Monthly Archives: January 2006

Writing Too Much About iWeb

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a new post on SFist wherein I talk about how iWeb isn’t as cool as HyperCard. And talk, and talk, and talk — I blame ecto. I liked it enough to pay for it, and now it means I [...]

NetNewsWire ScreenshotThere’s a new post on SFist wherein I talk about how iWeb isn’t as cool as HyperCard.

And talk, and talk, and talk — I blame ecto. I liked it enough to pay for it, and now it means I don’t have to use web browser editors for my crucial blogging endeavors. Which means I’ve got even less restrictions on my natural inclination towards long-windedness. It turns out that living in fear of accidentally hitting the back button and losing everything was the only thing helping me towards succinctness.

My other discovery yesterday was RSS readers. I knew of them, of course; I’m not that far out of the loop. But I thought Safari was plenty sufficient — it tells you what sites have been updated, and then you can click on the links to see the full thing as it was intended to be presented.

After trying out the dedicated readers, though, I’m hooked. It actually makes what is essentially a time-wasting activity more efficient. You only see what’s updated, and it checks every site you’re interested in. I decided on NetNewsWire, but PulpFiction was almost as good. The only reason I didn’t choose that one is because it looks too much like Mail, which feels like work. NetNewsWire straddles the line between web browsing and efficiency, plus it just looks better.

This isn’t all just unfocused rambling, for once: the topics actually have something to do with each other. When I was setting up the different news readers, I could check out all the content from websites without ever visiting the page itself; some of the sites I’d never even heard of before. It only took a few minutes to come up with a NetNewsWire theme that I liked better than any of the defaults, and better than most of the source pages (including my own).

Which raises the question: does all the attention to CSS and webpage design even matter all that much anymore? Artistically-challenged people like myself should be excited at a world where substance is more important than style, and poor graphic design skillz aren’t a barrier to entry. But it’s kind of disappointing, too — there’s always the potential for a full website to have more functionality than a simple newsfeed, but I like the idea of a site’s just being attractive enough that you’re encouraged to see it, just for looks.

iWeb is on the other end of the spectrum from RSS feeds. It’s all about presentation, and the back-end support is pretty weak. It’s not even featured enough for a blog as simple as this one. But it makes it relatively easy to make a page that’s pretty damn slick; I imagine that people more artistically inclined could do really nice stuff with it. I just wonder if it’s doomed to irrelevance. Do people even care how a website looks anymore? Livejournal is one of the most popular blogging engines out there, and I’ve never seen a livejournal entry that didn’t look like ass.

I never thought I’d be arguing for style over substance, but there it is: I want the intarweb to look better. And before anyone points out that charity begins at home: I’m working on it.

Yeti!

Posted on by
1

A Disney podcast called Inside the Magic has posted two ride-through videos of the Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida. It is what we Imagineers like to call so totally wicked awesome. The video is from a roller [...]

Chuck SMASH!!A Disney podcast called Inside the Magic has posted two ride-through videos of the Expedition Everest ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida. It is what we Imagineers like to call so totally wicked awesome.

The video is from a roller coaster, so it’s dark and bumpy and blurry and such, but then that’s why The Zapruder Effect is in play. You can see the cool Yeti shadow effect, and the twisted tracks sequence, as well as pretty much the entire ride in the video. But what’s going on in all the pitch black sequences? And what’s it feel like on the ride itself?

I’ll find out the next time my job takes me to Orlando. I’m feeling lucky!

If you use iTunes, you can get at the video podcasts part one and part two.

(And the goofy picture of me is just to test out ecto, a blog-writing app that I’m thinking of using.)

Face for Radio, Voice for Print

Posted on by
Reply

My copy of iLife ’06 was waiting for me when I got back from the southland, so I spent last night and most of today playing with it. Early impressions: GarageBand seems like it’d be cool if it’d work, but [...]

My copy of iLife ’06 was waiting for me when I got back from the southland, so I spent last night and most of today playing with it. Early impressions: GarageBand seems like it’d be cool if it’d work, but I get no sound and no preferences pane, so until that bug is fixed, I can’t use it. Everything else in the existing apps is pretty much a point upgrade; all the remarkable new features require a .Mac account.

I was most looking forward to iWeb, after gushing about it on SFist and on here, and I’m still evaluating it. My first impression is that it’s neat but limited. I’m using it to finally put together my pictures from Japan, even though I’ve mostly forgotten that trip, and anyone who would’ve been interested in seeing those pictures has already seen them in different formats and heard me repeat the same stories over the past 2 years. It’s more to see how flexible iWeb is, and to finally be able to check that off instead of having it feel like a big project that I’ve left unfinished.

Apple is really pushing podcasting and videocasting with its new stuff. So just for yuks, I tried playing around with iMovie and my iSight camera. Wow, that was a mistake. Technically, it worked fine, but there’s nothing that blows the self-image quite like seeing yourself how others see you.

Few people like hearing their own voice, because it never quite comes out as good as it sounds in your head. And I’m vain enough to have spent some time playing around with the iSight to try and get a good picture of myself, so I’ve got a pretty realistic idea of what I look like. But I always kind of imagined that in practice, the voice and the face kind of cancelled each other out and reached a reasonable compromise. What I saw in the video was more like a surprisingly fey version of Frankenstein’s monster.

I guess if it proves anything, it’s that Apple’s web-publishing and podcasting revolution isn’t going to change the world anymore than its desktop publishing revolution did. Some people just don’t have any business being in the broadcasting realm. Whether or not I have any business in the writing realm remains to be seen, but I’m sticking with it for now — better to have a lower-bandwidth assault on my self esteem.

I Said Lady, Step Inside My Hyundai

Posted on by
Reply

I’m going to take you up to Glendale. Land at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and groove to the hot hits of the 80s played constantly on the PA system. What’s that playing at the rental car booth? “Who [...]

I’m going to take you up to Glendale.

Land at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and groove to the hot hits of the 80s played constantly on the PA system. What’s that playing at the rental car booth? “Who Can It Be Now?” by Men at Work? Oh yeah, gonna get my groove on while I slide up to spend some time with My Lady. She knows how I like it; she always makes me wait, take it nice and slow before she asks me for my driver’s license and credit card. Lady knows how to treat a man, insisting on a second phone number even though I don’t got one; I’ve learned to just make one up, give her what she wants. She gives me a mini-van and won’t hear no back-talk from me. That’s all she’s got. And she knows I gotta drive.

Pick up the key and there it is at the far end of the lot — my Dodge Caravan. Oh yeah, that’s my ride. Got a lady on the side in the security booth. She asks me every time what I do for Disney, and gives me that same look every time when I tell her “programmer” instead of “casting agent.”

Tearin’ up the 5 past the In-n-Out, watchin’ the ladies watchin’ me in my sweet ride. Pulling all up into that ABC parking lot. Putting in my time with The Mouse, then heading back to The BUR for a night on the town. Fine dining selections await, such as the Baja Fresh. But there are cultural options as well, such as Borders and the AMC 12.

So yeah, that wasn’t really going anywhere so I’ll stop now. I got off work a little early tonight and didn’t feel like spending 2 hours stuck in LA traffic to get to Anaheim, so I just came back to the hotel. Maybe I’d be better with spontaneous entertainment if I were in downtown LA (I’m skeptical), but with Burbank there’s just no chance. At least the hotel room has an internet connection and I can smoke indoors.

I thought I would be kind of daring and look at what the titles of the adult movies were, but they’re all pretty generic and dull. Bi Bi American Pie was the closest to what you’d expect from an adult film title, although Real Japanese proudly boasts “No Pixilation,” and they relish diversity, what with Running Wild as the “Gay Alternative.” Considering the hotel, I was hoping that One Night in Paris would be available, but no such luck.

But they don’t have the Cartoon Network or Food Network for some reason, so I’ve been forced to spend hours channel-surfing and browsing the web. And being exposed to broadcast television for the first time in months has really made me realize how little I’ve been missing. In between watching the same episode of “The Daily Show” twice and an Anderson Cooper show about James Frey and his whole book scandal, I watched a whole lot of sitcoms. I keep hearing about “My Name is Earl” and “The Office,” but I just don’t get the appeal.

One that was surprisingly interesting, although I’m not convinced I’d call it “good,” was “Crumbs.” It’s the one with Fred Savage and Jane Curtin. It went overboard with the laugh track and the maudlin moments, but from the pilot it was kind of like Schrödinger’s Sitcom: it had the potential to be either really awful or pretty good (not brilliant, but okay). One thing I liked about it is that they didn’t do exactly what I’m about to do: they didn’t make a big deal about Fred Savage’s character being gay. It wasn’t a total non-issue, but it wasn’t A Very Special Topic, either. I had heard or read about the show before (probably from Entertainment Weekly), but all I took away from it was that it was about a dysfunctional family. So I was surprised when they’re in the middle of the show and all of a sudden (I’d missed the beginning), a friend starts asking him about his boyfriend.

I did a Google search on the show, and I was surprised again. Considering what a ridiculous sham the whole Brokeback Mountain phenomenon has gotten to be, I expected there to be all kinds of attention on it. There are dozens of sites that use the same stock interview, and none of them mention it until a few paragraphs down, when Savage says they talk about his character’s orientation but “that’s not what the show’s about.” Well, none of them except for, of course, The Advocate, which uses the same interview but changes the headline and spins the whole article to make the show sound “Will & Grace” meets “Six Feet Under.” Everybody else just seemed to treat it like it was no big deal. Are people finally starting to realize that it’s not really all that interesting? Whether the show turns out to be any good, I dunno. But I thought it had some potential.

Who's Peeking Out From Under a Stairway?

Posted on by
1

When we went to Disneyland last year, Rain played a CD where every track was a person’s name, from A to Z. The entry for W was “Windy” by The Association. And so began my two-month-long nightmare. I’ve always been [...]

When we went to Disneyland last year, Rain played a CD where every track was a person’s name, from A to Z. The entry for W was “Windy” by The Association. And so began my two-month-long nightmare.

I’ve always been susceptible to getting songs stuck in my head, but this one is the worst since “Tom’s Diner.” I hear it before I go to sleep, I hear it just as I wake up, I hear it when I’m tripping down the streets of the city, smiling at everybody I see. When I had my La Tortura episode in the Sony store, I could hear it in the background. “Make Your Own Kind of Music” from “Lost” wasn’t able to drive it out. “We Used to Be Friends” from “Veronica Mars” didn’t work either.

I finally just gave up and bought the album, hoping I could listen to it enough to get sick of it. It almost worked, but that album also has “Cherish”, which is of course the song that was the worst at getting stuck in my head when I was little, before I’d ever even heard of Suzanne Vega. So now they’re both running together constantly, like some infernal medley. (“Infernal Medley” would be a decent band name, now that I think of it.)

Speaking of Disneyland, they’re keeping up with this whole closing-at-8 bullshit. What’s the point of spending three days in LA if you can’t at least go to D-town? I’m starting to think buying an annual pass wasn’t such a great idea.