Honeymoon
Velma and I will be gone from December 12 to 25 on our
honeymoon in Yucatan, Mexico. So I won't be posting for the next two weeks.
I have a new camera and almost 15 GB of storage, which I can probably fill up in two weeks in a foreign country. We'll see...
Happy holidays to everyone! See you when we return.
When is a liberal not a liberal?*
This one guy at work, a self-described "liberal," is always spouting the most obvious conservative crap on our internal company email list, and at the same time claiming to be liberal. It's so funny because every time he opens his mouth about something on the list, either everybody ignores him or a bunch of people slap him down.
Earlier this year I took him to task about his ass-hat views on urban planning (he claims to be an environmentalist but he wouldn't mind building houses up into the hills of places like Coyote Valley and other Bay Area greenbelt locales, just because "it shouldn't be so expensive to buy a house, and more homebuilding means lower prices"), and a few weeks ago another guy countered him about his ridiculous views on climate change.
He's such a patsy. Yet he's reasonably informed and logical in his arguments. It's just that his vantage is from a place already on the right end of the spectrum, which he doesn't realize. I mean, at least I
know I'm on the left, and I don't
claim to be a moderate! This guy claims to be on the left and then spouts things you'd expect to hear from Rush Limbaugh.
So now he's calling
this movie a "less big-government-friendly version of Michael Moore's movies." Gimme a break. I used to vote Libertarian fercryinoutloud, and I wouldn't swallow half the shite in this trailer.
*Answer: When he's an ass-hat.
tags: humor, politics, work
Thursday top 5
Jeong Byuing KeeThis is an
awesome Flash-based self-promo by 26-year-old Korean designer/developer
Jeong Byuing Kee. Make sure you turn your sound on!
» www.motion-wave.com/mw_4/Flowers Feed the SoulA truly amazing Flash-based site for a flower service in Singapore.
» www.flowersfeedthesoul.comSo long Donald RumsfeldJust because it's a classic video. The ending was new to me, though.
» youtube.com/watch?v=xQEeH0eWEhcJesus CampAdult: "How long have you been a Christian?" Kid: "At five I got saved... I really feel that we are a key generation to Jesus coming back."
Scary documentary. Makes me want to go to Satan Camp.
» www.apple.com/trailers/Get MortifiedAdults getting on stage and reading mortifying passages from their real-life grade school diaries/journals, in front of total strangers. Now there's also a book to go along with the videos.
www.getmortified.comtags: video, humor, web design, Flash, politics, religion
New projects
I may have mentioned in an earlier post that, after
the Hitchin', I was going to take the rest of the year off from working on any new projects. I needed a break so I could use my free time to catch up on things at home. Although I've been contacted recently by several people who wanted me to design websites for them (and some of them were hard to tun down), I needed some downtime.
This break has given me a little breathing room to work on a few personal projects that have been on my list for a long time (years, in some cases).
The Bay Area Action History Project
I'm happy to announce the debut of the
Bay Area Action History Project, an idea which I've had for several years but never had enough time to work on. The site will serve as a historical archive of the campaigns, projects, and — most importantly — the people of BAA.
I'm using
Facebook's excellent social networking functionality to invite people to join, share, and remember. I'm using
Blogger's just-out-of-beta new version for the back end, while the files reside on my server. The design is a customization of a standard Blogger template, and I'll be tweaking it further in coming months.
I'll be posting lots of old archival stuff, project lists, blasts from the past, photos, news clips, and eventually articles from the old newsletters. It may take years, but that's okay. Hopefully other people will join in and help.
Ozark Handspun blog
I also used Blogger's new version to install
a new section on the Ozark Hanspun website which I designed about a year and a half ago. Now Terri (my mother-in-law — yikes, that's weird to say!) can update their site with new happenings so they don't have to wait on me to do it the old fashioned HTML and FTP way.
The design is a highly customized version of a Blogger template that I made look a lot more like the rest of the existing OzarkHandspun.com pages. I'm getting pretty quick at customizing Blogger's templates with CSS and I can crank out a pretty good, custom design, plus set it all up on my server, in about two evenings.
Heinlein SocietyA few months back I sent an email to the
Heinlein Society volunteering to put the contents of their print newsletter online. As with most volunteer-run nonprofits, they often suffer from significant time delays between when articles are written for their newsletter and when it finally gets printed and mailed. I'm all too familiar with this from my own experience.
But I realized that they could put it online as soon as the articles come in and get edited. They don't have to wait for the print edition to be completed. Of course, hand coding it and FTPing it up is time consuming too, but if they had A) a volunteer to do it, and B) a CMS system that could streamline the process and make it nearly effortless, they'd be far better off.
So they gave me the go-ahead to set up a test run with a few articles and photos from their last issue, and then we'll see if they like the results and whether they'd like to implement such a system..
tags: work, BAA, Ozark Handspun, Heinlein Society, Heinlein, web design, blogs, environment
Sad news
Update: James' obituary on News.com.
It's a bit of a rough day at work today.
James Kim's body was found a couple hours ago. It's a little weird, I didn't even know the guy other than by reputation, and yet I'm affected with sadness for his family, friends, and coworkers. I learned a few days ago that a guy I went to grade school with was good friends with the Kims, so I'm feeling for him too.
I was outside in front of the building eating a sandwich when our CEO came out to talk to the press this afternoon (I'd heard about an hour minutes before), and stupidly, all I could think was, "Man, I hope I'm not in the background on the evening news, looking like a heartless dick, eating a sandwich and reading the paper."
tags: personal, work
Thursday top 5
Guy loses his Star Wars virginityThe only human left on the planet who hadn't seen
Star Wars sits through all six episodes, in order.
» www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1558880_1_0_,00.htmlBehind the scenes on the Bravia colo(u)r explosion commercial» www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz0Zadr0_KcThe Shire is in Bend, Oregon?» bendshire.comThe 10 Regions of American PoliticsInteresting breakdown by the
Boston Globe.
» http://strangemaps.wordpress.comFrito-Lay angrily introduces line of healthy snacks"Here's some shit that's made from beets. I hope you're all happy now that you have your precious beet chips with the recommended daily serving of fruit, or vegetables, or whatever the hell a 'beet' is."
» www.theonion.com/content/node/54916tags: top 5, movies, videos, humor, politics, food, environment
Aaron
Alexis
Anne
Anya
April & Matt
Ari
Bo
Brian
Bryan
Chris
Cousin Carol
Dave & Terri
Dave H.
Debby
Drue
Fibu
Four Waters
Fwegan (aka Ynnej)
Gary
Holly
Hilary
Internet Rockstar
James & Eric
Jason
Jen
Jesse
Jessica
Joey
Kansinee
Karl
Kelly
Laura
Leah
Marc
Martin
Matt
Mike
Morgan
OkayDave
Olya
Paco
Peter
Rick
Rocky
Ryan
Stellah
Tatum 
Trent
Velma
Veronica
Whiskey Media
Yuliya
Yu-Po