December 2002 Archives

December 31, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was an incredible movie. Just like the first, I’m amazed that there just wasn’t anything wrong with this film. The reason may be that, at its core, the story is a timeless one. I have the books now, so I plan on reading all three before next Christmas. We’ll see how that goes.

While over at the LOTR site, check out the interactive map to Middle-Earth for your Palm.

After some tinkering, I finally converted my old Blogger posts to XML so that they’ll live again here on my own system in the archives. They go back to September of 2000, although some months are pretty bare. It wasn’t all that difficult — just creating an XML template in Blogger (I’m using RSS 2.0 for formatting), then republishing. Works like a charm. Strange to see the same bugs still happening in Blogger after not using it in years.

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December 30, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Our tree is still up and it’ll be up until after the New Year. I’m wondering what the average day is for taking a Christmas tree down. Some take it down the day after, some maybe a month after? How about lights on the outside of the house? It actually feels strange to still have it up today, only 5 days after.

Apparently a 2000 page translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was found in the archives of an Oxford library.

Star Wars Origami:

“Why combine Star Wars and paperfolding? Why not? I like ‘em both, and let’s face it, so do you. That’s why you clicked that link.”

So true… so true.

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December 29, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Ah, I still love the Patriots.

A few of my favorite albums of the past year that I actually got around to listening to (not necessarily released in 2002 and in no particular order):

• Apples In Stereo, Velocity of Sound
• Doves, The Last Broadcast
• Beck, Sea Change
• The Hives, Veni Vedi Vicious
• Tahiti 80, Wallpaper for the Soul
• Promise Ring, Wood/Water
• The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
• Charlene, S/T

Mark Pilgrim has started doing some interesting things using the <cite> tag — automatic indexing of citations to other people and sites using the standard HTML tag.

You must check out Trevor Van Meter’s Fly Guy Flash animation/game thing. Impressive pixel and vector art throughout his main site as well.

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December 26, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Pictured right are the results of the first game played at home on a new Scrabble board (highly recommend the rotating board action). It was the perfect thing to do on a post-snow-storm-day-after-Christmas. I am not a great Scrabble player. In fact, can you spot my glaring grammatical error? (click image for larger view) Kerry didn’t catch it right away, so we had to live with it for the rest of the game. My favorite turn of the game by far: my playing an “i” to spell “hi” on a triple word score. The easiest 15 points one can get., yet I still lost by over 60 points.

Interesting stuff at the National Scrabble Association. Who knew?

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December 24, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Merry Christmas. There’s a house (or actually a whole block) in Saugus, MA that goes above and beyond with lights and decorations. I’ve never seen anything like it. Apparently they spend $30,000 to do it, and employ 3 people for a few weeks a year to help set it all up. The electric bill for the month of December is around $1000 and traffic on their street gets heavier than the central artery during rush hour. A colossal waste of energy? Yes. But still amazing. Shown at right (click for larger view) is a photo I snapped while driving by in the car, and while it’s blurry, you still get a sense for the amount of lights there are.

Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. Some valid stuff in there.

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December 23, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Sunil sent a link on how spam fueled the mini rc car craze this year. Really interesting, and I know I personally received at least a dozen emails for these little things.

Cool, a Tony Hawk autographed iPod. (via megnut)

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December 22, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

A friend of mine gave me one of those mini remote control cars (show right with the cover off) — apparently these are what the kids are wanting this Christmas. I can see why. The thing is the size of a matchbox car, but remote controlled, pretty darn fast and charges up in about one minute.

Ok, I just realized I’ve posted twice now this month (with pictures) about toy cars. I’m not that into toy cars. It just happened to work out that way I guess. Future posts will be about football, power tools and probably stuff that’s named with three and four letter acronymns.

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December 20, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

From the hilariously verbose Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About:

“I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I’d eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, ‘deliberately to annoy her’.”

Gawker is a newly launched weblog covering gossip and anything and everything in NYC. It’s an entertaining read, even if you don’t live in the Big Apple.

WTheRemix is an independent contest for redesigning the front door of the W3C. The winning design will not actually get used by the W3C. I thought about entering this, but then remembered how much time I put into the Blogger redesign contest. Fun, but…

Last night, while sitting in a dark, smokey cigar bar, I decided that I would be far more inclined to smoke a cigar (but still not often) if they were approximately 1/10th the length of a normal cigar. A couple of puffs and you’re done. Then one could enjoy a single malt scotch or cognac with a cigar, yet not end up smelling like one.

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December 18, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

A nice explanation of how to minimize CSS class names on Tantek’s log. (via zeldman)

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December 17, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Update: I’ve created a cederholm.org t-shirt over at pixeltees. It was eareally simple to create the shirt and open a store over there. They’re $15 (of which I make a whopping $1 per shirt after 5 or more are ordered) and I have absolutely no idea on the quality. I suppose I should order one and find out. Or maybe you should as well :-)

Make your own pixel art t-shirts at pixeltees. What a great idea, design and sell your own t-shirts made right on their web site using a killer Shockwave interface. (via overstated.net)

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December 16, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

HotBot has relaunched. This time it’s XHTML/CSS driven thanks again to Douglas Bowman. He talks more about the redesign on his site.

I used to love HotBot (before Google), and it looks like they’ve packed some new features into this new version.

Creative Commons:

“Creative Commons released version 1.0 of its Licensing Project, and the first release of content under its Founders’ Copyright. These are the first two projects in a series that Creative Commons will launch, all designed to help expand the amount of intellectual work, whether owned or free, available for creative re-use.”

This is a pretty great thing — an alternative for licensing creative material that even Roger McGuinn of the Byrds is using.

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December 14, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Reason I love using CSS #1045: specifying a background image floats the image above the background color. Neat tricks can be done. So if I do…

background: #000 url(“image.gif”) no-repeat top left;

…and the image is partially transparent, then whatever color is specified (black in this case) will shine through the image. Nice.

There’s something nice about the British pound coin. It’s small, yet thick. The advantages are that they don’t take up a lot of room and they’re easily picked out among lesser valued coins. I’m sure this was designed unpurpose. I bring it up because for the first time I have in my possession two US gold dollar coins. They’re only slightly larger than a quarter but gold, which doesn’t help when you’re fishing around your pocket for one. It’s just not different enough. Thicker is better. Does anyone use these things yet?

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December 13, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

So apparently Moby was attacked outside of the Paradise rock club here in Boston. Why would you want to beat up someone like Moby? A skinny guy who often speaks about non-violence. And furthermore, why would it take 3 guys to beat him up? More info and commentary from Moby himself on his weblog.

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December 11, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Whoa. 10 classic Atari games stuffed inside a replica of an ol’ Atari 2600 joystick? And it runs on batteries and has one cable that connects directly to the TV? And it’s only $20?! Looks to be unbelievably great. Christmas is right around the corner…

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December 10, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

There’s a nice interview with CSS guru and author Eric Meyer up at his publisher New Riders’ site. Some great explanations on why CSS is damn useful.

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December 9, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

From Zeldman today, we were introduced to Vitaflo, on which there is an interesting alternative to the CSS box model hack. The original is here.

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December 7, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Speaking of RSS, does your RSS feed validate?

Was just reading a fascinating post by Anil Dash on using XHTML instead of RSS. I agree with him — with a little standardizing of div names and classes — one could have one format for display and syndication. Makes so much damn sense. Afterall, XHTML is a repurposing of XML. Here’s another nice viewpoint on this. Makes you think, and I’m sure this guy doesn’t like the idea one bit — or if he does, he’ll start claiming he invented XHTML.

An amazing full-screen QuickTime VR panorama of Times Square in NYC. (via k10k)

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December 6, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

It had previously been snowing for over 24 hours straight here in Salem (albeit, a light snow). It just stopped maybe an hour ago, the skies opened up, and here’s the view out my home office window. The snow is already melting. It’s spring! Oh wait, it’s not even winter yet. Anyhow, I wish my sinuses would clear up like the sky did.

Enjoy the new NaDa 0.5! This is simply the best piece of software I’ve come across. From the NaDa web site:

“NaDa 0.9 was a system software extension, but the new improved NaDa 0.5 is just a document of 1 byte.You don’t have to restart your computer for installation. It is simpler than ever. We hope to reach our final objective by delivering NaDa 0.0 by the end of the current year.”

Some examples of UFOs appearing in 15th century European art.

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December 5, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

I’m pretty sure that these telephone jack powered products are a joke, but I’m wondering if some of this is possible — I’m thinking there is power coming in from the phone lines, but how much? In any case, it’s sure funny.

Wired:

“The Mac and its fans constitute the equivalent of a religion … This religion is based on an origin myth for Apple Computer, heroic and savior legends surrounding its co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs.”

Part 4 of an interesting series on the cult of being an Apple fan.

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December 4, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

There’s somewhat of an artform in creating tiny, useful apps — case in point: Searchling, a little “G” that sits in your menubar in OS X. Click it, and a little floating search box appears for instant Google searches. Results appear in your browser. Can’t get any quicker than this.

I’m in the middle of battling the worst cold I’ve had in a while, and the 2nd one already this winter. Geez. Kerry was kind enough to bring home some Alka-Seltzer Plus cold medicine a few nights ago. The package came with a little matchbox car (pictured above right). I like matchbox cars that come with cold medicines.

So there’s a reason for yet another subtle design change for this site. This is a design idea I had been working on for a separate portfolio site, but I decided it’d make more sense to fold that in here. So there’s now a portfolio page (yes, very tiny right now) where I hope to attract more projects as I have the time for them.

There are still some issues with the photos page that I need to fix, but other than that things should look ok. Force reload if something looks completely weird.

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December 3, 2002

Posted at 10:10 AM

Found a couple of great OS X applications worth mentioning over at What Do I Know — SnowSaver is a nice OpenGL screensaver, and Still Life lets you emulate Ken Burns by making little QuickTime movies of your digital photos. Zooming, fading, etc. I’ve only played with Still Life for 5 minutes, but it looks to be really easy to use.

Alka-Seltzer cold medicine works pretty well. Although, when it wears off you’re back to square one. But I guess that’s the case with any cold medicine.

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