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.
Tweeting
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!
Wallpaper for you! Taken somewhere on Highway 89 in Western Montana.
Download:
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1024 x 768
Zombies and Question Marks
Reading this article from the BBC News about zombie attacks, I was intrigued not by the scientific study itself, but rather by the name of one of the researchers: Professor Robert Smith?.
As the article points out, the question mark is part of his name! Who does something like this? And why? Were his parents playing a cruel joke? Were Mr. and Mrs. Smith? merely carrying on a long-standing family tradition? Did he change it himself later in life as a sign of independence and non-conformity?
After a bit of Googling, I was able to find Professor Smith?’s home page where he discusses his name: “If you haven’t lived with an incredibly common name, then you have no idea what it’s like to be entirely invisible on Google. Not that the question mark actually solves that, but at least it differentiates me from that guy from The Cure.”
He’s right, the question mark does nothing to help his Google search results, since Google ignores the question mark completely. If he was really trying to distinguish himself from the other Robert Smith you’d think he would have changed his name to something that doesn’t contain the words Robert and Smith!
But back to the zombies—what a silly study. Everyone knows (or will soon discover when the dead begin to rise) that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain. Merely decapitating it will leave a lot of heads rolling around on the ground biting at your ankles.
I can’t believe it took a scientific paper to determine that the only way to deal with zombies is to “hit them hard and hit them often…It’s imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else… we are all in a great deal of trouble.” Have these people not seen any of the Living Dead movies? Haven’t they read World War Z? It’s always the scientists who want to conduct research on the zombie epidemic that ultimately meet a very gruesome demise. So, question mark or not, I wish Professor Smith? luck in his future dealings with zombies—I’m suddenly in the mood to listen to Friday I’m In Love.
American illustrator, David Klein (1918-2005), created numerous travel posters for Howard Hughes’ Trans World Airlines (TWA) in the 1950s and 1960s. His posters use eye-popping colors, iconic landmarks, and scenic images to advertise global travel.
