The Art of Headlines

Alright, I'm conviced that there is an art to writing a clever and clear headline. But the challenges of getting this one all the way to publication must have been arduous. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070503/ap_on_re_as/skorea_high_wire

Read the headline very carefully, ignoring the actual content of the article.

The sincerest form of flattery

AOL is testing a new homepage design, but a close comparison of a competeing portal will reveal just how much inspiration is necessary to kick AOL into a design update. Not that I particualarly love the new Yahoo portal design, but it's still a little better than what came before. And probably one of the most worthy solutions to the intentional information overload on those sites.

Speaking of big media companies redesigning their sites. Apparently MTV redesigned their site and launched yesterday, resulting in an immediate service outage. The big story in this though is that MTV had just launched a brand new all flash based site last year. Heavy use of flash seemingly makes sense for what people expect from the MTV brand (loud, active, lots of video). I never visited their site before, but I just find it interesting that they so thoroughly decided to throw a curveball at their users and switch back to a HTML site. You cant please everyone, especially when you are a big name online destination, but seriously, that's a pretty good problem to have.

Flex Builder 2

Honestly, who was the genious at Adobe/Macromedia who decided to build the Flex Builder 2 IDE on a Java Application (Eclipse). Has anyone ever had a good experience with a Java based IDE on any platform? I love coding in an IDE, the debugger is the single greatest thing ever. But, having the program crash all the time, and have it become permanently inoperable after the latest crash has just made me wonder why they didn't take the time to create a tool for developers that was actually usable. I mean it's mainly just a text-editor, why was it necessary to put me through the torture of running my IDE in a JVM!?

Studying the energy balance at the poles…

This one is more of a documentary about the man and the process, but it reveals some interesting facts about the study of global climate change. All I can say is that the entire issue of global warming is debated, digested, and decided by people who rarely realized just how big and complex the world's climate system is. Sometimes a complex system can have one weaknes that will bring the entire thing down. And sometimes a complex system can have so many different elastic aspects that they may cancel each other out in the end. Also these factors we look at for our clues to the future simply may not be relevant to the problem we think we face. Personally, I doubt that the world we were given is not resilient enough to handle the changes we can induce. But, I sincerely doubt I have the knowledge necessary to make any qualified judgements.

Not So Cool

The references in this article are probably one-sided and may be misleading, but if it's true, awesome!

http://clubs.ccsu.edu/recorder/editorial/print_item.asp?NewsID=188

Not so much “cleaning”…

It's more like pruning. Our apartment is a garden and plant in it is badly overgrown. We don't have any literal plants in our apartment, that might actually make the situation worse. But rather all of our stuff is overgrown and filling up valuable living space, so that it seems like the primary function of our apartment is "holding stuff" and not really intended for living.

We haven't bought a lot of furniture in the two years we've been here, we replaced our couch and got a nice big coffee table, for the majority of our meals are eaten on that couch at that coffee table. A new desk came in and our old desk was shoved to the side to create just another surface. Our bed was on risers to create storage space. All three closets in the apartment were stuffed full.

We've had enough, wise men have said "He who wishes to travel quickly, must travel light." Other wise men advise against letting the stuff you own "own you." Now it's time to apply some of this wisdom to our apartment. We like the idea of traveling someday, so we needed to get rid of some stuff. We started feeling the pull to move into a bigger 2 bedroom apartment, but soon realized the price difference between a one-bed apartment and a 2 bedroom apartment was significant, and would weight down our budget a time when it really needs to be light. So, instead of moving to get a change of scenery Becca and I started thinking about rearranging our existing apartment, and just getting rid of our accumulated stuff.

Becca did a good job of sorting through our original pile of stuff when we first moved in here before she got a full time job. The past 15 months of her working were wonderful for our budget, not so great for the efficiency of our lives and our living space. Now she is home working part time as a freelance writer and enjoying it immensely. Her other more than part time job is taking care of me and all the wonderful little details of our lives that were neglected before. She is a saint, and has made my life much easier than I deserve.

In the past 2 days, we have hauled out to the dumpster six 30 gallon hefty bags of assorted trash and stuff, one fiber-board beat up desk, one old PII computer, and other miscellaneous items that didn't fit into trash bags. We have a stack of decent electronics and exercise equipment that will go on Craigslist for 2 weeks, and then on to the Goodwill. And we have already hauled 4 30 gallon hefty bags of clothes to the Goodwill. That is a lot of crap! Much of it was usable potentially useful stuff, but the idea is that if we haven't had a use for it more than once in the two years we've lived here, it's gone!

It's not all easy, there are strange sentimental ties to odd things. I really had a hard time throwing out my Rio 500 mp3 player, the first generation of digital music players was a long time ago, and this one had been broken since 2001. We had to throw out some of our holiday decorations... ok a LOT of Becca's holiday decorations. The entirety of our Christmas decorations takes up about 7 cubic feet. All other holidays fit in one impressively small box! That wasn't easy for Becca to sift through. We are keeping each other strong and the progress shows. It's not as much about re-decorating as it is just making room to actually keep things we care about and need, and not interfere with living in our living space.

We don't care about Feng Shui, or Yin and Yang, or modern designers that make everything from one piece of extruded stainless steel and bed's with ipod docks that cost $12,000. It's just about form following function, and making it easier for us to live comfortably in an efficient space.

Warmthiness

Warmthiness

Warmthiness is that property of color in a website that makes you feel warm and comfortable. Warmthiness is not jarring or garish, it does not assault your senses with oversaturated neon tones. It's simply happy, mellow, and light (but not too light).


This is a warmthy color scheme.

ISP’s Are Just a Pain

In light of the possibility that my internet service may be terminated swiftly and with little warning for something other than late payments, my whole disconnect issue with Qwest a few years ago doesn't seem so bad. And Qwest promises remarkably lower prices than Comcast already... hmmm.

If it ain’t broke…

It worries me when I fix something and I don't even understand why it's broken in the first place. It almost certainly means I will have to go back and re-fix it later. It happens most often with style sheets and IE 6. "IE 6 is the bane of my existense"™

Pages where the content is in a table are clearing my floats when the shouldn't be, only in IE 6. I don't understand it, but the solution (for now) is to make all tables which are children of a certain element float:right;clear:right;. This works, but it still worries me because I fear there is something else deep in the site which will break because of this hack. Yet for now... it will stay.

File undelete

File undelete

Originally uploaded by sirtimbly.

Have you heard about this “Teevee”?

You don't have to browse and choose shows from categories, you just sit down and pick a channel! The channels aren't even organized by theme or topic! And the best part is the way you get to channels is by their number! The number is totally arbitrary and not related to the name of the TV network. So Cool! There's no way to figure out what will be on what channel at what time unless you subscribe to a paper publication that gets mailed to you or you look online. The device you are consuming the media through offers no way to access information about the shows you are watching or the shows that you could watch. It's totally crazy, no information at all, just media, fed straight to you with an obscure system structuring the whole schedule that you pretty much just have to memorize.

Oh and I didn't mention the best part, they have banner ads! And not just banner ads, but banner ads that interrupt the content you are trying to watch every 6-10 minutes. Oh, and by the way you better make sure you don't mind banner ads, because there is no way to skip them, no way to watch a whole show uninterrupted, even if you wanted to pay for the content you can't it's just NOT available without about 20 banner ads in every show.

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This is what I call Audience Affiliation

Courtesy

Cingular recycles phone numbers & 24+ATHF=<3

Here is one of the minor yet still annoying challenges of modern living. Cell phone companies run out of phone numbers pretty quickly, so they re-assign them almost as soon as they are cancelled. I dont know what the exact length of time is but it doesnt really matter how long they wait as long as other companies (I'm talking to you Pizza Hut) are stupid enough to use a phone number as a unique identifier. Seriously, this is not Aisha's phone number anymore, quit calling me!

In a completely unrelated event, mooninites have threatened our national security. There's is only one course of action left to us, send in Jack Bauer.