So, I’m a wee biased, but I think the little girl involved in this picture is so sweet and cute looking. I can’t wait to meet her for the first time.
Click image for larger version
Category Archives: Opinion
How To Design a Flash Site
I have been known to be antagonistic towards Macromedia Flash because of accessibility, load time and various other issues that are tied in with poor Flash design and implementation. However, Mars Hill Church Seattle has got a Flash site that I thought was just using DHTML. I think that if I had this to do my way I’d have used DHTML with XMLHTTP. However, this site is really, really usable and you can select, copy and work with the text as if it was just plain markup.
I love the navigation. It reminds me of the Apple Finder app’s Columns view. If you select one main section of the site you get sub-navigation in the next column over. I want to use this sort of design and layout in something some day. I’d love that sort of control 🙂 But I digress. All of the links load up near instantly because graphical elements have been minimized to increase load time. However, the look and clarity is not lost because they have good design style and maintain simplicity.
You should check it out and learn some things from it like I’m going to do.
Democrats Call Rice Liar
With a headline like this I couldn’t pass it up: ABC News: Democrats Call Rice Liar, Bush Apologist. Isn’t politics a nasty business? I think they should remove the plank from their eye before they worry about Rice’s splinter.
In other news, pots and kettles are both black.
Bin Laden Bounty
If a man’s life (or death) is worth$50 million why am I buying life insurance? Seriously. And why am I paying what feels like exorbitant taxes? Right now here is the message the United States government is sending:
- Our national debt is not a concern – we keep making up money to spend on Iraq, bin Laden and inauguration parties
- Taxes are not necessary to raise money to fund events and functionality within the government
- I can get myself into enough debt to have caused George Washington to die of a heart attack had he seen the nation in that much debt
Fun, huh?
Email Killed the Floppy Star
Do you remember floppy disks? Do you remember the 8-track? Do you remember the vinyl records? All of those are ancient data transfer methods. However, now with ubiquity of the internet, the speed of broadband (more than half of US internet connections are broadband) and the simplicity of email floppy disks have all but died. Sure, Dell was going to get rid of the floppy drive in their PC‘s several years ago, but businesses cried out, “We love old technology, give us Windows 95!”
So, kudos Apple for bumping the floppy. CD burning takes only a wee longer with todays faster drives and the data storage quantity means I won’t have to carry a suitcase if I want to take a lot of data somewhere (I would have to with floppies).
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
So last night I watched this movie with my friend Brian, it was a really freaky movie along the lines of Memento, and possibly sort of like the Matrix if you just count the philosophical parts and no action and no special effects, though there was some special effect work done. It had Jim Carrey being serious, Kate Winslet not hanging off of the front of a boat, and Elijah Wood standing the same height as everyone else. It also had the main male role from 13 going on 30 as well as Kirsten Dunst whom we all know from Spider-Man one and two.
This movie is really weird because they play part of the end at the beginning, and then fill inthe middle, play past the part they played in the beginning and then finish the movie with the end. I appreciate a movie with an ending at the end, it makes a sense of completion possible. I will warn you that Jim Carrey is not overtly funny in this film and that the language, while being English, is full of words that parents don’t want their children to hear or use, and that if used any more than it was in this movie falls over the line of bad script writing. In other words, there’s a lot of prophanity in this movie and you shouldn’t see it if hearing it throws you into a fit of vomitting, temporary memory loss or back pain. Women under 30 should consult a physician before taking this… whoops! I got way off track.
I really liked the moral of the movie because it was that if you’re meant to be with someone you’ll be with them no matter what. However, 95% of the people who leave the theater, or finish watching the DVD, will not be thinking that. Carrey is serious in this movie. Really. Don’t come looking for an Ace Ventura, Bruce Almighty, or The Mask. Don’t come looking for The Majestic either, because this is not filled with the feel good stuff at the end.
The idea behind the movie is that a doctor in the area can erase memories from your mind. By the end of the movie a lot of memories are erased from a lot of minds leading to catastrophe. However, a majority of the movie is played out in Jim’s mind where he [some description that would totally spoil the movie if you were to watch it].
So, how do I rate this movie after rambling on so long with great discontinuity? On a scale from 1 to 13, with 13 being the best, I’d give it a 9. It’s above average, but due to some graphic scenes, vulgar language and silly kissing from Kursten Dunst, it can’t be a 13.
Windows Annoyance
So Windows Update triggered this morning to fix more problems with Internut Exploder as well as wanting to install some Anti-Virus type software. Well, the update finished (sans AV, which I’ve already got) and now every 10 minutes I get a little popup telling me to restart the computer. What the heck is up with that? Can I please reboot at my convenience? Sure Windows XP takes less time to reboot than Windows 2000 did, but why annoy me? I’m so going to switch over to Mac when I can.
Tips on Playing Doctor
My two year old, dearest Abby, loves to play doctor. Wherein she insists on shoving a fake plastic thermometer into my mouth. Wherein I refuse and get in trouble with ‘Dr. Abby.’ However, it’s safer that way because I know that she has no concept of what sterility is, cleanliness is and generally no sense of hygiene. I love to play with her, but I have to draw the line somewhere because just like working 168 hours a week you might be able to do it, but it would eventually come back to bite. I might actually have to go to the real doctor to fix the ailment that I got from the two year old doctor.
So, I recommend the following:
Over react to everything you pretend have. Make a big stink about being sick
Don’t let anything actually get into your mouth.
Don’t actually take any of the pills that a young doctor might try to cram into your face
Above all fake the intake of the item, whatever it may be. If it looks like you got it into you, the world is a better place.
Lastly, don’t play doctor too long, come up with other things to do together, like playing stuntman who jumps out of tall trees. Then, when you get injured you can really go to the doctor.
Please, Dear Frontier Not PDF
Dear Frontier Airlines,
I have written several times about your extra-ordinary customer service. Y’all have really done quite a good job. Except I found one thing that makes me scratch my head: Emailing me my receipt as a PDF. What is the reason for that? When I open it up it contains only text and one hyperlink to your web site. Why not HTML, why not just a plain text document? I placed my order online where I used an HTML browser to get the tickets, I opened up the email which could have displayed plain text or HTML email (preferably both for email clients that don’t handle HTML), and lastly, I didn’t want to open up the glut of a program known as Adobe Acrobat. If I was using an Apple I would have without question enjoyed the PDF because of OSX’s great real time rendering of PDF, but I’m not, currently I’m on a Windows machine and I’m terribly frustrated by the slow performance of Adobe on this machine, which has one gigabyte of RAM.
Thank you for your time and consideration of bandwidth, end user friendliness and customer service.
Regards,
Randy Peterman
File Under Double Speak
Piracy hits Hollywood in the wallet
OR
Record Profit from Movies
You pick. I doubt that the internet is undercutting the movie industry, the fidelity of the movies you can get online comes no where close to the giant screen that I saw Meet the Fokkers on last Sunday. And if Hollywood was producing outstanding films with regularity maybe people would be going to the movies more often rather than waiting to see them on DVD. Speaking of which, Mark Cuban has a good idea (again) along this line.