Ploafmaster General

I caught this clever ad for a Midwestern sub shop chain:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HClNcAvD1AY&w=425&h=350]

Head on over to the campaign's website to see the making-of video as well.

So this morning I changed my theme. Yup.

I noticed, though, that I had hardly any hits to my site at all today. Somehow, I failed to connect the dots...(see, it's a joke, because the ellipses uses dots)

Each theme has its own set of PHP files for the pages; specifically, there's a different header file for each theme, and that's where I'm supposed to paste the reference to Mint.

I finally fixed it, so I should be happily (obsessively) checking my stats again.

I think Layer Tennis is a lot more like Iron Chef then a sport for the visually creative.

So as you may notice, I've changed my blog theme...again...and back to one I've used before.

I did this for two reasons:
1. While the previous Mac-centric design was clever, it was really only clever for like a week. VERYPLAINTXT is much cleaner.
2. My previous theme wasn't wide enough in the main column. I was tired of referencing images that were too big...basically anything more than ~475 pixels. Sure, I could have spent some time resizing images myself, but I'd have to wait until I got home to use Photoshop, and I prefer to post on the fly rather than waiting until everything is ready. Well, most of the time, anyway.

So yeah, that's the deal. I'm wimping out again by changing to another theme instead of just buckling down and building my own. I hope, at least, this is easier on the eyes for a while.

The Non-Expert delivers a hilarious, musical entry today.

I've always thought of using Moo to create some business cards after getting a free sample some time ago. While I'm too lazy (and lack Photoshop skills) to have actually made my own, you can see some fine examples from Trey and Aaron.

I ordered some pizza, but instead McSweeney's delivered a heaping helping of humor.

Even though the keyboard-in-the-dishwasher is old news, I enjoyed Coudal Partners' short film on the subject. It has a very "1950's Documentary" feel to it. Very clever camera rig, too.

Yeah, Trey, it was your link in Twitter that borked my instance of Firefox :-)

It reminded me of something else, though - I have absolutely no idea, most of the time, what the links are that I see in Twitter messages when folks use TinyURL to fit their finds into that brief 140 character space. Had I known that Trey's link would take me to a page that contained embedded QuickTime (and as a fan of Apple's movie trailer page, I'd have known), I could have held off until I was at home (or, GASP! used IE...).

This got me thinking - is there any way that you could improve TinyURL so viewers could know in advance where they were clicking? More folks than just myself browse from highly restrictive corporate networks, and I inhale a sharp breath every time I see that "restricted content" page here in the office (they claim to be logging the incident...but I've never been contacted).

So I surfed to TinyURL's site to double check the process for creating the contracted resource locators, and lo! you have the option to provide a preview URL. Sure, this preview link creates an extra step for the casual web surfer, but it's certainly safer than blindly clicking links.

Where do we go from here? Well, I wish Twitterrific provided a choice in the preferences to use a standard TinyURL or a preview URL instead of only using the standard TinyURL. But there's part of me that doesn't want the browsing experience broken in such a way. What I really want is some sort of tool tip when you hover over the link - something that provides a short description, or perhaps the full URL. Of course, not being a web developer, I don't know how to accomplish this without using some sort of script.

Any ideas? I think this is a useful itch to scratch.

Full disclosure...my dad works for IBM, but I don't want anybody to get the idea that it's influencing my opinion towards them, good or ill.

So have you noticed these new ads on television yapping about innovation? IBM has a few spots of this nature - one featuring "Innovation Man", another about "innotation" (innovation meditation) and various others which appear to mock the widespread corporate speak and pompousness of our day. I'm still having trouble finding any YouTube clips. Either they're too new, or hey, maybe IBM commercials aren't that exciting :-)

Regardless, I can sum up the gist of the campaign with the screen-clip below:


Now I don't know how sincere International Business Machines is about this slogan, but they have a clever (albeit HEAVILY Flash-ified) page that delves further into the concept and sarcastically decodes contemporary corporate jargon. I think my favorite example is their explanation of "bleeding edge":

It's what you call the "cutting edge" if you think the term "cutting edge" isn't "cutting edge" anymore. Of course, the term "bleeding edge" isn't "cutting edge" anymore, either. If confused, just say "new."

I really like the point they appear to be making here, and it's often echoed by one of my favorite firms, 37signals. Too often companies and teams get bogged down by the details. They over plan, build mountains out of mole hills, and beat around the proverbial shrub. People use stupid phrases and jargon instead of just spitting out what they mean.

I am SO FREAKING TIRED of attending meetings where we endlessly argue about the fine points of a project instead of diving right in. I'm sick of start-dates moving back again and again because nobody can make up their minds. I'm sick of myself coming up with ideas and letting them stew in my head or in my Moleskine.

I want to start doing. I want to see my ideas on the Internet, not simply sketched out or half-completed in TextMate.

I need to get pissed off enough to take my own advice :-)

Thanks to John Gruber for linking up one of the funniest ads I've seen in ages:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wsGndlpQRs&w=425&h=350]

If you'd like to see the version that was too wide for my blog, check out the original.

Gah. I guess I'm getting sucked in to podcasts.

I finally caved and subscribed to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin's The Talk Show.

After listening to this week's episode, I decided to hit the subscribe button in iTunes and start gathering the back episodes as well.

Alright everybody, it's time for the second Programmers' House Party this Wednesday night, August 29th from 7-10 pm.

Check out the event listing and mark whether you're attending. No "watching" this time, Trey :-)

What better way to celebrate 500 posts and over two years of reasonably consistent blogging than a post that sums up the very ethos of my website?

I just finished reading about the recall of an arm-wrestling video game in Japan on the BBC News' website. Apparently some unlucky folks are breaking their arms on the device, and while "Even women should be able to beat it," according to a company spokesman, the game is being removed as a precaution.

I think I'd rather watch Over the Top anyway :-)

Now I ask you, seriously. Who would want to use the first floor?




Booger Hollow - Double Decker Outhouse


Originally uploaded by dsimmons2006.

I wonder if the flavor of this gum lasts an extra, extra, EXTRA long time.

You know, sometimes I feel like I know my buddy Patrick's co-workers better than I know my own. Maybe it's the common interest in general Interwebs Geekery that fosters such a notion.

Anyway, one such co-worker is Phil Barbato, and he writes a comic strip. Check out Patrick and Trey immortalized in the latest edition (and click the image to see the whole thing):

I noticed today when reading a fascinating story about natural-born identical quadruplets on the BBC News website, that they changed the way their news stories display:



Now they join the countless hoard of blogs that feel compelled to provide ugly and distracting link option icons at the end of each story/post. I hope they're just trying this out, because it doesn't quite complement an already busy-looking site layout.

So my few loyal readers will have noticed an absence in both posting activity and actual site activity over the past 24 hours. This is because my hosting provider, Dreamhost, had a ridiculous hardware issue that took them a lot of time to properly diagnose and resolve. Even their main support page, Dreamhoststatus.com, was unavailable for quite a while today leaving many folks in the dark as to what was wrong and when it would be corrected.

Serious hardware outages have occurred a few times in the past two years that I've hosted my website with these people, and this time is bringing me even closer to a serious switch in hosting providers. Media Temple's Grid Service is looking pretty good except it's $20 a month vs. the $8 a month I pay now. Anybody have any other good recommendations?

Anyway, I'm going to be writing several posts in the immediate future, so those of you on Twitter or subscribing via RSS, pardon the barrage :-)

For whatever reason, I sort of missed the whole big deal about podcasts in general. I do listen every week, however, to Ira Glass' This American Life. I, like many others, was made aware of Radio Lab on an episode of This American Life. Now I subscribe to two podcasts :-)

Radio Lab is excellently produced and hosted well by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, and has recently covered such topics as Morality, Emergence, and Sleep.

I highly recommend this show - it's both entertaining and informative...but don't dare call it edutainment :-)

Just a quick hey-hey:

Yesterday I created an event on Upcoming.org about the Programmers' House Party. If you're attending, please indicate thusly so I know what to expect.

It's refreshing to see people look for simpler approaches to problems and, dissatisfied with available options, craft their own.

Fellow web nerd Trey is working on his own nifty flavor of a content management system (CMS) to give him that coveted combination of simplicity and flexibility, and he calls his work-in-progress "Yark" - a portmanteau of YAML and Markdown.

I'll be following this development, and I'm looking forward to a peek at the final product.

It's been a while since I perused McSweeney's Internet Tendency, but I was glad to return today, especially after reading this hilarious entry from "The Lonely Sommelier."

So if you're viewing my site directly instead of through an RSS reader (do I have any regulars like that, anyway?) then you'll notice that as of today the Google ads have been replaced my a little Amazon ad.

I've done this for a number of reasons. First, I'm able to choose exactly what I want in that box. This makes it more relevant to me, and likely to my readers as well. Second, I think I actually have a better chance of generating even tiny amounts of revenue with Amazon's links than Google's, and this is related to my first point.

For example, why would you click on a link to the House Party Planning website that Google coughed up when I created my post about the Programmers' House Party? On the other hand, if you like music, movies, games, books, random crap, etc., it's more likely that you'd at least look at the album or film I'm recommending, and hey, maybe even buy it.

Whatever. I'm not expecting any real revenue for this (what with my handful of regular readers), but I figure it's better to experiment with it now. Who knows what would happen if my crazy little site were to be linked on Digg or something and my bandwidth spiked for a few days...at least I'll have a slightly better chance at recouping some of the cost that would incur. Maybe :-)

So about the first recommendation - it's for the upcoming album by Kenna called Make Sure They See My Face. I absolutely loved the first album, and the samples I've heard for this new disc make me want to purchase it as soon as I can.

Now I promise I won't be hawking crap at all of you on a regular basis, but I figure since the ad is supposed to reflect something I like, I might as well explain it. In the future, I'll likely just change the ad when I talk about some music or movie I like, and I won't discuss the link, so don't worry about it.

At the behest of Trey, I decided to go for Mint to track my site's statistics. Mint was gorgeously crafted by Shaun Inman and resides on my server.

All I had to do was upload one folder to my domain and place one line of javascript in my header file, and voila! Stats for my whole site. And I've gotta say, I get more hits per day than I thought - like, tens more hits than I thought! Woohoo!