November 2002 Archives
21 entries
November 29, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
I did something insane yesterday. It’s Thanksgiving morning, so I got up at 6am, drove 1 hour to Andover, MA and ran a 5K race in 20 degree weather. It took me about 40 minutes. Not very good. But I didn’t really train, and admittedly did this for my wife who runs one of these things every other weekend it seems. Anyhow, after that we had a great Thanksgiving at my Brother and Sister-in-law’s. Hours and hours of preparations, 10 minutes of eating, hours and hours of clean-up. You gotta love Thanksgiving. Still probably my favorite holiday though.November 26, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Made some more CSS changes to the site — force reload if anything looks wacky. 100% text navigation! Yay. Will Ferrell in some funny Apple switch ads.November 25, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Chewbacca sings “Silent Night”. Daigo pointed me to Mark Newhouse’s method of using CSS for formatting forms, rather than tables. It’s pretty simple, and works great.November 24, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
24 hours later, and I’m still not sure what I really thought about the movie Donnie Darko. It had similar qualities to “Magnolia” — where you’re just not sure what’s happening the whole time. Add to the fact that time travel dilemmas always confuse the heck out of me. It was a good film though. I think. Why on earth do you still have to twist speaker wire so tiny — yet it sill never fits in the damn hole on the receiver? Make the hole bigger — or the wire smaller. Thanks.November 23, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
I just watched this on a cooking show: deep fried turkey. Someone down south must have invented this. Actually, I bet it’s delicious… and healthy. Right.November 22, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Comictastic is an OS X application that downloads and displays up to 150 daily comics, automatically. Cool. Now you can catch up on all of those “Ask Shagg” clips. (via whatdoiknow)November 21, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Turducken:“… an enterprising cook decided to take a boned chicken, a boned duck and a boned turkey, stuff them one inside the other like Russian dolls, and roast them. He called his masterpiece turducken.”Mmm, just in time for Thanksgiving.
Kikkoman, the soy sauce-wielding superhero.
November 20, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Am I correct that yogurt should not taste salty? I thought so. Transmit 2 update: Several have written in, correcting me — Transmit 2 does work with BBEdit, just right (or control) click on a file. That’ll make me take a second look at it for sure. Thank you.November 19, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Had a photo shoot today with E.T. — complete with lighting technician and key grip. E.T. was incredibly hard to deal with, always bitching about how hot it was, running out of candy and how he needed to lie down. Anyhow, after the shoot, E.T. and I hit the pub and threw a few back. He’s got some funny stories, that E.T. Transmit 2 looks to be a fine little FTP client for OS X — although (as far as I can tell) it uses its own built in text editor rather than being able to work with BBEdit. That alone will prevent me from abandoning the almighty RBrowser. iPulse is a cool little desktop app that graphically monitors your Mac’s memory, CPU, disk usage and other stuff. Very customizable as well.November 18, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
The Bunion: Mad Magazine’s parody of the The Onion. (via evhead)November 16, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
One of the biggest takeaways from Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, was this: In Canada last year, there will 165 deaths from gun violence, while in America there were over 11,000. What’s even more staggering is that out of 10 million homes in Canada, there are 7 million guns. That’s a lot of guns, yet so few deaths. The film asks the question “what’s different about America then?” Extremely thought provoking, hilarious and masterfully hosted by Moore. The guy is a genius.November 15, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Douglas Bowman:“After 6 years, 3 months, 3 days, my employment with Wired comes to an end today. What a ride it’s been.Wow, only a month after the XHTML / CSS redesign of Wired, Doug’s leaving — but to start his own business. Best of luck to him — the Wired redesign has been somewhat of an epiphany for me, the tipping point in changing the way I approach all of my design and coding. It was a monster achievement for him to leave by. Last night I watched “Charles in Charge”. Seriously.
…I’d been following Wired magazine several years prior, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to move to San Francisco and join this relatively new online experiment called HotWired.”
November 13, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
I’ve changed the way the font size preferences worked from my own home-grown Perl way, to Paul Sowden’s famous and more superior stylesheet switcher — as seen on Wired News and many other sites. It’s superior in that I don’t need to write CSS values unhidden in the main template, thus changing the font size for browsers with limited CSS support. Now those old-school people aren’t tied down by CSS sizing of text in any way. Also, since it uses javascript, it doesn’t require the page to reload. For the color choices, I’ve kept those using my Perl script, where XSLT handles the spitting out of another color stylesheet on the fly. Couldn’t figure out how to modify the javascript to handle two alternate stylesheets at once. Everything seems to work nicely though, although you may need to force-reload and delete any old cookies from cederholm.org to be safe. I know this is so terribly exciting to read about.November 12, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Found a handy Lynx viewer from the Web Standards Project site. It allows you to view whatever page you’d like in the browser — as if it were being viewed with the Lynx text browser. Great for checking XHTML/CSS sites. cederholm.org looks pretty good, although I need to be more militant about proper paragraph tagging.November 11, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
My aunt and uncle in New Hampshire have goats. Specifically, they have one Tennessee fainting goat (“Olivia” pictured at right). They’re called fainting goats because when they get nervous or scared, their muscles tense up to the point where they can fall over. We saw a little bit of it over the weekend. It’s wacky. Apparently fainting goats were bred to act as decoys for predators going after a flock of sheep.What I like about this particular picture though, is that it appears that Olivia is talking to the camera. I could lie to you and say that fainting goats are also talking goats, but I won’t.
“Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers; however, you currently do not meet our minimum system requirements. You will need to adjust the following:
You Need Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP”
Hmmm. Oh well. I hear it’s a new “download and play it on your computer” service for renting movies. I’m sure this is where the rental industry is headed, and will be interesting to see what happens.
AltaVista has redesigned, and looks a heck of a lot like Google. I must say I do not like their new logo.
Macromedia just released Contribute, its bare-bones Web publishing software. We got a demo of this at work last week. Looks good for people that aren’t savvy and don’t want to be. Locking down portions of page code, etc. I need to look at it closer. People are wondering if they built in open standards…
November 8, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
The Noodle Incident (great site name) has some really simple CSS box examples. A quick and easy way to grab code that’ll generate multi-column layouts using CSS. If you haven’t checked out Tahiti 80 yet, what the heck are you waiting for? Caught their Boston stop last night — the first time they’ve been back here in two years. Their records are fantastic, and their live shows are a few notches better. I’m not sure why I like this band so much — maybe I’m intrigued by the fact that they’re from France and sing in English with a sometimes humorous accent. Maybe it’s because they can go from trumpet-laiden disco pop to a purely bombastic thumping retro-keyboard jam without it seeming out of place. I’m tired this morning.November 7, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Ban Comic Sans. Normally it’s severely annoying when a site decides to move your browser’s window position. But here is a case where it’s just darn cool. I gotta tell you, Shake n’ Bake is an underrated form of cooking meat. I love the stuff. Get some chicken, throw it in the bag, shake it (or use what I call the “flip-flop method”, which consists of turning the bag upside-down several times) and put it in the oven. So easy. I’m tempted to make my own mix, experiment, and then release the recipe. Sort of an open source Shake n’ Bake, if you will.November 6, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot. Interesting. I’ve actually been playing more and more with Chimera — the OS X Cocoa browser that is built on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine. It’s simple and fast, has great CSS support, font smoothing looks fantastic, tabbed window, etc. Worth taking a second look, and it’s only up to a 0.6 version release. My favorite feature by far (and probably possible in Mozilla as well) is setting up multiple tabs for different sites, then saving the entire set as one bookmark. Say you set up tabs for your favorite blogs or news sites, then with one click load them all into a single, tabbed window. That is nice.November 5, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine sing your favorite songs (such as “Hot For Teacher”, “Baby Got Back” and the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl”) in a way only a lounge singer could. Although it hasn’t snowed quite enough yet, you can send your friend a message in the snow with Pee Mail. Just try it. I’ve been studying the CSS work of Eric Meyer, author of some great CSS books. His site has a giant resource for examples of doing nifty things using CSS. Blogger is holding a contest for the redesign of their site. Cool idea — get your site redesigned for free. But their tactic worked, ‘cause I entered.November 3, 2002
Posted at 10:10 AM
Because I am a gigantic loser, you now have the option of choosing 1 of 3 color schemes for this site by clicking a colored block from the top right of the navigation. It’ll remember your color preference as well as font size each time you return. Why? Good question, and the answer simply is because CSS makes it so easy to do this.
Bulletproof Web Design Second Edition New Riders
Web Standards Solutions The Markup and Style Handbook Friends of EdA tiny design studio founded by Dan Cederholm. We create simple interfaces balanced with a standards-based methodology, and we’re based in Massachusetts, USA.