Vee Dubs
I bought a new VW Jetta last week. It's my first brand new car and I'm nervous as H about it getting scratched, soiled or looked at wrong. It's black with black leather, which doesn't help much, although it will force me to baby it if I want it to look nice.
I'm still not used to the fact that I'm not driving around in a beige Saturn wagon. Every once in awhile I remember that I'm in a new car and it feels pretty cool.
In family news, my brother moved to Tucson on Friday. I'm kind of jealous. I hate the weather in Minnesota so much. I've been toying with the idea of moving after I'm done with school next year. I'm not sure if I have it in me to do that, but I'll figure that out when the time comes. It's at least something to think about.
On the movie front, I watched The Matrix: Revolutions the other night and can't express how much I hated it. Friends told me that I might have liked it better if I saw it in the theater, but I doubt it.
Other than that, I'm getting pretty frustrated with myself for not getting my new site design up and running. I'll do my best to crack down during the evening hours this week and just get it done.
Rocket Man
What do you get when you strap a rocket to the back of your car? A six minute trip from Los Angeles to Oregon. Actually, it's pretty cool what this guy did. He mounted a camera on his car, recorded his entire drive and then sped it up 95 times to make a six minute movie.
You can watch the video here.
Warning: May cause motion sickness.
redesign
The new design is finally here. I hope someone out there likes it. I'm pretty happy with it so far, even though I have more work to do. I still have to convert my wallpaper and flash pages. After that I'm going to get my photoblog up. I'd like to say that it will be live in the next few days, but the way things have been going I'd guess that it's still a week or two away.
I'm going to be testing and tweaking things for a few days. Please let me know if you notice any errors, formatting problems or anything else. You can send an email to the address below. I'll keep that address live for a week or so.
redesign @ neongreen dot com.
Ring my bell
Today was one of the weirdest days I've had in a long time. Why? I woke up with major hearing loss.
Let me back up a little bit. Yesterday I went to the dentist for some pain that I think is a result of something to do with the crown/cap I had put in last month. My dentist looked at it and prescribed an antibiotic and some Vicodin, which I don't plan on taking.
When I got home from work I took one of the antibiotics. About twenty minutes later I had a feeling in my ears in my ears that I haven't felt since I was 6 feet deep in the junior high swimming pool. Not only that, but my ears started to ring.
I was a little nervous, thinking that all of my years as a drummer were finally catching up with me. I went to bed and hoped for the best.
When I woke up the plugged ear feeling was gone, but the ringing was still there. Like a good patient I got out of bed and took my morning dose. Before I was out the door and on my way to work the pressure came back and the ringing got worse. By the time I got to work I felt like I was on a different planet. I called my dentist, pharmacist and family doctor. All suggested that I stop taking the pills and get a different medication. There was more said, but I couldn't make much of it out over the loud ringing in my ears.
After work today I picked up the new meds and had a chat with the pharmacist who explained that while rare, what I experienced was a side effect of the drug. He put a note in my file and gave me a new bottle of pills. So far I'm doing fine. I still have some residual ringing in my ears that I hope goes away.
CSS Fear Factor
Feedback regarding the redesign has been pretty good and I've had no major complaints. I added a section over on the right side to keep track of music that's in heavy rotation. I might also rig something up to list my Netflix dvd queue. If anyone knows of a good application that will publish Netflix data automagically, let me know.
I also converted the wallpaper section to the new look. I had a couple of CSS problems during the conversion that I thought I'd share.
Problem 1: Phantom Links
Phantom links are invisible "hover areas" of links that will sometimes appear to the right or left of link text. In my case they occurred to the right of the download links on the wallpaper page and continued all the way to the edge of the paragraph element. This occurred in the latest versions of IE on both Mac and PC.
A quick tip on this page convinced me to put the links into an unordered list, which fixed the problem and made more sense. After all, the wallpaper links are simply a list of available sizes.
Problem 2: The Peekaboo Bug
The peekaboo bug took more time to solve. In IE any content to the right of the floated thumbnail image was invisible until refreshing the page or scrolling down and back up again. What really had me stumped is that once the content was visible it would disappear again after mousing over the navigation links.
After a lot of Googling I found a few solutions here. I chose to go with Matthew Somerville's fix, which was to add a line-height attribute to the containing div tag. This fix makes no logical sense to me, but it works, and that's all you can ask for sometimes.
Thanks to everyone who has given feedback. Keep the suggestions and bug reports coming.
V-Drums, Enkoder Update and Free Gmail
With all of the Gmail hysteria going on right now, it's nice that some people are not trying to make a quick buck off of it. Kevin Rose and Scott have created the Gmail machine, where you can win a free account. I donated an invite to their cause and have an extra one or two that I'd be willing to give away if any of you are interested. Just get in touch with me through my contact form and I'll hook you up.
Update: I've given away all of my Gmail invites for now. Stay tuned. I might get more later. Thanks.
On to other news...
Enkoder
The Anti-Spam Email Address Enkoder has been updated for OS X 10.3 and is full of new features.
Don't have a Mac? Don't worry. There's also a web version that you can use right now.
O'reilly Poster
The History of Programming Languages poster is available for download (pdf).
V-Drums
This always happens to me. Whenever I decide that I want to buy something, it suddenly becomes hard to find. The latest example of this is the Roland V-Drum electronic drumkit (picture).
At the Guitar Center last night I played around on one for awhile and fell in love. The pads felt good, the samples sounded good and it was really fun to play. I was sold. I could have purchased the floor model, but it was pretty worn. It turns out that there's a national backorder for this kit and even the largest national retailers can't get their hands on one for me. I guess I'll join the long line of drummers with noise ordinances to obey.
Gmail is the new swimming pool
After posting that I had a couple Gmail invites to give away a couple days ago I got a taste of what it must be like to have a popular site. The response was amazing. I got more contacts than I could respond to and everyone was really cool, even after I ran out of invites. Thanks.
To follow up on the electronic drumkit search, I found one and I'm excited. The guys at Guitar Center found one at their store in Dallas and are having it shipped to me. I should get it this week.
I want to start practicing drums again and I've had a strong itch to play again lately. Other than that, I'm not sure where it will lead. For now, I'm just looking at it as an outlet that doesn't have anything to do with computers. No need to worry. I'll still be geeking out here.
Speaking of which, I did some major geeking out in my car today. On the drive home from my dad's I listened to Jason Kottke's reading of Cory Doctorow's talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM).
I highly recommend giving it a listen. Some interesting points are raised about why DRM makes no sense. The clearest example is given with this quote:
"I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK."
That's how digital media should work too.
Gmania
I've got a four or five more Gmail invites to give away. Leave a comment and I'll give them out until they are gone. The more creative your request, the more likely you will be to get an invite. I'm looking for ideas for this site, links to your favorite sites, a list of your favorite software for PC or Mac, etc...surprise me.
Note: I can't send to Hotmail accounts (not sure why) and Yahoo is sometimes throwing Gmail invites into the spam bin, so please provide an alternate email address.
Firefoxy!
I'm done with Internet Explorer. Don't get me wrong, I still test with it and make sure that my pages look reasonable in it. Firefox has been my primary browser for the past few months and the recent security warnings about Internet Explorer have inspired me to persuade those around me to drop IE as well.
"Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it."
The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine.
The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular websites.
Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast.
If this flaw isn't enough to scare you into switching, read Ben's reasons and then get Firefox.
sugar and vitamin c
My third most frequently visited site, kottke.org, has been redesigned. Nice.
Last night I stayed up to watch 13 conversations about one thing, which I highly recommend. My plan was to watch half of it and finish it up today, but I just couldn't turn it off. By the time it was done I was so jacked up on Junior Mints and orange juice that I stayed up way past my bedtime surfing the web.
Flying high on sugar and vitamin c, this site kind of creeped me out.
I think I'm in for another late one tonight because I can't stop reading the endless amount anonymous confessions at GroupHug.
Tiger seen on Whidbey Island
After an exciting announcement earlier this week from Apple about OS X Tiger, Microsoft has announced the release of the Visual Studio 2005 (beta 1). I'm excited about both.
Concerning OS X, I can't wait to see the Dashboard and Safari updates. The addition of an RSS reader is intriguing. For now I think I'll stick with NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
Back to Microsoft for a minute. I'm not as excited about the Visual Studio beta as I am for what was released along with it: a line of Visual Studio 2005 Express products. There's even a version of SQL Server 2005 in the mix! For now, they're free. We'll see how long that lasts. If you're interested in exploring .NET, I suggest you download now. I would really like to see Microsoft embrace amateur developers by continuing to offer free versions of their tools.
