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If you run you’re finger across the screen, you’ll see that the thin film of dust is in fact sitting on this site and not on the monitor. Obviously things have been slipping around here. Of course, I was pulling all-nighters at work last week working on a project while all that interesting stuff was going on at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. If I ever get a chance, I should probably catch up on what sounds like some real interesting stuff: kottke, peterme 1, 2, blackbeltjones.com… oh wait, got to boingboing and found out that aaron ‘blogspace‘ swartz, boy genius, has put up a collection of just about all the etcon notes in existence on a single page.

This of course makes me feel slightly guilty about the SXSW notes I never finished putting up, as well as the kms i’m never going to get finished (not at this rate anyway), but well, after taking a few breaths I’m over it. At this point I’m just going to try to get my offline and work life organized for a while. I get the feeling that I need to acquire some superior organizational/time management skills.

Um, finishing off with some random thoughts. E3 this week… down the block… obviously I won’t be there, but I’ll be catching lunch with an old college friend who will be. I’m 21. Isn’t that too early to be getting nostalgic about college? Of course, yet another one of my friend’s is going to be going down the aisle soon.

On that note, looks like I’ve been misssing out on some comedic gold courtesy of the Peanut Gallery on BlindDateBlog How rusty has so much spare time I don’t know. Doesn’t he have a website to run?

Jonathan starts things off with a description of a kiss that reads more like a Greco-Roman Wrestling manual. “I’d start off with a clinch, holding my upper lip against your lower gums, and pinning your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Then I’d reverse it and whip my tongue against your left cheek, while at the same time using the leverage of my molars to twist your lower jaw into a reverse Kowalski. Then I’d go for the pin, gripping your nose between my lips and twisting over and sideways, firmly settling the weight of my chin onto your uvula.”

And you thought you’ve seen everything.

I wound up going with some friends and saw the 12:01AM screening of Episode 2 (funny since I didn’t really plan on seeing it at all, much less on opening night), digitally screened at the newish Grove theater. We caught the digital projection, which well, was interesting. First, about the projection, during the first few minutes the picture was offset about 5-10% to the right of the screen and crawling. Apparently, just because it’s digital doesn’t mean that the projector monkeys won’t find a way to screw things up (remember when there used to be real projectionists in the booth? no, me neither, but I’ve heard they do exist… in Chicago at least). Also fun were the occasional screen blankings and one or two tearing/vsync errors. It occurred to me that while the next generation of kids might never see scratched up and dirty reels or projectionist dots, they’ll be completely used to the digital artifacting from the digital projection technology.

Oh, about the movie. Well, the grip of people I saw it with seemed to enjoy it, and I don’t want to rain on that parade, but even coming in with incredibly low expectations… but, wow, the dialogue, characterizations, and story were laughably bad. There is a continuation of the byzantine unrest in the Republic involving factions of various trade organizations, blah blah blah, but honestly, my eyes glazed over at the screen crawl. That’s really weird, because I remember when first reading the crawls on the earlier Star Wars movies that they were simultaneously 1) much simpler and 2) much more engaging. It got me thinking… it can’t be that hard to make an entertaining space opera can it?

Of course, that’s oversimplifying, seeing as it’s not just some random movie, but “STAR WARS”, part of a mega-franchise with so many expectations. But really, does that make it impossible to make a movie that can engage on something beyond a visceral level? I mean, it’d be fine that was what was being aimed for, but somehow, sitting through quite a bit of lengthy exposition, even worse dialogue, and more than a few hackneyed plot devices, I get the feeling that Lucas was trying to say… something. On the bright side, there were some ‘dramatic moments’ so silly that I just burst out laughing. Very entertaining in a MST3K way. So, no, Anakin’s journey to the dark side isn’t very compelling at all, and his ‘romance’ with Padme is actually slightly creepy, and isn’t very convincing (Jedi mindtrick explains it I’m sure).

Oh, and while I’m kvetching, It’s funny that on a visual level, I actually much prefer the the older films. Just about everything in the movie is computer generated, green screened, and composited, and unfortunately… you can very much tell for the majority of it. From the bad character interactions, to the ever-present shine, it just made the whole movie look like a giant video game. I don’t necessarily blame the technology, it seems to be more of an aesthetic decision than anything else.

Hmm, that’s a lot of writing, really late at night.

Update: here’s a nice summary thread on /.

After several very stressful hours of sketching, pixel, and polygon pushing (and some very helpful feedback from a friend, which helped me polish it off) I was able to get a working solution for the screen designs of the Event Calendar project I’ve been working on. This actually would have been fine if it wasn’t for the fact that I realized that there was an intractable problem that required a complete overhaul of the layout… with the beta launch in threetwo days.

Thinking about it, this would have been a very useful design excercise. (Not to mention great for interviews). I’ll probably do a little write-up/post diagrams in the next few weeks if I make it out of this week alive.

I shoulda bought that case of Red Bull when I was at CostCo.

Wow, Eric S. Raymond has a blog. Despite the media coverage, and seeing the number of people blogging, (as well as reading and listening to way too much community pundrity,) I’ve never really taken a step back and be struck by the phenomenon. For some reason, the combination of reading some of the most recent round of articles and seeing some of the conversation around them made me do that.

Whoa, these light grafitti photos are amazing rad. Worth installing shockwave for.

Hmm, apparently there are some people who don’t like combo boxes. While I agree that it can be at times confusing, I think the author of this combo box-bashing article is ignoring how damn useful combo boxes are, especially when combined with auto-completion. A combo box is ideally suited for when one is either selecting something that exists or entering a new value, uh… hence, combo box. Where the combo-box really shines is in list-filtering based on partial input. This is usually either by scrolling of the drop down, or by actual filtering of the drop down items (useful when the items aren’t alphabetically ordered). It’s even better with inline autocompletion. Forget how confusing it might be, it’s just damn useful, and none of the alternatives that the author suggests work are as suited.

I’m repeating myself, but that and cascading menus really should have been built into basic HTML forms. Did I mention how lame optgroup is? It can only include options (no multi-level cascades), and even Mozilla doesn’t support it properly (although it’d actually be nice to be able to choose how to style it).

Giving up on combobox for the night. I was trying to attach the combobox nodes I had constructed with appendChild, but I can’t seem to reference the container (or even the script node) from the function that I’m trying to do this from. If I can’t figure out anything I may just have to document.write it.

I’ve been pretty lackadaisical about the blog lately. Part of it has been being really busy and run down from work, and part of it has been from cutting time spent online to do some reorganization in my life. In any case, I’m hoping to get back in some regular schedules.

I’ve started working out after a long respite. In the year since I stopped, I’m surprisingly only 5lb’s heavier, but I know that it’s definitely badly offset from losing muscle mass. In any case, I’m breaking out the EatWatch again (if you’ve never seen this program before, it’s awesome, calculates moving averages on your weight).

I’ve also dusted out my old calorie counter and am retrofitting it. The first thing I figured I’d do was program a better DOM-based ComboBox. I’ve made some progress on it, but it’s a bit more challenging than I had expected. Not to mention, that my JS is rusty. Well, that’s half the fun, I suppose.

Speaking of web stuff, apparently there’s a Los Angeles Mozilla 1.0 party going on in LA (or road-tripping to norcal) on June 12th. Hmm, although DJ Shadow is going to be at the Mayan on the 12th I think…

On the ‘I want it now’ hardware front, details on the new Matrox card, Parhelia, have been leaking out over the weekend. NDA lifts today though, so now there are articles that won’t get pulled down the next day. Among the highlights:

• 10-bit RAMDACs w/ full gamma correction with 10-bit rendering for 2D, 3D, DVD, and video, as well as 10-bit ARGB rendering
• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs
• Dual independent DVI outs
• TripleHead Desktop (3 displays, up to 3840x1024x32bpp)
• Dual overlays (yea!)
• Glyph Antialiasing
• All kinds of 3D goodies

I ordered a ridiculously huge TV last Friday, and it came in Thursday afternoon. It seems to mostly work. I’ve been spending a bit of time at the Home Theater SPot forums. I’ve also found the Service Manuals for my TV at a site, although I think I’m just going to pony up the cash for a calibrationist, as there are lots of possibly fragile, fiddly mechanical things that need to be done.

• Lens/Mirror Cleaning – apparently there’s usually prints or dust on that stuff. And one must be careful not to spill the liquid from the lens unit
• Mirror Shield Screen Restacking – the protective mirror shield on the TV causes mucho glare
• Lens Hood / lens-cavity Duvatyne – reduces interior reflection, improves black levels
• Lens Striping – to balance out the color temperature on the screen
• Grey scale tracking
• Picture adjustments for brightness, color, etc.
• 56-point convergence
• Geometry adjustments to correct bow, skew, and overscan problems
• Edge focus (electrostatic/mechanical)

I’ve done some minor adjustments, like the 9-point convergence and going through the basic Avia screens, but am definitely hoping to schedule a full calibration after the burn-in period.

2001-05-07, 03:14:07AM, f/2.6, 1/60s: