I’ve been using Plazes for a while now to track my location as I wander around with my laptop. The concept is really cool. They have a desktop client that figures out your location based on a database of network ids and such. If it doesn’t know about the place where you are, it asks you, and the information is added for anyone else who visits that place.Earlier today, the client asked to be upgraded and I obliged. Moments later, the new interface appeared. The first thing that I noticed was that the window was slightly transparent. There’s no real reason for transparency here, so it struck me as another casualty of Apple making certain UI effects at bit too easy. (more…)
Social calendar web app 30 Boxes launched yesterday and has been getting quite a bit of attention. The clean interface, tagging features, and sharing interface make it a joy to use but I have to say that its ‘killer feature’ is definately the ability to add events using a natural language interface (’fly to philly mar 21 6:04am tag travel springbreak’). While this makes entering events quick and easy, I wanted to make it even easier to access without breaking my workflow. I was considering writing a javascript bookmarklet when I realized there was an even easier and more elegant way to do it. I’ve long been a fan of AcidSearch, a Safari plugin that enhances the search field to access multiple search engines, and especially a feature that allowed easy access to these via a prefix to your search terms (for example, I can type ‘kg pine tar’ to go to the Pine Tar entry on the KoL Wiki). Since the process for submitting a search request is the same as submitting any other form, I constructed the proper query string based on 30 Boxes’ code and, I can now add calendar items simiply by typing ‘cal’ followed by my event description into the Safari search box.
While I had a vague idea of features that I’d wanted to include when working on my current site design, I hadn’t thoguht them through enough when I started. As it happened, the design evolved out of some things that I discovered while implementing a different design in css and just stuck. In this process, it lost the ability to work with some of the functionality that I wanted it to have and it’s just kind of sat here in a half-finished state for some time now. Because I’m tired of it sitting like this and need to get a solid design worked out so I can focus on content and other important things, I’m redesigning the site with a lot more focus. Read on for a list of stuff that I’m planning on doing. Tell me if any of it sounds crazy.
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Snakes on a Plane. It’s a movie. It’s a phenomenon. It’s a paradox. It’s a lifestyle. What’s it about? you ask. Well, let me try to explain. There are snakes. There is a plane. The plane is in the air. The snakes are on the plane. Presumably, chaos ensues. End of story. Oh, and it stars Samuel L. Jackson.
I remember reading about Snakes on a Plane when the entry on Josh Friedman’s site had first been posted but I had no idea just how much of an online flurry there had been over the film until I rediscovered it the other night. This is an attempt to round up the many amusing gems that have been created.
There is, of course, the original blog entry that’s pretty much responsible for all of the hype this film’s received online.
Next, and probably he second most influential piece of SoaP cannon, if you will, is this interview with Samuel L. Jackson that serves to assure the public that the film’s title will not be changed from Snakes on a Plane if he has anything to do with it.
The comments on the IMDB entry contain over 200 possible titles for sequels, ranging from the clever to the terribly moronic.
It’s been added to Wikipedia and urban dictionary. and spawned a livejournal blog devoted to news and information about the film. Two t-shirts have entered production, and last, but probably best of all, there’s a humorous audio trailer and trailer script. In more traditional online pre-movie hype, there are actual photos from the set, but that’s boring compared to the rest of it.
Sometime after between April and late September of 1999 there was a dramatic increase in the number of unemployed little green magical elves. Millions of these loyal workers were unceremoniously sacked without warning. “But why?” you might ask. “What company would do such a thing?” Well, I’ll tell you: eBay.
Prior to this great round of layoffs, the elves dutifully managed eBay’s proxy bidding system. This is the system by which you can specify a maximum price that you are willing to pay for an item and have bids placed automatically at the minimum increment until either you win the auction or reach your limit. Nowadays, this is all handled by computers, but it used to be the job of the elves. An elf was personally assigned to each and every eBay user to act as their proxy in the great online bidding process.
Presumably, when eBay’s membership grew beyond a point that could be economically handled by the elfin workforce, the entire department was disbanded and the process was transferred to a digital system. Talk about your drastic outsourcing measures.
Don’t believe me? You don’t have to, there’s a full confession in the Internet Archive. Also mentioned are Umpa-Loompas that handle other operations at eBay. Presumably these fine workers have also been given the ax, as they too are absent from eBay’s present help system.
[This post comes from a combination of oregon-trail-fueled nostalgia and the release of Amazon’s mechanical turk.
While working on this redesign here, I’m finding myself reading a bunch of articles and reference sites that I hadn’t paid attention to for years. One thing that I’ve just rediscovered is the joy of the ABBR tag. It lets you markup abbreviations so that they can be styled if you’re so inclined but the thing that is cool about it in my mind is that browsers display the title attribute of it as a tooltip. I kind of went crazy marking up the post that I just made and I’m determined to keep doing it so that those who don’t know what KOL, ZP, or PNCA are can be easily enlightened with a simple mouseover.
After writing this post, I realized that for most of my examples I should have been using the ACRONYM tag instead. Oops, silly me.
In developing my new site layout I’ve been sticking strictly with clean XHTML and using CSS for 100% of my formatting. I just made the final little updates that make all of my templates validate as XHTML 1.1! It feels really good to be writing standards-compliant code and having it create an appealing user experience.
Now, I had kind of expected that IE users would get a somewhat less-pretty experience but had assumed at they would at least get a usable one. I’ve since discovered that I was wrong. My current main problem, which I may have solved somewhat, is that IE doesn’t support position:fixed (used to keep portions of the sidebar from scrolling). Since position: fixed is a version of position: absolute that doesn’t scroll with the viewport, I’d be happy to have the elements default back to position:absolute in IE, but even that seems to cause problems as the top bar doesn’t seem to properly inherit things from the side bar. Phooey.
As an expression of my frustration, I’ve used the Brilliant Button Maker to create the following little 80×15 button:
In other web-related news, I’ve discovered that every browser except Safari seems to hate garamond. Even if I have it installed on the computer i’m working on, Firefox and Opera (now freeee) both render my type in Times. This is confusing.