Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

On that whole TV thing…

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Most people who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’m not much of a fan of television — and actually haven’t really watched television in a long, long time. Seeing as how a couple people commented on my watching Lost, I thought it might be worth addressing this. :)

I’m really not sure when exactly I got sick of TV, but my best guess would be sometime around 1992/1993 or so I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time. Most programs didn’t have enough intelligence to keep my interest, and even when I did sit down to watch something, the insipid and insultingly stupid commercials would drive me up the wall. So I quit.

In the intervening years I’ve seen bit and pieces of shows here and there, generally when I’ve been over at friends houses. For the most part, though, I’ve relied mostly on recommendations from friends as to what shows were actually worth watching…and then I’d wait for the DVDs to start coming out. Thanks to DVD, over the last few years I’ve seen (for the first time) all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the first four seasons of The X-Files, and the first four seasons of The West Wing.

More recently, adding BitTorrent to my repertoire has allowed me to keep up with more recent shows. I first saw Firefly this way, I’ve been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica, Gray’s Anatomy got a few trial weeks, and I’ll soon be watching the first three episodes of Surface to see if it’s worth keeping an eye on.

So I’m not really entirely against television as a whole — in a very general sort of way, yes, I think that TV is primarily a waste of time, and most people (especially children) would be far better off finding better ways to spend their time — but I’m not entirely opposed to finding specific shows that are better written, more intelligent and/or more entertaining than most.

I’d have been quite happy sticking with BitTorrent and watching things at least a day or two behind most of the rest of the world, too, except for two things: Prairie, and Lost.

Prairie, while sharing many of my views on the majority of the shows on TV these days, has never been quite as militant about her anti-TV views as I have been over the past few years. She’s had a few shows that she’s been enjoying keeping up with, with her top three being ER, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. All during last year, she’d occasionally drop tidbits of what was going on in that week’s episode of Lost to me…and then, after getting me to admit that it sounded interesting, and determined to get me hooked, she picked up the Season 1 DVD set when it came out.

We spent the next week powering our way through all of Season 1 — and she won. I’m hooked. So, Wednesday nights are now “Lost Night” for us. Admittedly, I still grit my teeth during most of the commercials (and even the ones that are cute once or twice get extremely grating the twentieth or fiftieth time they show up), but I’m quite enjoying watching the show itself.

So I’m still primarily anti-TV, and am far happier spending my free hours either fiddling with projects on my computer, wandering around town with my camera, or getting together with friends whenever possible. For one hour each Wednesday night, though, I’ll be joining the majority of America in setting back, grabbing some munchies, and keeping up with this week’s adventures on the boob tube.

(Oh, and while I’m just not interested enough in a hospital soap opera to get sucked into ER, she just might get me hooked on Desperate Housewives if I’m not careful. The last two episodes have been pretty entertaining, I must admit….)

The Sesame Street Theme…in Klingon

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Original:

Sunny day
Sweepin’ the clouds away
On my way
to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get,
how to get to Sesame Street?

Klingon:

pem Hov jaj.
Haw’choHnIS ‘eng ‘ej Haj.
ghoch vIghaj;
‘ej pa’ muDmo’ jIbel.
chay’ Sesame He vIghoS?
SIbI’ jIHvaD ‘e’ yIDel.

Translation of the Klingon:

A day of the daytime star.
The clouds are compelled to commence fleeing, and are filled with dread.
I have a destination;
and there, because of the atmosphere, I am pleased.
Describe to me immediately
how to go to Sesame Street.

And there’s two more verses at the original location. This is so wonderful!

(via MeFi)

Another Cheaper by the Dozen?

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I ranted a while ago about the Cheaper by the Dozen film, a bastardization of one of my childhood favorite books, vowing not to see the results.

It’s time for another vow — this time, sadly, for Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Never, never, never. The only even vaguely interesting pieces of the trailer were two quarter-second long shots of girls in bikinis…and since if I ever feel the need to see that I can do a quick Flickr search, that takes care of that.

Would someone please just forcibly retire Steve Martin and put us all out of our misery?

Seattle’s Seasons in Software

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The news that yesterday’s rumors are true and that NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire is flying all over the ‘net right now. NewsGator posted a quick Q&A about the acquisition, which produced this little gem from NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons:

Q: Is Brent moving to Denver? Or Tennessee?

Greg: Yes!

Brent: No, I’ll be staying in Seattle.

Greg: Darn it, I’m 0 for 2. Denver’s not such a bad place, you know. We have 4 seasons and everything!

Brent: As a Macintosh user interface designer I like to simplify whenever possible. Four seasons is two too many. Seattle has two seasons, rainy and dry — anything more is too complex for new users. ;)

Shining

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Okay, so I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve really got to check out the trailer for a little heartwarming family comedy called Shining (9.5Mb QT .mov). A definite must-see!

LJ-style links for Ecto

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This is actually fairly simple, but you never know.

For ecto users who want to post LiveJournal-style links to LJ user accounts (such as [djwudi's info]djwudi) into a weblog entry on a non-LJ system:

  1. Open Window > HTML Tags.
  2. Click the + button to create a new tag set.
  3. Paste the following code into the ‘opening tag’ box (as a single line): 
    <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=%*">
<img src="http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif" alt="[%*'s info]" width="17" height="17" /></a>
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/%*/"><b>
  4. Paste the following code into the ‘closing tag’ box: 
    </b></a>
  5. Assign a command key sequence (optional, of course — I used option-command-J).

Viola! You’re done. Now, just type someone’s LJ username into a weblog post, select it, and choose the new tag set (or type the command key sequence you set), and the LJ-style link is created.

Cage Match: Gaiman vs. Whedon

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Okay, so no, it’s not really a cage match. What it is is a really good interview in Time with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon, on the eve of the release of their movies, Mirrormask and Serenity (respectively).

Plenty of good stuff in this interview — I knew I was going to enjoy it right from the start…

TIME: Joss, this is Lev from Time magazine. You’re also in the virtual presence of Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman: I’m not virtual. I’m here.

TIME: Sorry. You’re virtual, Joss. Neil’s real.

Joss Wedon: Okay. I wondered.

TIME: I’m glad we settled that.

Neil on writing, and the drive to avoid repeating yourself:

I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.

Neil and Joss on their primary fan base:

TIME: Let’s talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.

NG: I think the fan base is literate. You need to be reasonably bright to get the jokes and to really follow what’s going on. That, by definition, is going to exclude a lot of people who will then get rather irritated at us for being pretentious and silly and putting in things they didn’t quite get. But it’s also going to mean that some of the people who do get the stuff will probably be fairly bright.

JW: Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you’re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don’t bother to read. So yes, I think it’s kind of the same thing.

But I also think there’s a bit of misconception with that. Everybody who labels themselves a nerd isn’t some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who’s never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

On mainstream culture’s growing acceptance of genre work:

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I’m holding this science fiction magazine that’s got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I’m doing this. That’s pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We’ve been co-opted by the man.

Neil on “family” films:

…in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn’t want to do that. I like the idea of family as something where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of it.

Joss on his upcoming “Wonder Woman” treatment:

NG: She’s such a character without a definitive story. Or even without a definitive version.

JW: That’s how I feel. I hope to change that because I really feel her. Let’s face it: She’s an Amazon, and she will not be denied.

TIME: I’m really hoping her bustier will slip down a little bit further than it did in the show.

JW: You’re just after a porno, aren’t you?

TIME: Yes.

JW: It’s all about priorities. Yes, it’s very empowering for her to be naked all the time.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Help: CSS2 selectors

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I’m working on setting up a print stylesheet for the site. I’ve got it about, oh, 98% done — done enough that I could leave it as-is, except that there’s one little thing that’s bothering me that so far, I’m not able to fix. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Because hyperlinks are essentially useless on the printed page, in the print stylesheet, I’m using CSS2 selectors as outlined in this A List Apart article to insert URLs after links in the text. This way, instead of links simply printing as colored and underlined text, the destination address of the link is printed out after the link text.

Here’s the code I’m using to accomplish this:

a:link, a:visited {
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:before,
.entry-more a[href]:before,
.trackback-content a[href]:before,
.comment-content a[href]:before {
    content: " [";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:after,
.entry-more a[href]:after,
.trackback-content a[href]:after,
.comment-content a[href]:after {
    content: " " attr(href) "] ";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

So far, so good, it’s doing exactly what it should. Here’s a sample of what it looks like when printed from a browser that understands CSS2 declarations (that is, pretty much everything except IE):

However, I often insert images into my posts that are linked, either to larger versions as in the above screenshot, or to the Flickr pages for the original images. In that instance, I’d prefer that the target URLs not be inserted, as they are less relevant, and tend to muck up the final printed page in odd ways.

Example number one: the panoramic image that appears at the beginning of the Cal Anderson Park post from earlier today:

Example number two: the Flickr imagebar from the bottom of the same post. The web version shows five thumbnails side-by-side, but once the URLs are appended for the print version…

…only two of the thumbnails can even appear on the page.

Okay, sure, so these things aren’t exactly major disasters, but I’m just anal enough that I’d like to fix them. What I’d like to do, then, is figure out just what CSS code I’d need to use to exclude images from the code shown above.

Of course, I haven’t got a clue how to do this (obviously, or this post wouldn’t even exist). I’ve been poking at it all morning, and I’m stuck. Any ideas?

Anyone?

Bueller?

NOTE: Possible Safari Bug? In the original A List Apart article, the example code used a combination of a:link:after and a:visited:after to ensure that the links were inserted after all the links — if the code was only attached to a:link:after, then any links that the user had visited would not get the link appended when the page was printed.

While I was working on this, I started with that code. However, I was noticing an odd bug that was only appearing in Safari (at least, it wasn’t appearing in Firefox or Opera, the other browsers I have available to test with) — Safari would pick one URL of the URLs on that page and insert it after every link. In other words, if one link on the page pointed to www.example.com, then no matter how many other links were on the page, they would all display as www.example.com.

I wrote that off as something to worry about later, and kept fiddling around trying to get my images to do what I wanted. In the process, I skimmed over a more recent ALA article on print stylesheets and noticed that Eric Meyer had presented slightly different code: instead of combining a:link:after and a:visited:after, he simply wrote a[href]:after, and that took care of both instances. I swapped out my old code for the new, more concise version, and not only did it work as it should…but the repeating URL bug disappeared. Now, when printing from Safari, all the correct links print out just as they should.

Weird…but good to know.