): www.sabrinajeffries.com

Back in the spring it took me several collages and 4 mockups, each evolving from the last until I scrapped them and just did something different for the last, to finally nail the design.

Beyond the design challenge this project has several interesting aspects to it. The Information Architecture had crept out of control on the last site. It needed to be stripped back to promoting essential information, and tucking the extensive peripheral content aside where it can be found by those who want it. With all that content just about every page utilizes all three columns in the design. I had to establish guidelines for what type of content went in each column. This is also the highest profile client that I've worked for so far. Her books regularly make the New York Times Bestseller list, and she is involved in one way or another in 8 releases next year.

It's been an exciting challenge, taking on such a large site single-handedly, but the heavy HTML production in September was rather grueling (all my own fault for slacking off all summer). I'm looking forward to not getting on the computer after work, and when I've recouped a bit starting some new projects. Next up is an online book trade in Ruby on Rails, along with a redesign of this site.

Scratching Post

Photos on Flickr: Fritz Attacking the Scratching Post

I made the cats a couple pieces of scratching furniture a couple months ago. One is a simple "L" shaped peice (like a couch with no arms or legs) that protects the carpet that they'd been scratching on the step up to the office. They don't use it that often, but they've stopped scratching the carpet; mission accomplished. The other is this upright post that I built because I was on a roll. It's a piece of scrap 4x6 wrapped in carpet, the seems protected with extra-thick leather. It's all held together with sheetrock screws.

For about a month the cats wouldn't touch the thing. I'd clearly put too much effort into it, and they wanted to see me suffer. Recently we decided to push the TV hutch all the way against the wall where it belongs (original furniture floorplan) freeing up more space between the living room and cat dining room. It also let us open up the left "wing" of the hutch and put the scratching post under it. The cats love it now. The Fritz has become very territorial, attacking the Milton whenever he goes to use it. Very entertaining.

Manual for Singer 221K Featherweight

Ah the internet, what a wonderful thing. Here's the owner's manual for my mom's old Singer (photo on Flickr).

Search and Rescue - New York Times

Tim O'Reilley's response to the Google Print lawsuite.

Skidoo : Ruthsarian Layouts

3 columns, each of equal height regardless of the height of their contents, a header, a footer, and background colors of the columns not created using background images. Ingenious! The trick? Short version: the sidebar backgrounds are actually the borders of a wrapper. Clever negative margins pull everything together.

Essential for Serenity

With the movie finally making its public release this week it's time to do a little last-minute browncoat recruitment. Having seen the movie 9 months ago, Cybil and I are lending out the DVDs with a list of "must watch" episodes for those few friends who aren't properly prepared for the movie. Not that I think you need to watch the show to see the movie, but I'm in no position to judge, having watched and re-watched it many times.

So here is our attempt at a required viewing list:

Pilot: Serenity Part 1 & 2

A proper introduction. Once you've seen this, you're hooked.

Bushwhacked

Fear of Reavers: important for the movie.

Our Mrs. Reynolds

This one actually isn't that critical to the overarching story line, but it's the one that we always go, "oh, that quote is from this episode too?" while we're watching it.

Out of Gas

Great back-story. Plus it's got my favorite plot structure.

Ariel

River's story progresses, and the Tams vrs. Jayne conflict becomes very immediate.

Objects in Space

OK, so there's a new bounty hunter in the movie, but this episode's important because it cements the relationship between River and Serenity. And for other reasons, but no spoilers here, right?

There are a couple more that episodes that really wanted to squeeze their way up into the "must see", but we figured letting Our Mrs. Reynolds slide into the otherwise movie-centric list was enough.

Shindig

An exploration into Mal's off-beat sense of honor (*cough* chaotic-good), and his relationship with Inara.

Jaynestown

This episode has my favorite quote about a "special hell". Jayne's character grows a bit, and we see what life is really like under the Alliance.

What to you guys think? Are there any other episodes that are essential pre-movie watching, given that the movie is, to quote Joss, "Mal's story told through River's perspective," and is about the origin of the Reavers? Any that could be taken out?

CSS Maintainability

In response to Simon Wilson's post on CSS Maintainability…

My old partner in crime over here at work, in the ebusiness team where we build web applications, once posted a little something on this subject here @ mezzoblue where he suggests pulling out all the structural CSS that forms the layout of the page and placing it at the top of the document, using indentation to echo the nesting of the HTML.

In my own more recent work I have been doing something like this:

/* General Style - Tags */
body {...}
h1 {...}
p {...}

/* Layout - IDs */
#header {...}
#content {...}
#sidebar {...}
#footer {...}

/* Reusable Components - Classes */
table.columnarForm {...}
table.data {...}
label.error {...}

One item of note: we have found that as stylesheets become larger it is necessary to forsake the old practice of putting properties each on their own line, like this:

body {
   margin: 0;
   padding: 0;
   font: 86% Georgia, Times, serif;
}

and instead pulling them all onto one line so that it is possible to find a given rule, and see the structure of the CSS file at a glance, like this:

p { position: static; margin: 0 0 1em 0; color: #000; background-color: #fff; font-size: 1em; }

But in order to read these long lines of properties it is then necessary to put them in a consistent order. The order that I have been using is in de-bugging priority: position, layout, color, and typography (as shown above).

South West Shropshire Tourist Information

Bishop's Castle, Clun.

The Lawsuit vs. Google Print for Libraries

Publishers and authors forsake their place in the digital future by thwarting Google Print for Libraries. But that doesn't mean that, like the music labels, they won't spend the next few years blazing a noisy path of self-destruction.

Can anyone tell me what the hell the difference is between this (print.google.com) and Amazon's "Search Inside" is? I've used both on exactly the same book and got exactly the same results. Must be that Amazon's is opt-in, while Google's is opt-out. But who the hell doesn't opt-in for Amazon?

Regardless of the outcome of this lawsuite and others, as iTunes will destroy the existing music distributers, so will emerging technologies destroy the existing publishing industry, whether they like it or not. And frankly, I'll be glad to see them go.

CLEAN JOKES FOR SLIGHTLY TWISTED MINDS

joke collection that Mark put together.

Communicating error messages accessibly - Standards-schmandards

The error message system that I have implimented at work is close, but not all the way there. I left out the header, just went with the list, and haven't implimented any form of setting focus on the field (whether it be via javascript on an anchor or a label tag). The jaws user who commented suggested firing a javascript alert as well, but that's just so rude I'm not sure if the benefit to disabled users outways the harm to the user experience for everyone else. Also from the comments, here's some sample friendly error text:

We were unable to process your form. Some information was either missing or not understood.

Please check the following, and submit the form again:

• The Name field can not be empty. Please enter your name.
• The Age field can not be empty. Please enter your age in years.

Netflix Survey Reveals Hugh Jackman as Members' Choice to Become the Next James Bond

This could only be because the people surveyed don't know who Clive Owen is. Because if they'd seen him in a single movie they would know he fits the part. And Hugh Jackman clearly does not fit the role. At all. People are stupid.

MilkandCookies - Crazy Ping Pong Match

Two tournament players get more caught up in keeping the ball alive than actually winning.

Indeed. At some point it moves beyond competition and becomes just about the game.

JRX: real-time JavaScript RegExp evaluator - cuneytyilmaz.com

I've been using the jakarta demo applet, but this is fun in that it shows you the results. That and it's not a bloody java applet.

Styles were a bit tweaked first time I loaded it (specifically the text of the regexp being outside of the input box and uneditable), but it cleared up with a refresh

RSS Feed // ShaunInman.com

This is surely old news, but how excellent is the fine-grained customization of this feed?!

Typetester – Compare fonts for the screen

I am totally going to use this to help pick the type face for my re-design. Recommendation: copy some real text from your blog into the sample text. There's a big difference between looking at text and reading text. Concern: being a 3-column fixed-width layout set at 1024 pixels wide the line length is shorter than that used in the majority of websites. Line length has an integral relationship with leading (line height) and font size. Being able to control only 2 out of 3 of these variables is rather limiting*. In fact, the more I think about it the more I'm not sure that this tool will be helpful since the words-per-line count only becomes reasonable at <=11px, which is just too small for a broad audience. Ohwell, I think it will still be useful for my new site layout, as it is 4 columns wide in places, so the short line length does apply.

*yes, it's true that if you're desiging a fluid width layout you will never have control over the line length (aside from setting min/max width), but what you can do is anticipate a likely range of widths at typical screen resolutions and typical window widths. And to those running full screen at 1600*1200+, fucking grow up! If you run full screen in applications other than design/dev environments then you don't deserve that big monitor. Go on to Craigslist right now and trade it with someone who can't afford a bigger monitor, but would use one appropriately if they had one.

Personal Site Redesign

It's that time again. The last was two years ago. The final straw (aside from Josh, Jeff, Jon and Doug all working on their sites) was Josh's Flickr badge. I've just gotta have one of those. But for that I'd need a mult-column layout. And so a redesign began.

What my personal site has always lacked is a home page that highlights the depth of content. Sure there are a bunch of links is my nav, but they're all hidden in the "drop-up" menu. I've been doing some thinking, and I came up with a way to pull together multiple Blogger homepages into one page. I've made some progress in my understanding of how to build flexible multi-column pages. That all came together the other night, first on paper, then in HTML, and finally with this crazy multi-column layout.

Of course it looks completely insane with background colors ranging from #000 to #fff. The actual design will be fairly monochrome (thinking of borrowing the color scheme from this photo of a person hiking). It will be a big change from the current site's garishness. Also note: the H2s (Words, Play, Hyperlinks) are going to be image replaced with low-contrast decorative text.

Ok, that's all for now, I've got a number of other projects going.

Solution to the Liquid Layout Gutter Dilemma

Here's the problem: you've got a CSS layout, you are a "true believer" that websites should be flexible, but you're not sure how to get the padding into those columns—since width only counts the content, padding would make the layout more than 100% wide. (sometimes I'm not sure if the W3C got it right).

I've always thought there were just these two solutions:

1. Nest an extra "gutter" div and add your margins to that (which is what Dan does in Bulletproof Web Design). But then you're adding extra markup for presentational purposes (and doesn't that "nesting extra" just bring you back to the bad-old-days?)
2. Add margins to every single element within the column, which is what I've been doing until now. But it's really hard to anticipate every single potential element (trust me, I've tried).

After reading Dan's book and pondering this dilemma, that phrase "every single element" finally rang a bell; we have a selector that does exactly that! Here's the first part of the solution:

#sidebar * { margin: 1em 20px; }

That gives us 1em vertical margins (arbitrarily chosen) and 20px horizontal margins (those "gutters" that we're shooting for) on every paragraph, list, etc. within the container of id "sidebar". But we don't want the children of those elements to also have those margins (every link inside a paragraph, yuck!), so we add this rule:

#sidebar * * { margin: auto; }

which translates roughly into, "every element in the sidebar that's nested inside another element that's also in the sidebar, go figure out your own margins."

Here's the solution demo.

Listal - A social DVD, book, music and games collection manager

This here beta application puts my del.icio.us DVD List and this little database that I wrote for Cybil to keep track of all her books to shame. Once it's got reasonable import capability i may just have to move everything over.

Powazek: Just a Thought: Digging in the Dirt

positively refreshing to see something totally new in the realm of website design. only on a personal site could you get away with such delightfully burried navigation. the colors and textured details are spot on too.

Selenium

a javascript based test tool. not that we need it at work, QA here does a great job here, but i'll give this a whirl for my next side project, a book trade that may well have many more users than it has in the past. via jeff.

some code from josh that helps find elements that don't have id's:

xpath=//input[@value='Save Project Profile']

VisitBritain

totally getting one of those Great British Heritage Passes. it's gonna be one hell of a british countryside castle tour vacations!

VisitBritain : Britain's garden mazes

Planning our trip. Have the travel bug. Want to go now.

RailsPlayground.com Free Ruby On Rails Hosting

I was chatting with Josh the other day about our prototyping process at work, lamenting that forms and tables are more trouble than they're worth to prototype in photoshop and that I was thinking of just jumping straight to HTML on the next project*. He said, why stop there, let's just prototype in ruby on rails and build actual working forms for people to play with. This makes a lot of sense, to acknowledge that the first version is going to be a throwaway anyway, and just build something that is guaranteed to be tossed out (since the production version will be on webwork).

I've got a side project coming up, a book trade that's run prior to a conference in March, but I've already coded it before (in ColdFusion of all improbable languages), so I'm not all that excited about building it again. I'm more interested in front-end stuff, recoding the back-end of something in another language doesn't sound that thrilling. Unless it was to learn a whole new environment that could have practical work application. So I've signed up for my free account. Now I need to get a local dev environment setup on my laptop. Josh…

*I did jump straight to HTML on the project I'm working on now, but I'm finding that once the foundation is set I have to pull a screenshot into photoshop to adjust the colors and decorations (and it still has a little ways to go). But it does save a whole lot of time.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web | Bloglines | Preview Feed

Google Alerts are really cool sometimes. Here is further evidence of this project that I caught wind of earlier. The staging address for the project appears to be http://webtype.clearleft.com/. The preview feed does not appear on the website, at least not linked from anywhere yet. The posts themselves have titles corrisponding to on of the appendixes in the book (which sits right here on my desk next to me) which summerizes each section of each chapter. I am curious to see how much of this project will be original content and how much will be a plug for the book. I am hoping for the former, and that Bringhurst himself might be involved. Regardless, it is clearly time to read the book again.

JavaScript Text Highlighting

Between the two, Google and MSN probably comprise about 80% of all search engine traffic, and that's being pessamistic. Basically, people either use the search engine that ships with their operating system, or they get a fucking clue and use Google. Anyway, the reason I point this out is that they both use the variable "q" in the query string, and this here text highlighting function is set up to read that variable.

Now if I were to add this feature to I site I'd be a little more subtle/devious about it. Instead of aweful yellow highlighting I'd do something like make the text bold, or maybe increase the contrast a little. My aim would be to make the visitor's keywords more obvious without screaming, "hey, look here, I know what you're searching for!"

css Zen Garden Archives

The Zen Garden archives have at long last been overhauled with kick-ass thumbnails! And the Category Index is very also thorough, with broad categories like Official and Conceptual, specific categories like Blue and Food, layout structure categories like 3 Column, and abstract categories like Sinester. It's so easy to browse now, I'm finding cool designs I've never seen. Check out Killer Style (using Firefox of course, don't bother if you're using Internet Explorer)

Negative Margins: the other way around

cool take on a 3 column floating layout. the next version of my personal site (in very early conceptual stages at the moment) is probably going to be 4 columns (blog, link log, mtg blog and a flickr). i've got a scheme for a way to combine multiple blogger main pages into one page, while retaining independent archives (and not using frames of course). testing out the scheme on some defunct side-project blogs.

Update: while tracking down the appropriate template tags to pull off seperate HTML for the main page than the archives i found a blogger help page on including multiple blogs in a single page. so it can be done, and exactly how i was plannig on doing it, just need to work out out maintaining seperate archives, and then of course there's the minor problem of the design and CSS for a 4 column layout.

Whatever: Being Poor

I've been asking, "why didn't they evacuate?" but this puts things into perspective. My mom was on welfare when we were kids so we ate government cheese and collected bottles for redemption to have an allowance, but reading these draws a distinction for me between just being poor and living in poverty. We always went to the dentist. The bottles brought in enough money to afford He-Man and Transformers toys. We didn't get food from the dump (though my dad's infamous porno magazine collection did come from the magazine recycling). There was always heat AND food (can't imagine how you'd live without either in Maine).

Use international date format (ISO) - Quality Web Tips

Hmmm, I might have used this on a recent project at work. Instead, given the company's heavy US bias I opted to use a different format with an abbreviation for the month to eliminate the ambiguity about which number stands for day and which for month. The format I chose was "6 Sep 2005" which at least has a logical progression from most specific to least specific, even if it is reversed from the ISO recommendation.

Data Tables and Cascading Style Sheets Gallery

The "zen garden" of CSS tables. Yup, some of us geeks mostly forms and tabular data all day, so we enjoy junk like this. Actually, a number of them are quite nice. One might hope that if this project were to stick around for even a little while longer the few really bloody aweful submissions might be removed. And if you're not reading this in a feed reader you know that I've a fairly high tolerance for garishness.

The US Open 2005 - TV Schedule

on USA and CBS. of course with analogue cable being shut down at the end of the year we don't get USA, so I'll have to catch the first showings on CBS. Then after next weekend we can drop cable TV.

ThinkGeek :: R/C Laser Tag Shocking Tanks

ok, these are doing so many things right. when there aren't animals around to chase and torment (dogs, cats, ducks) the next best thing that you can do with a remote controlled vehicle is race or fight other remote controlled vehicles. Usually this means slapping down fifty bucks for each one, but the price point is down around video game levels at fifty bucks for the pair. and while racing and crashing remoted controlled vehicles is fun, shooting at each other is even better, especially when an electric shock adds that missing physical response when you're not actually destroying the toys.

The Man in Blue > footerStickAlt: A more robust method of positioning a footer

I'm always looking for ways to use CSS to enable layouts that weren't possible using other coding methods. Often I'll create the design first in Photoshop and then challenge myself to come up with a technical solution. This is how I came up with Emulating Position: Fixed; when working on Jade Lee's website. But sometimes it's nice to find a pure CSS solution to a common layout challenge that somebody else has come up with, and add that layout to the list of possible layouts next time you're designing in Photoshop.

As someone who steadfastly charges hourly for freelance work I try to avoid creating unnecessary code challenges for myself while in the design phase because when it comes time to code I'll either have to compromise the design or decide to put in extra un-billed hours because I want to solve the problem for personal reasons, but that would be bad business if I were doing freelance sites for a living rather than as a hobby to work on my design skills.

Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive

parasites, placebos, the list of things that manipulate the brain continues to grow.

Cybil's Site #1 for a New Zealand Google Search

She doesn't have the same rank in the .com version of google, is there something I don't know about Cybil and New Zealand? (à la Susan and Australia from Coupling)

SonSpring Design

This site's one where you'll want to hold your breath and activate that IE View plugin. As much disdain as I do hold for American Christains, I link to this site for it's excellent message for Internet Explorer users (which for those not running IE on XP looks exactly like the warning messages in that woeful browser).

Newton Canyon on Bike

Location

From the 101, 7.9 miles up Kanan Road (becomes Kanan Dume Road at Mulholland Hwy) park right before the 3rd tunnel. Head west down the trail into the canyon.

Misadventure

This trail fucking kicked my ass. I walked the bike halfway back up out of the canyon sweating profusely. There are plenty of excuses, the heat, the washout from this spring's heavy rain, but it all comes back to that I'm horribly out of practice biking and horribly out of shape. Oh well, I'll get there.

I think I'd better go back to Las Virgines and Malibu Creek and get a little better at this biking thing before trying the Backbone Trail again.

Alaskan Wedding - a photoset on Flickr

My dad got married

Preventing JavaScript File Caching

"I can't reproduce the bug you entered. Clear your cache, you must have the old version of that javascript file."

I don't know how many times I've had to say this as a front-end developer. But the problem of cached outdated JavaScript files is only going to get worse as we get better at separating Structure from Presentation from Behaviour. And it's also worse when you are doing more frequent updates to a production environment (just a dream when it comes to secure apps, but maybe a possibility for ongoing development of internal-facing apps). The biggest problem is that users can't be expected to know how to clear their caches. Things will just break and magically fix themselves if the user even has the patience to wait around until their cached file gets updated.

I googled around and found a theoretical answer in a forum somewhere. Based on what I found here is the solution that Josh and I put into practice:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/webLibrary.js
?buildtime=@BUILD_TIMESTAMP@"></script>

...where @BUILD_TIMESTAMP@ is a variable to be replaced by the back-end language / build script of your choice. Here are the issues that this solves:

• Browser does not pull the JS file from cache when there has been a new deployment.
• Browser cache continues to function as it should in between builds (speeding up page loads)

The Long Tail: "Just enough piracy"

...putting forth the theory that there is an optimal amount of piracy that is actually beneficial to the industry, whether it be software, music or motion pictures.

Bow man (flash game)

skip the practice and go straight to the killing part.

Google Map Visitor log for Divine Blog

just plugged this thing into my site. why not?

Master Lock Street Cuffs Bike Lock

wow. now that's a bike lock.

Lust For Bust

now this is what flash was meant for!

Trail Central Listing for Los Angeles County - SoCalMtB.com

while lookin for bike shops to figure out what size frame i need came across this fairly extensive trail listing.

Replacing Line Feeds in IE and Mozilla

Line breaks, carriage returns, new lines, form feeds, whatever you might think of them as, browsers have their own ideas. I'm talking specifically about the character(s) produced when you hit Enter within a textarea and then try to manipulate the value of that textarea with JavaScript using regular expressions.

IE (internet explorer) on a PC

\r\n

Firefox (mozzilla) on a PC

\n

So, if you wanted to replace all the "line feeds" in a variable whose value was pulled from a textarea with a single space this is the code you would need:

val = val.replace(/\r\n/g," ");
val = val.replace(/\n/g," ");

On a related note, IE also has a funny idea about what character a single space is represented by when written to the page from a database (but not when typed with the space bar). If you want to strip out all of the spaces from a field in IE try this bit of hex:

val = val.replace(/[\xA0]/g,"");

That concludes this geeky interlude. Now back to our regularly scheduled nerdiness.

The Christian Paradox (Harpers.org)

This is why, with apologies to Josh and Doug, it is so easy to say, "American Christians fucking suck" without feeling too bad about it. But I will try to remember to include the "American" at the begining of that statement in future.

Knot Book

Had a dream about knot tying last night. Ok, so I'm a rather obsessive about the things I do; on the nerd side of geek. Today I digitized the knot book that I wrote in 1998-99 and uploaded them to flickr. I'll update this post as I add descriptions and category tags (bend, loop, hitch). I also plan to update the knots page on this site with highlights of the most practical knots and their applications.

So take a look at my photos tagged with "knot", but stay tuned for better organization and more information.

Update: I've updated my Knots Page to feature the best knots for a variety of purposes. But sorry, I still haven't done anything about improving the quality of the knot photos themselves. Someday I'll bust out the drawing tablet and the camera and do it all up proper like, but not today.

adaptive path >> an interview with ludicorp's eric costello

wow, i didn't know that Flickr evolved from The Game Neverending (which I dropped a blog post about a couple years ago but never actually played), which was in turn built by the creators of the 5K contest.

Flickr: Photos tagged with wettshirtcontest

now there's a tag we can cross our fingers that it takes off

Critique: The Alphabet

Uu

I have nothing good to say about this lazy piece of rocking shit. Both of them. Probably designed by whoever did the C.

Flickr: Explore interesting photos from the last 24 hours

some brilliant photos. particularly like the colors in this batch, not just a bunch of artsy black and white portraits. have to come back tomorrow and see what the rotation is like.

The Word Nerds--A Weekly Podcast About Language

traffic is particularly unpleasant during the summer, or maybe I'm just getting bored by the same drive every day, either way I was looking for something to shake it up a bit. So I commandeered Cybil's mp3 player and started downloading podcasts. Between this new one (new to me) and Science Friday I've got my commute covered for a while just catching up on their back lists.

My Date With Drew - 30 days - $1,100 - 1 date

This guy is one of Trisha's (Cybil's sister's) co-workers. Trisha has seen the flick but won't tell us if he got the date.

IEBlog : Standards and CSS in IE

this is more encouraging than what i've been hearing about ie7 beta 1. sometimes you start to think since ie has been so static for so long that they must be living in some sort of software development vacume, but then you see PositionIsEverything and Quirksmode mentioned, along with the web developer names for all these delightful bugs (Peekaboo, Guillotine) and you get a glimmer of hope.

One thing though that could become very clear when ie7 comes out with these bugs fixed is that those who haven't been using conditional comments to fix IE problems are going to be sorry. That is, if you use some hacked selector (like * HTML) to serve something to IE, and IE doesn't fix the selector problem but they do fix the CSS rendering problem, pages are going to break.

Flat Fuck Fell - On Accidental Plagiarism

I just received an IM from somebody I didn't know. The conversation began like this:

Ok, sorry to be a random jackass, but you're the first Google result for "flat fuck fell," and I think it's insane. It's one thing to mimic a writer, but it's entirely different to gank a phenomenal phrase like that, and adopt and adapt the next line too, without giving any credit to Tim O'Brien. That's just my opinion though. Cheers.

He was referring to the #1 rank in Google that my bit of short prose Slipper Ice holds for the query "flat fuck fell". Once I explained what had happened he was totally cool, it's an entertaining story so I'll start at the beginning...

I had this awesome teacher for my American History class junior year in high school. He had us read O'Brien. I went on to read a couple more of his novels outside of class. That was in '96 or '97. A couple years later, first year of college, I wrote this bit of prose about a friend of mine, and an O'Brien fan (which I didn't learn until later). A year later we hooked up. 5 years later we are still together, this piece of prose is still kicking around on my website (albeit still in the old template), and I get this IM from somebody I don't know accusing me of stealing the phrase.

Now you'll have to trust me that my conscious memory of phrases like that just isn't good enough to pull something up from two years ago to deliberately use in a piece of prose. But now I understand how people can accidentally plagiarize, and why many writers avoid reading anything in their own genre while working.

So now this post will probably take the #1 slot on Google, since the phrase is now in the header and it's reinforced by the high rank of the other page. And so the vicious cycle of plagiarism continues, but at least this time it will be explained along with a bit of advice, "Let this be a warning to you, young writer, do not read. Ummmm, well at least don't read and then write in the style of your favorite authors. Wait, that's no go either. Fuck it. I don't have any advice, and it wouldn't be of any merit if I did. Don't do drugs."

T-Mobile

wow, honesty from a cell phone carier. how rare is that? it would kick ass if some other companies did this too, and a third party held them responsible.

Constructing Excellence, A to Z Information: Pareto Voting

Why the hell am I linking to some random UK construction website? Because I've been dabbling in thoughts of search engine optimization of course. Here follows a number of un-proven (by me) observations about how to achieve good Google ranking, to be concluded with the new idea generated by the above link. Good Google ranking might be obtained via:

1. clean code. reduce the signal vs. noise using semantic markup. it will make your keywords a higher percentage of the total contents of the page. for search engines that stop reading a page after a given number of characters it will guarantee that your content is among those characters.
2. links. this is why blogs often jump to the top, they link to each other. but more than that, link to each other in a meaningful way, using descriptive link text and often following them up with commentary.
3. content freshness. a regularly updated site will do better than a static site, if for no other reason than that a page's value is calculated in the context of the site as a whole, and regular updates means that the site as a whole is generally better fleshed out and more relevant than one that was just built and left to rot.
4. focused content. a page devoted to the keywords entered in a search will rank higher than a page that mentions those keywords in passing. this is why i think definition pages like the above link will do so well in Google. a page that can answer, "what the hell is ____?" is a useful page, and therefore deserves high rank.

New Scientist Breaking News - Why cats prefer meats to sweets

Scientific proof that Fritz (our younger cat) is a freak cat. He's got a crazy sweet tooth, just last night attacked me for my rootbeer float.

Lussumo Vanilla - The sweetest forum on the web

I'll have to play around with this free forum application for than next freelance gig where they've "just gotta have a forum."

Soft Launch of csolyn.com

Here it goes, Cybil's Skin Fitness Expert esthetician website and blog: csolyn.com. I'll update this post as exciting new features are added.

Update August 2nd, 7:23am No bald pussy yet, but the blog launched last night. The first couple entries are kinda background pieces, next week things will really get rolling with an article on sunburns. And don't worry, the waxing & photos are being scheduled within the next two weeks.

Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours

jfred showed me script.aculo.us, and I was like, that's cool, I'm sure the drag and drop stuff will come in handy at some point, but I'm not sure if I like the animation, it feels too much like the stupid transition effects in windows that are too slow so I turn them off immediately after installing. Now Jon just pointed out one of the libraries used by script.aculo.us, which jfred may have as well, but my attention was obviously elsewhere at the time because this is really cool shit. The DOM can be a pain to traverse just to add your events. It's not actually that hard, but adding events directly is just so easy, when up against a deadline ideals have a way of slipping. But CSS selectors, if not the easiest thing to learn (do you remember the first time you had to wrap your head around precedence?) are used on a more day to day basis (at least at my gig) so they are totally painless. I'd rather use CSS than the DOM to apply events any day.

One last thing. Take a look at the very bottom of behaviour.js, they've actually documented a regular expression using ASCII. Regex is a twistedly powerful tool, but it's such a bitch to reverse engineer, documenting it like this could prove to be a very useful technique.

Wish List

I'm writing this to myself two months from now. That's all the warning that you're gonna get that this will be a long boring-ass post and not worth reading.

I enjoy wanting things, electronic gadgets and the like. In fact, I may enjoy wanting things as much as having them, since most things that I do actually get wind up either lost, broken, or never used. So, now that Cybil and I have begun the year long process of paying off our share of this vacation club, I have the perfect opportunity to want stuff without the possibility of having the cash to actually buy anything.

This post is about the various things on my wish list (which no longer resides in the Links menu above) that I want to buy, but will have to wait until my birthday or Christmas to acquire. In a couple of months when I do have the opportunity to get anything I will check back here and see if my reasons and intended uses for the following are sill valid.

Here's one I've been considering off and on for a while: a bike. Yes, the most immediate motivation is that Doug has been riding on the trails around his new home, and jfred also recently picked up a bike as well. Last time I rode was about 4 years ago. It was just a test drive of a low-end mountain bike. Let me tell you, a cheap bike these days is above and beyond what I rode as a kid. Light aluminum frames, suspension, it was a blast. But the problem has always been, where the hell am I gonna store the thing? Not in the apartment (it's a 1 bedroom with a ping pong table already squeezed in), not in front of my parking space (theft / freaky management). But I finally did come up with a solution: stash it in the back of my hatchback. The seats are always down, it's already being used as hiking gear storage, why not?

My only remaining questions for myself are, will I use it often enough to justify hauling it around at all time, will I have any luck getting the guys to ride between golf appointments, and how will I decide whether to hike or to bike a trail? When the days get shorter nature will take care of the last question, probably not a good idea to go biking in the mountains after dark.

Next item up on my wish list is a GPS, one with WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) for geocaching precision. I'm excited by all the forays technology is taking into the real world. Since this is new technology to me (I was a map and compass guy growing up) I've got a number of questions I'll have to look up. How many geocaches are there around this area? How can I make my own geocaches, and how brutal am I allowed to be (is miles from any road access fair game)? What are the possibilities combining google maps/earth with a GPS? Anyway, much potential geeking out in the out-of-doors, and if I continue hiking after work 2 days a week (after this heat wave passes, or in October, whichever comes first) it will certainly see plenty of use.

Lastly, I've been looking at portable MP3 players. Just a little bit of research shows that Apple, while obviously having the best designed player, has some serious competition when it comes to features. Creative Labs has a nifty little flash drive player that as well as playing MP3s also has an FM tuner and a built in mic for audio recording (as well a line-in for direct dubbing).

With these three major features it could have so many uses. The speakers in my car have been acting up (not to mention the CD player broke 2 years ago) and it would probably cost as much to fix as it would be to buy one of these. That, and I'm never in my car Sunday afternoon for the chamber music concerts they've been playing on KUSC, or Saturday morning for the Met.

I'd also like to get back into listening to books on tape/CD. With a portable player I could borrow CDs (from anywhere in LA through the online library exchange system), rip them to MP3, and play them whenever. With the line-in I could even dub old cassette books.

It would be nice to just be able to listen to the small handful of CDs I've gotten over the last couple years. I can't listen to music while working on the computer (too distracting), so I haven't listened to much music outside of the weekday commute for some time.

For several years now I've been planning on making digital recordings of those various poems and speeches that I used to have memorized back in the days of frequent campfires. With odeo.com finally launched (and presumably their "create" feature will be launched someday soon as well) I'll have ready means of publishing audio recorded on this device. It will also be an excellent source of audio content to listen too. In fact, I'm going to bring this post to an abrupt end so that I can install OdeoSyncer and try it out.

Line56.com: Death of a Blockbuster

rock on! only better news would be a walmart closing (but not the one where my brother works).

Line56.com: Death of a Blockbuster

rock on! only better news would be a walmart closing (but not the one where my brother works).

kiss my bitter ass

kottke is right, this is frakin' lame. totally violating to take a person's name off their credit card and post it on the internet. and since when is 15% not the industry standard? it's a minimum mind you, i tip more if the service was good (water remained full), or i was especially cheap ass in what i ordered for a meal (just because i ordered cheap food doesn't mean the waiter should get shafted). but i mean really, isn't this illegal? one step shy of stealing my credit card number and buying something on ebay.

On having layout

One of the more insightful articles I've read this year, and it's only a working draft. Pre-requisite reading: Explorer Exposed!. link via Anne.

I've been trying to see if setting hasLayout to "true" fixes the non-clickable padding bug in IE5, but for some reason I've been having trouble re-creating the bug.

The Collection

...cards for that other significant other. heard about these a few months ago. thought they would be more playful/cartoony, but looks like they took them seriously. Just don't change them on a credit card, wouldn't want "Secret Lover, Inc." to show up on a statement.

The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection (Harpers.org)

Mr. Fish's political cartoons. Disturbing, and funny, from Jesus to Darth Vadar. via glassdog.

los angeles bicycles classifieds and want ads - craigslist

it'll probably be september (birthday) before i can scrape together the cash for a bike, but when I do I'll probably just grab something cheap off craig's list. that way I might be able to get a GPS too.

los angeles bicycles classifieds and want ads - craigslist

it'll probably be september (birthday) before i can scrape together the cash for a bike, but when I do I'll probably just grab something cheap off craig's list. that way I might be able to get a GPS too.

History According to Harry

I think perhaps that Rowling has realized that Those Who Forget History are Doomed to Repeat It, but that future generations are not learning history from school, and so she has injected at least the morals if not the facts into her books to supliment the fact that most kids don't care about history.

Optimus keyboard

My next keyboard.

lifehack.org >> Over 100 Quick and Easy Healthy Foods

Since 15 minutes is about the longest I will bother to take to make a meal (and I don't eat out) my meal choices have been rather limited, especially with the new braces. The only thing this collection of recipies is missing is a random recipe selector. Yes, I am so lazy when it comes to food that deciding what to eat is as annoying as taking the time to cook it.

Backbone Trail

Last Sunday I finally took that Backbone Trail hike that I've been gearing up to (the one where you hike one way, and then take the Park Link Shuttle back to your car). Given the limit of three photo sets with my free flickr account I've tagged the photos as backbonetrail.

Hike Stats:

Distance

12 miles one way

Time

5 1/2 hours

Depart/Return

9:00am / 2:30pm

Elevation Gain

lots (for the Santa Monica Mountains anyway)

Location

Santa Monica Mountains Backbone Trail, from Tapia Park to Kanan Road.

Misadventure

Encountered a female bobcat and what could have been a coral snake but might have just been an imitator (digital camera wasn't fast enough to catch it). Got a bit of a late start so I took the hard direction, from low elevation along the road to Malibu to high elevation up on Kanan Dume Road. By the end I had sweat dripping down my hands, and boy did my legs ache Tuesday morning.

Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale :: University Communications Newsdesk, University of Maryland

Now my question is, would vegetarians eat it? And what about vegans? via glassdog.

Google Maps Mania

"Webmaster shows site visitors on Google Maps"

One of many uses of the google maps API highlighted by this new blog. What I find really exciting are the connections between the real world and computer technology, especially where the technology encourages forays into the woods. Realizing that I've gotta get myself a GPS to take adantage of this new technology, but with our budget as tight as it is right now I'll have to wait a couple months for my birthday. Getting too hot to hike anyway.

Click (2006)

Filming here at work end of July through the beginning of August.

The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization?

Hmmm, fancy that, by paying their workers a fair living wage Costco actually saves money by retaining more effecient workers, and not having to constantly recruit, interview, test and train new employees. Nice to see some positive numbers behind the benefits of actually conducting business with integrety and some sense of moral good. Or maybe there's no good intent, but they have figured out a more sustainable business model that benefits the employees as a side effect.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

Here we have another strength of links over categories:

When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them. - Zero Effect

That is, often when I am looking for something (a movie to watch, design inspiration) I don't actually know what I'm looking for. So if I'm drilling down deeper into categories, if I made a mistake early on I may just be getting further and further from what I'm looking for. But if I'm following links they may take me on a tangent that leads somewhere with little connection to where I started, but it might just be exactly where I didn't know I wanted to be.

Access Matters - Screen Readers and CSS Layout

"Today’s screen readers speak the content in the order it is written in the HTML."

It's great to have someone who actually has screen readers available verify this. This also means that fangs will be a reasonable approximation of most screenreaders. So the most important thing to consider with regards to standards based layouts and accessibility is source code order and appropriate use of "skip links". That doesn't sound so hard.

Type Directors Club : News : TDC2 2005 Results

While it's true that "Low-density scans cannot do complete justice to the high quality of the printed material." in a few cases they might have tried just a little harder in migrating the material to the web. That aside, what fun to see a fresh new collection of faces, and so varied.

csolyn.com redesign

http://www.csolyn.com/staging/

Having come up with three viable designs, Cybil and I are now stuck in the position of having to pick only one. Could you help by leaving your thoughts in the comments?

Here are the goals of the home page:

1. Give existing clients her schedule at all her locations.
2. Define the term "Skin Fitness Expert" which her PR campaign will be centered around.
3. Answer one of the most frequent questions she gets, "Where else do you work?"

As far as the look&feel are concerned the goal is to be, "more of a personal site than a spa site."

Google Toolbar for Firefox

yup, i couldn't resent using this to blog this. the tabbed browser integration is pretty nice. set the right options and there's no need to hit the new tab button before starting a search (especially since half the time i'm just using google as a spellchecker these days). and speaking of spellchecking, the integrated gmail/blogger style spellchecker is pretty kick ass. cheers. i do believe i'll replace the 3rd party extension with this one.

Skimboarding International - Source for Skimboarding Videos, Pictures and Related Media

fun collection of random movie clips. current highlights include boxing cats, banging stuffed anmials and drowning drivers.

Northern Lite

them germans, never know what they're gonna cook up next.

BBC NEWS | England | London | Eyewitnesses tell of travel hell

At least 33 people have been killed and hundreds injured after a series of explosions on the London Underground network and a bus in central London.

del.icio.us DVD Archive

http://del.icio.us/DevineSolynDVDs

We went through and catalogued all our DVDs while in the process of re-organizing our shelves to make room for inventory rescued from a dying spa. Cybil typed them into Excel, but that didn't let us do anything but alphabetize. I wanted so much more functionality and information: year, plot summaries, director, cast, but most of all tags. I wanted to be able to filter our collection based on the genre of movie that I'm in the mood to watch.

I've actually been thinking about this for a while, trying to decide if I could justify writing a little database app, or if there was something out there already that I could use for this purpose. And there is. By using del.icio.us to bookmark the imdb.com page for each of our movies not only do I automatically have easy access to lots of data on every movie, but I also have the ability to easily tag them all with multiple genres. I can then filter them by one or more tags, and search by title and plot summary.

Next I need to go back through and add tags that I've thought of since finishing the initial input. TV is one. "(TV)" appears in most of the television show titles, but it really needs to be a tag. I'm also thinking of tagging them with directors, producing, and maybe even actors. I've also got a few "Nils" labels, things that I'm often in the mood to watch. These new labels will be "kicking" and "nakedness." I might add some others if I think of it, but violence and nudity usually cover most of my movie watching desires.

ohnotheydidnt: Tits, tits, tits! Celebrities

Let's hear it for Livejournal!

Apple - Trailers - Domino

Clear/y Keira is blowing all the right people. Four movies in 2005. Missed the Pride and Prejudice screening earlier this week. Worried that they're going to butcher that one, the 1995 mini series (i haven't seen the 1980 one) had everything going for it, good acting, plot, dialogue and production value. I just don't know if they could pull off anything that could a candle to it in a single movie format.

Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter?

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

Let's not forget New Hampshire's state motto: "Live free or die." This could actually happen.

Google Earth - Home

the long awaited google earth public beta

Bayle photos

Three Photos of Bayle

Cybil's family dog is a 14 year old Belgian Malinois. She lives on the way home from work, so when I'm not tromping about in the Santa Monica Mountains I stop by and take her for a walk somewhere in the Sepulveda Basin and we terrorize the ducks, squirrels and today rabbits.

Script Type Face in CSS

Yes, I am being a total dork linking to a CSS file from Joe Clark's blog. What's worse, I'm going to highlight some code that I think is particularly excellent: font-family:
Zapfino,
"Apple Chancery",
"Lucida Handwriting",
"Caflisch Script",
"Poetica",
"Sanvito",
"Ex Ponto",
"Snell Roundhand",
"Nuptial Script",
"Palace Script",
"Park Avenue",
"Poetica",
"Shelley",
"Kaufmann",
"Zapf Chancery",
"Zapf Chancery Medium Italic",
"ITC Zapf Chancery",
"ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic",
"Monotype Corsiva",
Corsiva,
"Zurich Calligraphic",
"Bickley Script",
"BriemScript",
"Brush Script MT Italic",
"Brush Script MT",
"Brush Script",
"Edwardian Script ITC",
"Edwardian Script",
"Freestyle Script",
"French Script MT",
"French Script",
"Kunstler Script",
"Matura MT Script Capitals",
Matura,
"Mercurius Script MT Bold",
"Mercurius Script MT",
"Mercurius Script",
Mercurius,
"Palace Script MT",
"Palace Script"
"Script MT Bold",
"Vladimir Script",
"Chancery",
Sand,
Textile,
Mead,
Script,
"URW Chancery L",
"URW Chancery L Medium Italic",
cursive;

What do you think of that as an image replacement alternative? On this here win2k machine without any nice text smoothing it's rather rough, but the idea of just using CSS and the fonts on the visitors machine is appealing. I didn't see any notice about "borrowing" code on Joe's site, but I'm guessing that if he thought people would actually use it he'd be asking people to use this code, not bemoaning the theft of code (that must have taken some work to put together).

FedexFurniture.Com

surprised this wasn't a dorm room, but I guess right out of college you're even more desperate than a starving student.

HE-MAN Meets The Big Lebowski

The voices match the characters uncannily.

dog_bites.wmv

I've gotta id this park so that I can make a note NOT to walk the family dog there.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web - a practical guide to web typography

first noticed this over at Cameron's Screen Grab Confab, vol. IV #213, so I set up a Google alert which pulled up this link dump and that's how I found this webtypography.net preview. My only concern is the use of Flash. But then again many would have the same concerns about my use of JavaScript.

2nd to last Futurama Tagline

Yeah, so I translated it using the Futurama alphabet on Omniglot:

thanks for watching,
futurama slave army!

That Omniglot site is pretty cool, they've got Klingon and Romulan, and some cool real world stuff like undeciphered scripts.

Kanan Dume Road Backbone Trail Head

Ok, check this out. Zoom in a bit and you'll see that the map is centered on what is actually a tunnel, a bunch of trees and earth covering the road. If you follow the road north a little ways you'll see a turnoff on the west side. That's the parkshuttle stop. The trail goes down into the trees to the north of the stop, that's Newton Canyon where last I knew there's a dead deer carcass rotting away.

If you go back to were we started and follow the trail over the tunnel you can see where it winds through the valleys and then up again to a small circular turnoff on Latigo Canyon Rd (switch to map mode if need be). That's where I began my hike last Friday. The trail continues east until it gets to Tapia Park, just south of Malibu Creek State Park.

pussy.istheshit.net

• lesbian.istheshit.net
• porno.istheshit.net
• and so on...

of course you could always put in somebody's name as is intended, http://doug.istheshit.net is particularly funny.

Veer: Shuttleboard

note to self: try this out on the csolyn.com redesign.

Eric's Archived Thoughts: Universal Child Replacement

another use for the * selector in CSS, child selection. be sure to read comment 14 for the specificity problems.

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area - Maps

just printed the Backbone Trail Map (pdf) and I'm off for a hike. Summer half day Fridays ar the best!