The Virtual Piano is (judging by the notes that have been echoing out of a bedroom for the past hour) a big hit in our house. (courtesy of).
And while I’m here, Lifehacker recently pointed me to RainyMood.com. On a whim I pushed play and then, after about an hour of interneting, realized it was still on. Super job of drowning out ambient noise.
Calvin and Hobbes is without a doubt (and by a hefty margin) my favorite comic of all times.
My first car had a sticker of the two of them flying in a box.
.
My only tattoo is a small one of Calvin dancing.
My oldest daughter started reading through some of my Calvin and Hobbes books
So here now is the Kickstarter (fund raising site) page for Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary about the strip.
Dear Mr. Watterson is a film that will look to the readers and fans of Calvin & Hobbes to tell the story of the strip and its creator. As we explore the art and impact of Bill Watterson through this unique perspective, the undying appreciation and love of Calvin & Hobbes and the man behind it will be evident in the anecdotes, stories, and memories shared by readers of the strip and friends and colleagues of Mr. Watterson.
While the crew has been donating their time to make this project happen, we’ll be taking several trips to conduct interviews and collect footage, so the costs of air tickets, rental cars, meals, and motel stays will add up. The benefit of raising our goal of $12,000 all at once through Kickstarter is that we’ll be able to move forward on this film without the hurdle of funding, and the more we raise on top of that, the more we can do with the film.
I would love to see this happen and am working on my contribution as these words type to my screen. Consider doing the same!
Amazon has a $3.99 deal on Elvis 75 happening today. I don’t actually have any Elvis around so this seemed like as good a time as any to grab some.
Amazon MP3 is giving away free Christmas songs
I’ve got a problem. The main players are my plugin, Internet Explorer (7, maybe 8, not 6) and SWFObject.
The original inkling of issues came via Anon’s comment, on my previous update post, that YouTube videos pulled down as part of the “more” section were broken. I tested this locally and saw that, with IE7, he/she was right. Of course, it’s not just YouTube. It would be any of the <object>/<embed> elements video sharing sites provide.
That really sucks.
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I had to update the Read More Right Here plugin for the recent 2.8.1 Wordpress release (details below). The most important item to note is that now the minimum required version of WP is 2.8.
So I had a problem. A long, unordered list of links seems to want to overflow out of their containing <div>. The list items were set to display inline and were extending out past the width of that <div> instead of wrapping down to a new “row”. This list was being generated programmatically, i.e. (simplified):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | $values = get_values(); $display = "<ul>"; foreach($values as $value) { $display .= "<li>$value</li>"; } $display .= "</ul>"; echo $display; |
Why was my list spilling out of its well defined boundaries? A staggering amount of time was spent fiddling with every possible CSS property for that element and those around it. Edit, save and reload. Edit save and reload. It was driving me insane.
Solution? Append a newline after each list element.
6 | $display .= "<li>$value</li>\n"; |
I have no idea why. If you do, please enlighten in the comments.
Dear Lord I hope this helps someone else out.
Is anyone else watching Kings? I mean, is it a “hit”? Are the ratings good? Is it going to last for more than this first season? I ask because I care. I care because I really like this show, and I’m not seeing much in the way of internet chatter. Granted, I haven’t actively searched for people’s reactions, but normally you come across this or that, here or there, while idly browsing around. And I haven’t, which surprises me.
If you’re not familiar with it, the gist is: Story of a royal family in a modern, fictional world. And the ruler, the king, is not a figure-head. He’s the real deal with power to spare. And so there are the expected power struggles internally and externally. Military action and political action.
It’s all very well done and fun to watch. A sometime small twist to it all is the idea of the king being truly “chosen” by God. There is a strong undercurrent of signs and symbols the leads look for and notice.
I hope people are watching. I hope the show lasts (and continues to be entertaining and interesting). I hope I’m not the only one watching.
(It’s fixed….see second update below)
I just updated this site to use the latest WP (2.8) and now my “Read More Right Here” plugin doesn’t work quite right. When you click the “Read More” text, the rest of the post successfully downloads and is displayed. However, the next “click” takes you to the post’s single page display instead of just collapsing the new content.
I will hopefully get this sorted out soon. Whenever I do, I’ll update here.
UPDATE:
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to fix this. The problem is caused by the latest version of jQuery (1.3.2), to which WP apparently updated. Actually, it was caused somehow in the changes made in between 1.2.6 and 1.3.
Specifically, the function curCSS is throwing exceptions during the animation of the new content “away” (i.e. hiding).
800 | var computedStyle = defaultView.getComputedStyle( elem, null ); |
The elem parameter being passed to getComputedStyle that causes the exception is a “\n“. With jQuery 1.2.6, I don’t see that element being passed to that function.
I tried some of the other animation techniques, but they I guess they all hit curCSS at some point or another. Even plain old hide causes problems.
So…..sorry. As of right now, the RMRH plugin does not work with WP 2.8. The only solution I can see at the moment is to include the older version of jQuery with the plugin. But I’m not sure yet how that will work out.
UPDATE 2: FIXED
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I had to add another Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip, as this has got to be one of the best gags ever.
I’ve been working on a personal “hobby time” project lately using John Resig’s port of Processing (a Java thing) to Processing.js (a javascript thing).
I was at one of those lulls where, instead of worrying about the code, I started playing with the layout. My <canvas> element is sitting inside a <div>, whose “positioning” property I changed to absolute. After this edit, the top-left corner of my <canvas> was no longer (0,0). It had changed to the (x,y) coordinate of the <canvas> element on the page.
Of course, the above conclusion was only reached after a bunch of “W.T.F is going on? Why T.F. is everything broken?”. After some other debugging routes, it dawned on me what might have happened. So I set the frame rate to 1, and used Firebug to log the mouseX and mouseY as I moved the mouse around. Sure enough, my positioning of “top: 200; left:200;” was reflected in Firebug’s console output showing coordinates near those values while hovering around the top left corner. Commenting out the style sheet’s absolute positioning returned the console output to the (0,0) area code.
So this is a defect, right? I can’t imagine that’s how it’s supposed to work. Anyway, consider this a heads-up if you decide to embark on a little processing.js play.
Over on the post announcing my “Read More Right Here” wordpress plugin, an interesting few comments popped up by Thijs (I love these drawings). He found that the plugin breaks when a domain lets wordpress run its root, but the actual Wordpress files are stored in a subdirectory (see this codex article for the how to).
And awesomely enough, he found the cause of the problem!
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This is a little convoluted, but it’s the journey not the destination. Apologies.
A couple months back, I came across Dewey (via Waxy, Feb 2, 2009). It offers a new, web-two-ohee method of navigating the music available at Archive.org. I wanted something to listen to at work and so started looking for some familiar names. I eventually stumbled on some Guster shows.
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There’s a Subway just down the street from where I work, which is just next door to a large university. Whoever franchised that spot struck gold because it pulls in huge crowds during the lunch time hours. They actually have two lines leading to two sets of sandwich artistry going on at the same time, as well as a drive-thru. It’s bustling.
You ever had a co-worker run to pick up food for the group? Or maybe dad’s got a family to feed and will just go it alone? The modern age affords those individuals the ability to quickly and easily confirm or update orders via the cell phone. Just recently my own dad called to ask what I wanted on the sub he was picking up for me. It’s like the folks you see wandering around Blockbuster, carefully scanning the rows and recounting what’s available to whomever is listening on the other end. But at Blockbuster you’re not doing this while the director is carefully crafting the movie just for you. At Subway you’ve got the sandwich artist to consider, as well as those standing behind you.
So they posted a sign:
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At least, that’s my conclusion after reading Zombie Love.
