metafilter on the election – the 2000 election is likely to tip the balance on the supreme court. i do not want a “conservative” court presiding when ucita or the dmca, or any other number of the looming copyright, privacy, and civil rights issues come up, but then again, that’s just me.
oh yeah, in case anyone cares, this is what i did this weekend. yeah i’m a nerd.
also, i took some photo’s of one of my housemate’s cats. although i’m not particularly found of em (and i’m sure i must be getting hives or something from em) i have to admit that watching them just moving around and doing cat stuff has been pretty amusing. here’s a pic i snapped of one of the cats, romeo, rolling around on the warm concrete in the back yard. being a cat is an easy life.
well, the text is too small and scrolls too fast for me to read it, and the flashing / blending text stuff doesn’t help either, but it certainly does look cool. the music loop thing is also cool. sorta like something the limey did (lost his url, doh).
in other design related news, i found out one of the kick-ass designers working at zenimax (parent company of vir2l), philipp koerber. funky site at plasticbag. not too fond of the many tiny popup window design philosophy though.
also, read the sympathy for the plug-in article on a list apart. pretty weak. there is room for rich media on the web, though. it’s called svg. not only will it have all the fancy doodads designers want to play with, and the tools to make them with, but it’ll make programmers, and web heads (like me) happy too – it’s xml-based language, which means it fits right into the dom. full scripting and document interaction! (not to mention the ability to churn out your own svg’s from custom scripts – fuck generator) so, if you’re reading pg 2 of the article where peter talks smugly about being able (oooh, i’m impressed) handle query strings and pass variables, get a load of this. um, yeah, so, that’s my spiel. rah rah for the semantic web
from webdesign-l: “You can’t make a folder called “prn” on a Windows machine – 95, 98, NT (Workstation or Server).” wild… just tried it on w2k and that’s also true. good thing all of the is very well documented (can’t wait for some of penfield’s ruling to take place).
interesting /. comments in response to a dumb mac article
wow, i’ve never been to InfoDesign before. i will have to make my way through this (eventually).
one i wish the blink tag would work. leads me to wonder if someone will modify a broswer (im thinking moziall would be easiest) to render based on dtd, or customize rendering to emulate certain browser rendering/parsing bugs. might be neat. of course, i’d much rather be able to dynamically turn off javascript functions (window.open in particular), presentation tags, and animated gifs. nothing lots of people haven’t thrown out in the air before. of course i won’t be of much help. didn’t get a chance to even begin looking at writing any xul stuff.
jz reviews a bunchload of interactive ad agency websites. definitely of interest to anyone redesigning their company website. *cough* *cough* also of amusement, jz snuck in a link to praystation in the article.
speaking of cool business sites, i find myself liking vir2l’s site a lot, despite it’s crappy usability (what good is a next generation ecommerce site if you can’t bookmark pages?).they have some really spiffy designer’s working there, and great eye candy, at least. i can admire it, but i don’t think i could in good conscience ever ape that kind of web design style. (and i’m too immersed in backend schtuff to go balls to the wall on any clientside design right now, but i definitely need to get back in the swing of following the latest trends in web design).
ooh, looks cool. fic has the web page up for their crusoe powered web pad – AQUA3200 WebPAD. if it had a slightly higher res screen. i am a bit bothered by it’s wireless support. it says it has 802.11 support via pc card slot, but it only has one type II socket available and one compact flash slot. if i’m decoding the specs right, that means that if you have the wireless card in there and pretty much no storage (personally, i’d be happy with one extra pc card slot so i could transfer from my camera’s cf card to a typeII hd (while still having wireless access).
good lord. it’s 9pm. i have no life. of course, i didn’t get home today until almost 8pm, so i don’t feel that bad. but i still have no life.
for some strange mysterious reason, jon katz was trying to find something good in the $cientologist pos battlefield earth. this anonymous coward was up to the challenge:
I liked Battlefield Earth!
I went to this movie on a date with this chick named Kelly. We were actually double-dating with my buddy and his girlfriend who were going to go see a show at a theater complex a couple of miles away. It was one of those chick-flick luvvy-duvvy shitfests that his girlfriend made him go see. I will not see movies like that, period. I was a bit curious about Battlefield Earth, though .. I liked John Travolta in many of his recent movies and I thought “What the hell?” I called up Kelly and asked her if she wanted to go (we had been out once before) and she said sure. My buddy and his GF dropped us off at the theater and went to their flick. They would be back later to pick us up.
Well, turns out the movie sucked so bad that we were ready to leave about halfway through. The only problem was that we didn’t have a ride .. my buddy was suffering through some pansy-ass chick flick that wouldn’t be over for over an hour! This left us with the problem of what to do for that hour. We didn’t want to just sit around and do nothing. The sky was overcast and as I recall it was even drizzling a little bit.
Across the street from the theater was one of those fleabag motels .. you know, the kind of place that has hourly rates. Slyly, I asked Kelly “You ever wonder what it would be like inside one of those motels with hourly rates?” I didn’t know how she’d take it, dude .. like I said, it was only our second date. Well, imagine my happiness when she got this little smile and said “Well, now seems like it would be a good time to find out.” What followed was an hour of the most unimaginably raunchy, sweaty, athletic, mind-blowing sex I’ve ever had. We even had time for a quick shower (though I won’t describe the state the bathroom was in .. yeesh!) By the time we were heading out the door, my buddy was just pulling up to the opposite curb.
So the bottom line is, Battlefield Earth was responsible for a very interesting afternoon. So I would like to thank you, Elron Hubbard! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! You might be a freak, Elron, and your Scientology cult might be a complete sham, but at least your piece-of-crap movie got me laid real good and proper-like!
Thank you, Elron! Thank you!
also pretty good is rimrod’s response: “It’s giving Britney Spears and Bill Gates some needed competition in the “Worst Thing Ever To Happen, Ever” category”. and ucblockhead has a good comment:
It entertained millions.
By providing something easily trashable, it allowed hundreds of reviewers to write hundreds of mild-to-very amusing reviews trashing it.
I have personally spent probably a total of twenty minutes being entertained by reviewers topping each other at amusing anecdotes of the filmatic crapulence of this film. And I didn’t even have to spend a dime! Multiply that by the millions who encountered reviews and you get something that entertained many more than would have a merely mediocre film.