The Mascot by Ladislas Starewicz
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-mkGqcvKPM
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtjtKw_mATM
The Loudness War
More info here: The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse.
Promo video for Charles and Ray Eames’ shell chairs
New Twinings Packaging
V. upset about the new Twinings packaging. This pretty much ruined my morning tea.
Old, good Twinings packaging: 
New, bad Twinings packaging.: 
Tweeting
I’ve been trying to devote a bit more time and effort to Twitter. If you’re not already,
you should follow me on Twitter here.
An homage to the Neutra typeface inspired by the song Poker Face by Lady GaGa.
Good Things About Being Sick
Since I’m sick with the swine flu, Ebola, or some other nasty bug, and am generally feeling very miserable, I thought I’d try and be positive and post a few good things about being under-the-weather:
- Ricola
- Revisiting Sex and the City: The Movie
- Handmade Fuzzy Wool Slippers
- Homemade Vegetable Beef Soup
- Super-Soft Fleece Blanket (not a Snuggie)
- Homemade Cinnamon Raisin Bread
- Finally having the time to read an entire New Yorker cover-to-cover
- Cambric Tea and Rusks
-
Jogging the Memory
on repeat
Waxy
I watched the Wax trilogy the other day: Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), House of Wax (1953) and House of Wax (2005). I actually only made it through about 15 minutes of the 2005 House of Wax. Gah! Terrible! The ‘53 Wax had its moments, but even Vincent Price couldn’t save a Disneyesque production with an overblown soundtrack, cheesy sets, stilted acting and several lame scenes that existed only to showcase gratuitous 3D effects. I won’t even try and review the ‘05 Wax, except to say that Paris Hilton won a Razzie Award for her subtly nuanced performance. If you really want to waste a couple hours, the whole movie is on YouTube. As usual, the original is still the best: Mystery of the Wax Museum had great performances by Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh, a restrained soundtrack, wonderful sets and a classic early-30’s mystery feel.
Redesign
I redesigned my website (again).
A few technical notes:
The site is my first outing with HTML5. Not much different (at least for this site) as opposed to XHTML 1.0, but it was a chance to get my feet wet.
The background image is an 1800x1090 jpeg taken by my wife in downtown Minneapolis. It’s the largest element on the page, but it’s sufficiently blurred to only weigh 72KB. The main div has an alpha transparency through a background-color rule: background-color:rgba(0,0,0,.4). Internet Explorer doesn’t recognize this so I also used a filter rule in the IE portion of the stylesheet. The div has rounded corners by means of a border-radius rule.
All the links on the page turn red when the main div is hovered over and are underlined when hovering over the individual links. This is accomplished through the simple CSS rule: #main:hover a{color:#c00;} which IE (of course) doesn’t recognize, so I used the Whatever:hover script to make IE implement this behavior.
The portfolio interaction and animation are accomplished with JQuery and the easySlider plugin. To avoid a flash of the not-yet-hidden portfolio div while the page loads and still adhere to the principles of progressive enhancement, I hid the portfolio with a Javascript CSS rule.
The font is Steinem Roman, designed by Apostrophic Lab, downloaded in an @font-face kit from Font Squirrel and embedded through a CSS3 @font-face rule. I also used a fall-back serif font stack for browsers that don’t support @font-face. To speed up font downloading I gzipped the font files.
That’s it in a nutshell!
