woolie t.

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.

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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.

This video is so totally rad. The sporadic but regular booms happening out-of-sight while our heros strap together their contribution to the mayhem. The confident strut to one of the designated boom areas. The anticipation as our man waits his boom turn. And then….

I’ve embedded it below if you want. Background info available at the AskMeFi thread from whence this came.

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You see that kottke went through a redesign? The first, and I’d say most obvious (and perhaps most original) difference is that the entire site is now bordered with four shades of blue. It also looks like he’s now displaying a title for all posts. And gone is the Buzzfeed sidebar widget. That might have only been there as part of an effort to help get the site established since he was part of “the board” (never really sure what that means). Also noticeable is the font change. His use of Georgia for the site font was what inspired me to use the same. He’s now moved to Whitney (by Hoefler & Frere-Jones), as his primary.

I visit kottke.org many times most every day. I remember more than a few years ago finding it as a result of an article mentioning Jason Kottke as one of the first full-time, “that’s my job”, bloggers. At the time he was open to (and soliciting I think) contributions. I thought the whole idea was cool enough that I sent a few dollars. And then promptly forgot all about it. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I stumbled back across the blog and really became a dedicated reader.

As with any visual overhaul of familiar sites, it will probably take a bit getting used to. I really like the border concept as something unique (and sure to be mimicked). But the rest of the changes seem to be away from his more minimalistic design, which I loved, and towards something more……vanilla. It is, however, still a very clean looking site (much more so than my own). And to be honest, as long as he keeps posting his mix of quick hits, intelligent observations and informed opinions, I don’t mind what the site looks like.

I know I can’t be the first to make this observation, and more than likely I am one of the last. I finally saw Wall-E not too long ago. Loved it.

Speaking of which:

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For the last couple of days, Gmail has been showing one unread message, but I didn’t see any in my Inbox. This is the type of thing that can slowly drive me insane. I changed themes a couple weeks ago and thought it might be related (however unlikely). Changing themes again did nothing. From somewhere deep in my thinking machine came the idea to do a search for “label:unread“. I must have read that at some point in time, though I have no idea where.

Anyway, it worked. There were about 80 of them total, and I started selecting all of them to mark as read. Finally it got down to just one last one. I noticed it was marked as being in my inbox (unlike the others, which were most likely archived or in spam). It was from Adam Clayton (a name I don’t know). The subject was “Delivery Confirmation”. And it was sent September 21, 1976 (mere months before I was born). When it arrived, it slipped past spam filters and was dutifully placed in correct chronological order.

I’m not sure why the spammers would set the date like that, other than to accomplish what it did in my case, which was checking out the email (prescription drugs from Canada). But regardless, mystery solved. I won’t go insane after all.

The other morning it was just the baby and I at home. I decided to fry a couple of eggs to eat for breakfast while I fed her. I crack the first one over the pan, let it cook a bit and then fold it over. I grab the second egg out of the carton, crack it on the edge of the pan and out from within drops two egg yolks. Twins!

Not something that’s happened to me before. I’d like to think its due to a natural course of development and not some super fertility drug injected at the chicken factory.

NETTUTS has an extremely thorough, step-by-step video tutorial that covers slicing a site design in Photoshop, coding the HTML, creating the CSS and then (briefly) adding a touch of Javascript.

I make this recommendation with a bit of hesitance though, as the total running time is a bit over 90 minutes. I actually skipped the last third or so of the first video (slicing the PSD). But there is something strangely mesmerizing about watching someone else progress through their work like this. It’s also interesting for me to see someone else’s work flow and tools use.

The presenter/author, Jeffrey Way, states that the tutorial is for beginners, but I’d say that it edges closer to the intermediate level. The CSS section, though long, progresses pretty quickly. You have to already be pretty familiar with the selectors syntax. And he moves right passed terms like “inline” and “block”.

If you’ve got the time and the inclination, it’s an excellent howto for that area of web work.

The Sound of Young America has an interview with Graham Linehan (creator of two of my all-time favorite comedies: IT Crowd and Father Ted).

The questions, as you might expect, pretty much stay focused on his work in TV (i.e. there’s no childhood memories or ‘how I met my wife’ stories). I had never heard an interview with him, so this was fun for me. He comes across as a light-hearted, nice man.

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