Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Book recommendation: Cheaper By the Dozen

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This post on BoingBoing reminded me of a book I haven’t read in years, but that I loved when I was a kid, and can highly recommend: Cheaper by the Dozen.

It’s the story of the Gilbreth family — dad, mom, and their twelve redheaded children — set in the early 1900’s. Mr. Gilbreth was an “efficiency expert”, obsessed with finding the most efficient ways to do everything in life, down to timing with a stopwatch whether buttoning a shirt was faster from the top down or the bottom up. I’ve just added the book to my Amazon wishlist, and will pick it up in a while, it’s long past time to re-read it.

Politics in the Matrix?

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While I’ll be adding this to the collection of links on my [Matrix: Reloaded post], I wanted to call special attention to it — a very interesting post looking at possible [political undercurrents to the Matrix franchise]:

The way the Matrix Reloaded points out the multiple layers of control built into society is perhaps the most potent of the messages it carries. Its one thing to make people aware of the first layer of control. Its far more powerful to make them aware of the way that a built in “resistance” can be used to solidify the power structure.

These are powerful seeds for any campaign to make the American public aware of the way the Bush administration is using the rhetoric and the media to sell a system of control. The left has been pushing these ideas for decades now, and general public couldn’t give a fuck. Thanks to the Wachowski the ideas are now seething through the subconscious of the suburbs. And its far to soon to guess at what the ramifications are.

(via Doc Searls)

Songs, A-Z

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Well, I didn’t read the rules of this game after I saw D’s list, so this list might seem a little odd. Rather than just list songs that start with a letter, I chose songs that I have in my .mp3 library, and where both the song title and the artist started with the respective letter of the alphabet. Uff!

The only times I couldn’t get a match for both were for X and Z, so I listed two songs, one for the song title that matched the letter, and one for the artist.

A: Ain’t Goin’ to Goa by A3
B: Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Bauhaus
C: Codeine, Glue and You by Chemlab
D: Destillat (VNV Nation Mix) by Das Ich
E: Emanuelle by Ex-Voto
F: Fired Up! (Club 69 Future Mix) by Funky Green Dogs
G: Games Without Frontiers (Massive D/B Mix) by Peter Gabriel
H: Hernando’s Hideaway (from The Pajama Game) by Carol Haney
I: The Indigo Swing by Indigo Swing
J: Jane Says by Jane’s Addiction
K: Kylie Said to Jason by The KLF
L: Lucy’s F*ck*ng Sky by Lords of Acid
M: Moonbeam by Men Without Hats
N: Ninety-Nine Red Balloons by Nena
O: Only A Lad by Oingo Boingo
P: Point Blank by Pigface
Q: Quad City Funk by Quad City DJs
R: Renegade Soundwave (Leftfield Mix) by Renegade Soundwave
S: Stay by Shakespeare’s Sister
T: Twist in my Sobriety by Tanita Tikaram
U: Until the End of the World by U2
V: Vengababes from Outer Space by The Vengaboys
W: Wimoweh by The Weavers
X: Dear God by XTC (or) Xhemikals by DJ H. Geek
Y: Your Horoscope for Today by “Wierd Al” Yankovic
Z: Living Dead Girl (Subliminal Seduction Mix) by Rob Zombie (or) Zeros and Ones by Jesus Jones

Black Hawk Down

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Wow — excellent, powerful, and frightening film. When Black Hawk Down first came out, I avoided seeing it — while I heard from many people that it was good, I was a bit overly cynical as to whether it was getting good reviews because it was actually a good movie, or because the US was in the process of bombing Afghanistan, and a patriotic “rah rah” movie was reaping the rewards of jingoistic fervor.

Let me be the first to say that I sorely underestimated the film, the reasons for its good reviews, and the reviews themselves. Overall, I think a healthy dose of cynicism is a good thing, but this time I seem to have taken it a bit far. Ah, well, everyone makes mistakes occasionally. BHD is actually a gut-wrenching account of a disastrous mission in Somalia that stretched from a planned hour-long insertion and retrieval into around seventeen hours of hell. Not at all pleasant to watch, but excellently done, and very powerful.

There’s what looks to be an excellent newspaper series on the events portrayed in BHD from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mark Bowden: Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.

With stripes!

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Xander: Hey! Buffy!

Willow: You missed it!

Buffy: Missed what?

Xander: We just saw the zebras mating, thank you, very exciting.

Willow: It was like the Heimlich — with stripes!

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ‘The Pack‘

I missed the next few lines of the show after that, I was laughing so hard.

Navigation – left or right?

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I breezed through a usability study comparing left- and right-justified site navigation this morning.

I had the standard left-justified navigation for a while, and at one point had a three column layout with sidebars on both sides of the page, but in one of my redesigns I decided to go with the current right-justified navigation, and plan on sticking with it.

My basic reasoning is that this layout emphasizes the content over the navigation. As English speakers read from left to right, the content area has dominance. It also (I think) makes it a little easier to track your position on a page when reading a long post. With left-justified navigation, when you reach the end of a line on a page and move your eyes back left, you need to account for whatever space is taken up by the navigation bar. Using a right-justified navigation scheme, you just let your eyes snap all the way to the left of the page, and no searching is necessary.

Now, these are my opinions only, and I’m not schooled in usability at all, so I could be completely off base with that, so take my reasoning with a grain of salt. It’s just my thinking on an admittedly not very important matter. ;)

(via WebWord)