May 31, 2004
Via k10k.net, but it doesn't suck
This site is beautiful, and even though I found it via k10k.net, it does not contain any of the following:
- Text so small that it would be hard to read even if it wasn't put on a non-contrasting background.
- Iframes, iframes, iframes!
- Pixel art.
- A freakish attachment to the use of pixelated fonts.
- Unintuitive navigation icons.
Disclaimer: Yes, k10k contains all of these. Yes, I think k10k sucks. Big time. (There, I said it. Whew!) And yes, I know Scrivs has told us not to bust on the designs of web sites (only the content is open for opinion, apparently) in public.
k10k just deserves it too much. I've seen way too many people gush over and link to (but only to the home page) the unusable, unreadable, unbookmarkable, cacophony of iframes that somehow has been passed off to the world as the pinnacle of web design. Honestly, k10k is a case study waiting to happen.
I'm not maintaining that the designers behind k10k are talentless. Certainly, they have more design skills than this techie. Please don't think I am maintaining I have more skillz than they. I'm sure their billz are much better paid than mine.
They just didn't really turn it on for their own site. In fact, I think they must have designed the site during lent, having given up sound judgment. Moreover, they undoubtedly have an eye for great design. How else would I have been blessed with the five minutes I spent at the Arne Maynard Garden site?
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Update: Sorry, Paul. I didn't mean to add to your frustration on the issue of critiques of web design. Indeed, I liked and agreed with what you had to say, and admittedly took your words out of context to make an exciting link. :-) I, too, blame my lack of communication skills and the impossibilities of getting sarcasm across in writing. These blogs can be dangerous things in the hands of us amateurs, huh?
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Vacation Preparation Step #1: Digital Music
- Purge your iPod of all the albums you haven't listened to in months.
- Scour your CD collection for discs you haven't listened to since you got your iPod.
- Waste a rainy morning listening to 30-second bits of about 200 songs you haven't heard in years. (Songs open in iTunes. Get it.)
I thought computers were going to save us time and that digital music held the promise that we could bring our collections with us anywhere. How come I waste so much time sitting in front of my computer playing with digital music. (And who would have ever thought that you could play with music?)
May 25, 2004
Dead Phish
Last Friday night, I got together with Mike, Page and Fish to talk openly about the strong feelings I've been having that Phish has run its course and that we should end it now while it's still on a high note. Once we started talking, it quickly became apparent that the other guys' feelings, while not all the same as mine, were similar in many ways -- most importantly, that we all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the point of vibrancy and health. We don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act. By the end of the meeting, we realized that after almost twenty-one years together we were faced with the opportunity to graciously step away in unison, as a group, united in our friendship and our feelings of gratitude.So Coventry will be the final Phish show. We are proud and thrilled that it will be in our home state of Vermont. We're also excited for the June and August shows, our last tour together. For the sake of clarity, I should say that this is not like the hiatus, which was our last attempt to revitalize ourselves. We're done. It's been an amazing and incredible journey. We thank you all for the love and support that you've shown us.
-- Trey Anastasio
Holy fucking shit!
Erickson Barnett Publications
I am testing out a new way of linking to pop-ups and how this affects getting these popped-up pages listed/indexed in Google. The test page is the Erickson Barnett Publications page. We'll see what happens.
May 20, 2004
Happy Birthday, Daniela
Happy thirty-frphreth birthday to my beautiful bride.
Sorry for not calling first thing this morning.
Sma.
Why I love Comcast
Let me tell you why I love Comcast, because I know you were all clamoring to know.
Sometime last night our cable TV went out completely. Nothing but static.
No fear. I called Comcast, and after some brief troubleshooting, I had an appointment with a technician for 9-11am the next morning. My guy showed up at just before 10am and my cable was back up and running less than an hour later.
The last time my DSL went out it took me two weeks to get it going again.
Shudder.
Why I love DSL
Let me tell you why I love having DSL as opposed to cable, since I know you were all clamoring to know.
Sometime last night our cable TV went out completely. Nothing but static.
No fear. I popped into my office and surfed the web for my news and entertainment.
If I was on cable internet, I'd be forced to read a book or something equally banal.
Shudder.
May 19, 2004
Blogger region?
Couldn't figure out how to get comment registration working since I upgraded from Moveable Type 2.64 to the fancynew 3.0 release (still can't, by the way). So, figuring TypePad would be using the latest version of the MT software (which is inaccurate, as they use entirely separate systems, I think), I went over there to check out some blogs that had comment registration enabled.
My mouse wound up over a link to "Buttermilk and Molasses," so I clicked over to the site. As coincidence would have it, the author was from Richmond, Virginia, my hometown.
That's incredible.
The likelihood of a person happening upon a blog written by someone from their hometown has to be remarkably small. In fact, if there are an estimated 10 billion web sites on the internet, it's likely you would be underestimating the odds with the phrase "one in a million."
Hi, Richmond. Fancy meetin' you here.
Just the facts for the folks at Six Apart
Q: How do you use MT 3?
A: One blog. One author. Completely personal. The free version suits me just fine. Thank you.
May 18, 2004
Erickson Barnett hires new Art Director, Dave Kammerdeiner
The marketing agency who generously hired me almost six years ago, Erickson Barnett, recently hired a new Art Director, Dave Kammerdeiner, to head up our creative department.
I can't wait to see what the creative team pumps out with this new burst of talent.
May 11, 2004
Farewell, Grandma
We buried my grandmother in Arlington National Cemetery today. Somewhat anti-climactic, to be honest.
It was filmed by a crew from National Geographic doing a piece on the cemetery. It will air the day before Veteran's Day on PBS. Check your local listings.
Farewell, Grandma. I love you.
Baseball sucks
ESPN.com really needs to include an "I don't give a damn" option on all their polls, especially baseball-related ones.
May 10, 2004
Blogger.com gets CSS-ified
Figured it would be on-topic to post that blogger.com has gone the way of standards and pure CSS - and with the help of Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path no less.
The look is great (although I can't dig on the physics-challenging double drop shadows either, Kottke). The code is clean (but formatted horribly). And the page even has a "big banana" ala Seth Godin (sort of).
Nice work, despite the parentheses.
May 08, 2004
That house has a nice ass.
On a walk around my neighborhood this morning I noticed that I was checking out the houses like they were hot women. I was crossing the street to check out their backyards, craning my neck to see through the front door, and generally scoping out them out.
I turned thirty a few weeks ago, but that's not what makes me old. My behavior this morning makes me old. No, looking at houses doesn't make you old, you say. That's not what I'm talking about. I've been hawking houses for years.
I decided to take a solo stroll through my neighborhood for the exercise and joy of it. This is what makes me old. I saw no one except yard sale managers, church ladies, and small children.
When I do this before 8am, call me "elderly."
May 06, 2004
Breaking up is hard to do.
I am one of fourteen people between the ages of 22 and 38 not watching the last episode of Friends tonight. I've had enough heartfelt and touching good-byes in my real life, thank you.
Plus, I really hate the sappy FINAL EPISODE business sit-coms pull these days. They completely change what everyone loved about the show for the finale. That just doesn't make sense.
They are always way too sappy and way too preoccupied with trying to make things neat and tidy, but at the same time they are compelled to leave those poor saps who are addicted to the show with the feeling that the characters who they know better than their own parents and spend more time with than their real friends will carry on and grow old with them after the show is long gone.
It's like they feel like they are breaking up with a sensitive girlfriend (or millions of them, I guess) and have to be all soft and caring all of a sudden. I would be much happier if they'd just continue doing what they did well all the way up until the end, then just said, "See ya!" and were never heard from again.
I pity you all, the jilted and lonely ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends of Monica, Rachel, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, and Ross - the one that has been sappy from the start. Don't worry, though, you'll be able to relive your time together every weekday on Fox at 7 and 11p.m.
May 01, 2004
Domain name speculation.
The links don't work now, but they might someday. And we all know how important PageRank is.
Damn Safari bookmarks, again!?
If you're currently using Apple's web browser, Safari, bookmark this page right now into a new bookmark folder called "Dumb". Right now! Bookmark it now quick!
Gotcha! Again.
You can't bookmark a page quickly into a new bookmark folder using Safari. It requires two distinct processes. One to first create the folder and then one to actually create the bookmark. There is no opportunity for the user to create a new folder while in the act of saving the bookmark.
This makes no sense.
It's the little things, people.
Update: To Safari's credit, you can choose "Add Bookmark Folder" after you access the Add Bookmark function and before you save the bookmark, but it's still a separate process and just as clunky as not being able to.