rant whine 'splain espouse

The myth of the fold

2010-03-09T13:44:00.000-08:00

In web design and development there is almost always a desire to surface as many items of content and functionality above “the fold”* as you can possibly cram in there: Top news, latest blog posts, branding, primary navigation, secondary navigation, customer testimonials, carousels, search box, Twitter stream, log in box, and of course at lease a couple ads.

Below is a brief catalog of the many years of user research that debunks the concept of the fold.

Let us be free of this burden once and for all. Our users already are.

The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Unfolding the Fold

Life, Below 600px

Debunking the “above the fold” myth

Below the Fold: Why Scrolling Isn’t A Bad Thing

* The fold is the viewable area of a web page seen by a visitor upon first landing on the page, without having scrolled. The concept comes from newspaper design. Since newspapers had to be folded in half to fit in racks or on newsstands, the attention-grabbing headlines and photos had to be placed “above the fold” to entice people to pick up the paper.

Thursday Top 5+1

2010-03-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

Google 411
It’s free. The pizza’s not.

The Modern San Franciscan
By local artist Mike Giant. [via MissionMission]

“Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)” by Jedward, featuring Vanilla Ice
These two young guys were apparently controversial participants on “X Factor,” one of those TV talent competitions. As I never watch those things, I hadn’t heard of them until this music video hit my radar. It’s actually a pretty good performance/mash-up/parody, for what it is. Inviting the real Vanilla Ice to appear in a version of the song that was so controversial*, and which practically ended his musical career, was a stroke of sheer genius, and kudos to him for taking it on with a bit of self-mockery.

* If you’ve been paying the least bit of attention for the past 20 years, you know that Vanilla Ice’s song was slammed for sampling/ripping off the 1981 Queen and David Bowie hit single “Under Pressure.” Sadly, the Wikipedia article on Jedward’s song did not mention this.

Council of Responsible Advertisers Promoting Accepted Digital Solutions
“Rich media can literally kill you.”

The Sandpit
Cool tilt-shift video. [via Jenny]

You’ve been Yelped!
Great article from Inc. magazine on the power and peril of Yelp.com.

The weekly Thursday Top 5 lists the five most notable, interesting, funny, outrageous, cool, or simply strange things of the week. It is intended for distractionary purposes only. Do not take orally. If ingested, seek a doctor’s advice. If you like it, share it with others, or check out the long list of previous entries.

Thursday Top 5

2010-02-25T07:22:00.000-08:00

“Walk Hard,” The Music Video
I watched Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story last week and thought it was hilarious. Most of all, I was impressed by the amazing songs, plus the fact that John C. Reilly actually sung them all! The title track is an incredibly catchy Johnny Cash-esque tune that’s been going through my head ever since.

Olympics photos from the Big Picture
I never watch the Olympics, but I often enjoy the great photo collections that emerge when you get hundreds of photographers together to cover a single event. [via Gary L.]

Want to know what this blog sounds like?
The Codeorgan parses the code of a given web page, removes and translates any characters that don’t correspond to musical notes, and assigns snythesizers and drum loops, making music of your code. [via Jason]

Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой
This one’s definitely for Olya. So she can translate the title above. And while the comments on YouTube usually just serve to prove the decline of civilization, I found these three funny: “Anybody know where I can get the lyrics?”, “From the great Russian songwriters strike...”, and “I want [to] punch this guy in the face so bad!” [via Jenny]

Stunningly good PSA
An original approach to road safety advertising from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership.

“Can you super-size that please?”

2010-02-24T14:39:00.001-08:00

At the risk of sounding un-PC and reinforcing a stereotype, it struck me as funny when a largish person (I think obese is a term with some stigma, although I’m confident she would fit the technical definition) who’s visiting the office for a week asks her nearest cube-mate whether there’s anyplace that will deliver lunch.

In San Francisco, most people who work in downtown office buildings go out for lunch to one of the many, many restaurants, delis, etc. that are squeezed into nearly every crevice that isn’t occupied by a Starbucks or office space. There are probably three or four dozen eateries within easy walking distance (a block or three) of our office, offering everything from cheap soup and sandwiches to exquisite dining.

All I could think when I heard this person ask about delivery was, “Perhaps if you walked a little more each day you would be in better shape. After all, you’re visiting one of the most walkable cities in the country, a city with more restaurants per capita than almost anywhere else, and it’s not even bloody raining or anything.”

Since I’m already probably offending people, I might as well just go ahead and add that this woman was a Southerner. Now, before you cry foul and nail me to a piece of wood for my wanton sterotyping, let’s just reflect that nine of the ten states with the most obese Americans are Southern states, and yes, she was from one of those states.

In fact, I’m always struck by the astonishing difference when we travel to Missouri (#12 most obese state) and suddenly notice that we’re the thinnest people nearly everywhere we go, sometimes the only thin people!

I wonder if people who live in the South experience a similar wonder when they travel to the coasts and see more thin people.

Meera the Meerkat

2010-02-24T00:30:00.000-08:00

When she was about 3 months old.

Thursday Top 5

2010-02-18T22:21:00.000-08:00

Honest Twister Commercial
For sexually frustrated people ages 8 and up.

Little People – A tiny street art project
Jason really liked this book.

“A Million Ways” by OK Go

“This Too Shall Pass” by OK Go
This one’s for Jenny.

Hot Dog Launcher

Thursday Top 5

2010-02-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

Art inspired by the series Lost

Logorama
Nominated for an Oscar. With good reason. [via Jason]

’80s Synth Medley
Three guys, six keyboards, 15 hits of the 1980s. See how many you recognize.

Dr. Who (How To Remake TV Theme)
How the BBC audio guys recreated and refreshed the Dr. Who theme in the 1980s.

Fireland’s favorite favorites of 2009
Some of them were pretty hilarious.

Dear New Employee

2010-02-10T20:02:00.000-08:00

Welcome on your first day. Here is some information that will help you be a productive member of your new team.

You will be issued a security badge at some point in the future, but for now you need to sign in as a guest. You’ll be given a temporary badge that doesn’t do anything at all, so if you need to walk outside any of the electronically-locking doors on your floor, you’re not getting back in. Fortunately you have access to the bathrooms and kitchen, but if you need to use the stairs or elevators to go to any other floor, or if you want to go out of the building at lunchtime, you’re going to need an escort to get you back in. Sometime in the afternoon we may issue you a proper security badge. Don’t hold your breath.

If you’re lucky you’ll be on one of the floors which feature putty-colored 1990s industrial design reject desks and partitions. These are a step up from those horrifying fuzzy-walled cubicles in most offices, but let’s not let our imaginations get away from us and assume you’ll find the sort of quality furniture you expect to see in high tech firms at their pinnacle.

Notice how the fluorescent lighting and the putty furniture conspire to cast a lovely grayellow shade on everything around you? That is, of course, unless you are one of the few who is allowed to sit near a window, in which case the company cannot be held responsible for any negative reaction you may have to natural light. If you would like a lamp on your desk, please imagine how little we care.

When you arrive at your new desk you will observe that the top of of it is filthy, like it hasn’t been cleaned in years. This is because it hasn’t. The cleaning crew vacuums the hallways once a week (but not the floor of your workstation area), empties the garbage cans and recycling bins at every desk, and that’s about it. If you want your “new” desk to be clean, you have to go hunt for something to clean it with (it’s not like anybody’s going to supply you with cleaning equipment, or tell you where you might find some).

The phone on your desk might be plugged in. Might not. Just consider yourself lucky to have one. You can plug it in yourself, of course, but it might insist on telling you that it’s eight and-a-half hours ago and display nothing but a big red light and “Extension in use” at you. This is helpful, since you don’t know what your extension is anyway. At least you won’t have to touch the phone’s keypad, which has so much filthy scum on it, the once-gray buttons are now brown. You should probably just avoid looking too closely at the receiver, as the microscopic colony of beings that has been growing there for several months may not like being disturbed.

There will be no computer on your desk. Tough it out.

When the tech rolls his cart up to your desk sometime on your second day, you might feel a surge of hope. This emotion will be dashed to pieces when he informs you that the Mac Pro he’s bringing you has 3 GB of RAM, almost one quarter of what you’re used to working with, and a bare minimum to run crucial work apps in any useable way. The stock 19-inch monitor he’ll bring you is the default given to any employee, and they are required to bring it to you regardless of whether your manager’s hardware request specified a 24-inch monitor. It will require intervention from a higher authority — your manager or perhaps a lesser demigod — to persuade the tech to fulfill the original monitor request. Meantime, he will dutifully hook up your computer to the 19-inch, boot up, and walk away with a vague promise to “look for” another monitor.

A moment later, when the login screen appears, you’ll no doubt realize he didn’t actually give you a login or password yet, so there’s no way to actually use your computer. Should you wish to remedy this, please open a Help Desk ticket. What’s that? You can’t use your computer? Try calling IT. What? No phone? Send IT an email. What? No computer? Why did we hire you if you can’t do the most menial tasks?

By the morning of your third day you might get some software installed on your computer so you can actually do work. You’d better bring a laptop for a while, so you can actually get some things done.

Don’t expect to have access to any local servers or have an email account for a while. We’ll give you a company email address when we’re good and ready, pal. It might take two and a half days, but when it finally works, it’s glorious. You get to use Microsoft Entourage!

Once you are finally able to use your computer, you can do many fancy things with it (but not email yet). You can browse the internet. You can browse the employee intranets. You can look with awe and wonder at thousands of internal documents that are years out of date and totally and completely inaccurate.

When you look yourself up in the online employee directory, the workstation number listed for you will be at least one digit off, so no one will be able to locate you. This is handy should you be in the Witness Protection Program, but not very helpful if you are waiting for someone to, for example, come fix your phone. It would be easy enough if the workstations were laid out and numbered in a logical numeric order, because then one could assume that workstation #1163 would be next to workstation #1162, but if you squint very intently at the miniscule text on the floor map on the wall in the most darkened corridor, you’ll notice that the numbers were apportioned by a patient in a mental hospital.

Trying to see if you can fix the workstation number yourself, you’ll notice that the intranet lets you log in with your name and password, but then welcomes you with the message “Hello (none) (none),” and half the pages complain you must be logged in to view them, even if it indicates you are already logged in.

Opening a help desk ticket for this will be an interesting intelligence test, as the help desk tool appears to have no way to actually create a ticket. You’ll puzzle over this for several minutes, reading and re-reading everything on the screen, before giving up and asking your manager what you’re missing, and hoping it’s not your sanity. They’ll log in to the help desk on their own computer, wondering if they made a terrible mistake hiring you, and you’ll see a menu on the left side that you’re certain did not appear on your own screen. Back at your desk, you’ll confirm that the necessary menu isn’t there, and that your sanity is indeed intact. Several minutes later it will dawn on you that the problem is a simple one that should have occurred to you: The help desk tool doesn’t work properly in Firefox.

Getting your computer to recognize one of the nearby printers is a mysterious black art that has been lost to the mists of time. Should you need to print something on paper, you might want to weigh the efficiency of drawing it in full color by hand versus the time you will spend figuring out the Mac’s printing dialogs and walking back and forth to various printers on your floor to see if anything is happening. It’s best to look at it as good physical exercise. To connect your computer to a printer, you are expected to know the difference between Line Printer Daemon, IP printing, IPP printing, Windows, AppleTalk, Bluetooth and Bonjour printing, plus you’re expected to know how to find the IP address of the printer you want to connect to, as well as various other obscure settings. If you actually are able to print a document you will be branded a witch and may be burned at the stake.

On the afternoon of your fourth day a new phone will be delivered to you. Following the instructions that were emailed to you earlier will allow you to activate the phone. Good thing you can finally access your email account.

By the end of the week, if you’re particularly industrious, you may have:

• Scrounged a chair from an empty desk somewhere else in the building.
• Played with the phone long enough to realize it’s pointless (wasting an hour or so).
• Poked through cabinets in dark conference rooms until you found a stray network cable, so you could actually plug your laptop in and get a little work started.
• Figured out how to log in to your finally-delievered desktop computer.
• Liberated a decent mouse from another empty desk.
• Downloaded Firefox and customized it with proper settings and a bare minimum of add-ons to get some professional work started.
• Set up your Photoshop workspace, keyboard shortcuts, and preferences twice (doing it the first time surely caused the computer gods to notice that you were likely to get some actual work done soon, so they sent your computer into a kernal panic that promptly wiped out half your customizations).
• Scrounged a desk lamp from someone who wasn’t using theirs anymore and said you could have it.
Downloaded and installed enough applications to remedially customize your computer enough to actually be productive.
• Spent some time trying to comprehend some of the absurdities of corporate logic.
• Completed about five hours of actual work.

Upsides:

• The coffee’s better than it used to be.
• Biking to and from work is the best part of the day.
• It was nice to see a few people again who I really like here.
• Learned the nice Security lady’s name is Lucia.

Thursday Top 5

2010-02-04T07:59:00.000-08:00

Women in the world of gaming
Interesting presentation on how women are treated by the games industry.

Boop beep boop boop
Big things have happened for Meekakitty/Tessa since the last time I listed one of her videos in the Thursday Top 5. She won $100,000 in a competition on YouTube (which she said she’ll use for college and to take her mom on a vacation to Prague) and she just recently produced this video sponsored by and featuring Google’s Nexus One.

“Moouuwse”
Five-star hilarious. [via Jenny]

“Welcome to Canada”

Two of my all-time favorite comics artists
All Bloom County strips are being reissued with lots of notes and extras, in five new volumes (here’s volume 1). To celebrate, here’s an interview with Berkeley Breathed in Vice magazine. And I’ll throw in a brief interview with Bill Watterson.

Updating the journal

2010-02-03T23:36:00.001-08:00

Please note: Things will look a little weird here and there as I update the design of the journal pages over the next few days1

Thursday Top 5

2010-01-28T08:32:00.000-08:00

Frank Zappa on “Crossfire” 1986
This is an awesome segment broadcast during the height of the music censorship wars of the 1980s and ’90s. I wasn’t into Frank Zappa but I really liked the way he stood up for the rights of his fellow musicians and the public in general. I read the Wikipedia pages on the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) the other night, plus about 80 pages of the testimony from the Senate hearings on “porn rock” in 1985. Speakers included Frank Zappa, John Denver, Dee Snider, Senator Al Gore, Tipper Gore, and others. This hearing was one of the reasons why I hated Al Gore for a long time. He was a member of the committee hearing testimony from his own wife, and didn’t recuse himself in the face of an obvious conflict of interests. And he wasn’t the only one: All the founders of the PMRC were wives of influential government officials, including other Senators. This is a big part of why I didn’t vote for Bill Clinton when Gore was his running-mate (although not the only reason, for sure), and didn’t vote for Al Gore when he ran for president. I love what he’s done for environmental awareness in the world, but I detest what he did in 1985. For the record, I voted for Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader (whose platforms I actually believed in), regardless of the fact that they were unlikely to win. I followed the testimony by watching a great segment of CNN’s Crossfire from 1986, where Zappa faces off with three hopelessly out of touch old white men.

Protect yourself
Not exactly safe for work. [via Jenny]

How to bake a car

You are Dr. Tran Fan?

Shitmydadsays
You may not “like” or “do” or even “get” Twitter, but if you have any sense of humor at all, you owe it to yourself to at least read this Twitter stream once. NSFW if you read out loud. You will laugh out loud.

Thursday Top 5

2010-01-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

Christmas Decoration Win
From Failblog: “Good news is that I truly outdid myself this year with my Christmas decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after two days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever. Great stories. But two things made me take it down. First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by. Second, a 55-year-old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn’t realize that it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of the many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn’t take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.”

White House iPhone app
With the announcement of the first-ever official White House App, the Obama administration to pursue technology and communications as a means for public engagement, in stark contrast to the previous administration. Among other things, the app reportedly delivers live video streaming for the president’s public events. Browsing the App Store, there are several other White House and Obama related apps, although some of them appear outdated (originating pre-election), or just plain lame. One other that caught my eye, however, was the White House Photostream app (will open iTunes), which is probably pretty cool. I’ve mentioned before that the White House’s photos are available on Flickr.

Dear American Airlines
Fascinating story in which a solo designer decided to redesign American Airlines’ crappy home page and publicly call out their design team. Then a member of the AA user experience design team responded. Shortly thereafter, that employee was fired.

Sea Shepherd vs. the Japanese ~~research~~ whaling fleet
It’s terribly interesting to read the press releases of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society regarding the January 5 ramming of one of their vessels by a Japanese whaling ship, and the ensuing battles in the Antarctic Ocean. There’s no dispute that the Japanese ship rammed the $2 million speedboat that looks like it comes right out of a Batman movie — the smaller craft wasn’t even running its engines and there’s video evidence from at least two angles showing the impact.

The Third & The Seventh
Watch this short film ( would definitely suggest watching it in full screen at least, if not HD), then afterward, hover over this link to learn a secret about it.

What I use to create enews.org and related websites

2010-01-08T01:56:00.000-08:00

A drive-by reader sent me an email ~~today~~ months ago after seeing Mark & Velma’s Hitchin’ Party picured on a roundup of “30 Green Websites” on TutorialBlog. I replied via email, but then thought I might as well post it here too.

Found your website by accident while searching for other things.

First off, I am overly impressed with all your efforts under enews.org! As a web services manager of many years gone by, I’ve been trying to spend more time for myself and my wife putting together little jewels like http://markandvelma.enews.org/. I’m not looking to start up any kind of consulting gig. I just want to have some weekend fun geeking out on some web goodies to kinda kinda combine a lil’ blogging and a lil’ photo collections of our trips to like Tuscany, Germany, San Fran, and the like.

I’ll admit to you that I’ve been looking at some of your source code under enews.org trying to determine what tool(s) you’ve used to put it all together. Besides movabletype and PixelPost, you’ve succeeded in keeping is all a secret. I did get a chuckle out of the witty repartee of ‘Powered by web geekery and strong coffee’ !

Would you be willing to share some of your secrets behind a project like http://markandvelma.enews.org/ & http://markandvelma.enews.org/party.html

My reply:

The original Hitchin’ site on http://markandvelma.enews.org/ was built with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and uses Lightbox2 for the photo gallery. I was intending to power it with WordPress but I didn’t have enough time before the wedding to set it up, and I haven’t had the time or impetus since, although I still intend to convert the whole mini-site to WP some day, so Velma and I can use it as a singular place for posting family news and pictures and stuff.

The Holiday Gift mini-site we put up there in December 2008 was also created with Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and uses a customized version of a JQuery-powered unit called the Coda Slider.

As you saw, I use Pixelpost for my photoblog. I like Pixelpost a lot and I’ve been trying to find time to upgrade to a newer version so I can start putting photos up again. I created a custom template for my photoblog using, you guessed it, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. There are a couple worthwhile WordPress photoblog plugins which I may consider using instead, but I really like Pixelpost, so I’m not wholly interested in moving from it until a better alternative comes along.

The rest of enews.org was cobbled together a few years ago using Photoshop and Dreamweaver for the portfolio page and home page.

The blog is powered by Blogger and uses a slightly tweaked version of one of their standard templates, although I host on my own server, instead of on blogspot.com. I’ve always like Blogger but it’s not customizable enough and the Google team develops new features mostly for the blogspot.com customers and the self-hosted folks like me get left out. I installed Moveable Type a few years ago and fully intended to switch to it, but ran out of time. Later I decided WordPress was overtaking it in terms of development and add-on support, so I decided I’d use that in future. But I still haven’t finished converting it, so it’s still Blogger for now.

I’ve been working on a huge redesign of everything on enews.org, to make it all finally look the same, but I keep getting inturrpted by things like contract work. Since that pays the bills, my side projects go on the back burner for another month or two at a time. Oh well. Things could be worse, right?

It currently is just Photoshop, Dreamweaver, JQuery, and Coda Slider, but it’ll be converted to WordPress once I’m done formalizing all the templates, which are still in development and haven’t been optimized yet.

I heartily recommend leveraging the many, many, many services and technologies that keep emerging that allow hobbyists like us to do these sorts of fun personal sites faster and easier than ever before. There are so many of them, with varying offerings, it’s impossible to recommend just one. But since you mention you interest in putting up photo collections and blogging in a family context, there are a couple I’ve been impressed with: Vox and Kinzin (I saw another one recently I liked even more, but I can’t remember the name). The thing about these two that a lot of people like is the ability to manage persmission so only invited guests can view your vacation photos (for example). You can do this with WordPress plug ins too, btw, you just have to install an add-on or two.

Thursday Top 5

2010-01-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

The Boston Globe’s 2009 in Photos on The Big Picture
I’ve posted this amazing news photoblog before, but their year-end round-up is always especially astounding.

Beatles 3000
What were the Beatles really like? [via Jenny]

TeuxDeux
A nifty web app for daily to-do lists.

Carl Sagan, “A Glorious Dawn” featuring Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)
The PBS show “Cosmos” was one of my favorite things to watch with my dad when I was young. This remix just makes it 100x awesomer.

Romance Reader, Unashamed
Daily Kos contributor Laura Clawson examines the myths about romance novels (many of which I held until recently; and some of which I’m still having a teensy bit of trouble disavowing, but mostly just to tweak Velma).

“Find my iPhone” function = mixed results

2010-01-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

Having returned from a short getaway trip to Orr Hot Springs last week with the redhead, I panicked for a few minutes when I couldn’t find my phone in my backpack.

When we arrived there, I had turned it to Airplane Mode and put it in my backpack, since there was no cell reception. When we returned home a couple days later, it wasn’t there. Begin to panic.

Since Orr Hot Springs has no locks on lockers or rooms, I was definitely thinking there was an iPhone thief. I logged in to Mobile Me to use the “Find my iPhone” feature, and it didn’t work. Deepening panic.

A minute later I thought of one other place where the missing phone might be, and there it was! I’d forgotten that I’d slipped it into the bag of cables and chargers that accompany us on trips.

I went back to try “Find my iPhone” again, making sure Airplane Mode was off and even Googling the setup process to make sure finding was enabled. It still didn’t locate my phone, which was now sitting right next to the computer, about 4 feet from the wifi connection. Meh.

Sadly, I don’t know whether to blame AT&T or Apple.

Update: I tried it again a couple days later, and this time it worked. Hmmm. Leads me to blame AT&T, since my cell signal is notoriously flaky at home. Doesn’t explain why it didn’t work over my Wifi connection, though. Still meh.

Thursday Top 5

2009-12-31T23:13:00.000-08:00

7,000 death metal logos? That’s like 1,850,000 spikes!
Vice brings us a brief interview with Christophe Szpajdel, a designer who specializes in creating logos for death metal bands. He says he’s designed more than 7,000 of them in the last 20 years. I don’t know what’s more scary: that he made that many, or that there have been that many death metal bands.

Peter Callesen
Amazing paper sculpture. [via Jenny]

HP computers are racist
The face tracking feature of the HP web cam will not recognize or track black faces. Or, as Dezi (sp?) puts it in the video, “The HP webcam does not pick up negroes.”

MPG Stickers
Get good mileage? Get a custom MPG sticker for your vehicle. Our 1996 Honda Civic DX still gets better mileage than practically any other “modern” car you can buy today in America, including the so-called “fuel-efficient” ones. We love our Hondog.

A Troubling Story of SFPD Bias Against Bicycle Riders
“...As I tried to get information from three SFPD police officers on the scene of the crash, two of them showered me with unadulterated disdain for bicyclists and pedestrians. One officer said she thought bicyclists and pedestrians are always at fault in crashes and that they are stupid for not watching out for drivers. She was very upset with cyclists running red lights. She told me the bicyclist was at fault in this crash without any knowledge that a witness was saying the opposite...”

Xmas cheer

2009-12-25T00:01:00.000-08:00

Why Atheists Care About Your Religion

Thursday Top 5

2009-12-24T00:38:00.000-08:00

Designer–Client relationships
From the awesome website Clients From Hell. Sadly, I’ve actually heard some of these things myself. This one, for example, is very similar to a situation I was experiencing quite recently.

Good: Jailbirds
A little data on the prison-industrial complex (link is a fascinating Atlantic article from 1998 by Eric Schlosser).

Sucker Love: Celebrating the naughty tentacle
Amanda Gannon answers the question, “Would you still do Antonio Banderas if he was an octopus from the waist down?” Needless to say, NSFW.

The Known Universe
This is really cool. Travel from Earth to the end of the known universe, in a scale-accurate animation.

Black Metal Cookies
How to bake the most grim and doom-laden of chocolate chip cookies. [via Jason]

Thursday Top 5

2009-12-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve been too swamped to post the Thursday Top 5 on time for two weeks. Fortunately, no matter how busy I am, people still keep sending me funny and interesting stuff. A few of these below are recent finds, and a few are from the Top 5 archives. So here’s two weeks’ worth in one post, and I’ll try to be on time next week. Enjoy!

Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.
As a follow-up to last week’s “How a Web Design Goes Straight To Hell,” James sent me this classic piece of humor.

How Twilight Works
In case you want to know what the whole Twilight hoopla is all about, The Oatmeal has explained it for us.

The FlatPak house
A cool prefab system. About / Photos.

Coca-Cola's Quest for the Perfect Bottle Starts with Plants
Coca-Cola has introduced the PlantBottle, a bottle made of PET plastic, 30% of which is sourced from Brazilian sugar cane and molasses. The company’s marketers will no doubt spin this as near to 100% “green” as they can safely get away with, and the vast majority of consumers will no doubt fail to note the difference between a bottle’s claim of “PlantBottle! 100% recyclable!” and the preferable goals of 100% renewable and 100% compostable. After all, the bottle is still 100% plastic, it's just that it’s partly plant-based plastic, instead of 100% petroleum byproduct. But, as GreenBiz columnist Marc Gunther notes, it’s a start. And a pretty good one.

The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

Carl Kassell is retiring as the voice of “Morning Edition”
Thankfully, he’ll continue as judge and scorekeeper on “Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!”. Carl is awesome. Enough said.

Rachel Maddow explains Washington D.C. gangs
Wait it out until until about 1:20. You will not be disappointed. PS: I loathe the poseur Joe Lieberman and hope he dies a horrible, burning death.

Beware the Death-Dealing Cockney Weasel
From the bizarre mind of illustrator Ryan Abegglen.

The Tetris God
I knew it. Bastard.

Breakdancing robot

Photo featured in LA Times

2009-12-12T02:46:00.000-08:00

My photo of redwood seedlings has been featured on the Los Angeles Times’ website, alongside another holiday gift guide and mention of Save the Redwoods League.

Thursday Top 5

2009-12-03T18:18:00.000-08:00

Park Street Renovation
Slideshow of a Bernal Hill house that was renovated to modernize and double (!) its square footage. Here are some other Dwell slideshows.

Enor Moose
A story with pictures.

Surprised Kitten!
RFLMAO! [via Jason]

How a Web Design Goes Straight To Hell
This is so true. [via Jessica N.]

Charlie Brown Christmas Performed by the Cast of Scrubs

Thursday Top 5

2009-11-26T09:14:00.000-08:00

Alex Badyaev
Olya turned me on to this guy’s great photos. He’s a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at University of Arizona, but he also takes exceptional wildlife photographs, and designed his own website too.

Truth or Fail with Meekakitty
Very clever YouTube-based game where you click in the actual videos to answer a true or false type question, and then it links to the answer in another video.

M&Ms are yummy!
Meekakitty is weird and funny. And a redhead. I guess I like weird, funny redheads : )

Tank Skeet Shooting

The World is Ending!!!

Thursday Top 5

2009-11-19T22:33:00.000-08:00

We Are Hunted
Interesting new music discovery site I happened upon.

Our Dream of Living Streams
A short video about some of the issue facing South Bay creeks from Santa Clara County Creeks Coalition.

Flowers Feed the Soul
A truly amazing Flash-based site for a flower service in Singapore.

Now here’s some yoga I could actually do

Sharing Information With Executives
A good read covering the following Executive Pet Peeves: 1) Numbers That Don’t Tie Out, 2) Misaligned Objectives, 3) Loyalty, 4) Errors, 5) Agenda. Written especially for analysts in the tech world, but containing some good advice for many workplaces. And indicative of many of the reasons to hate the corporate world. Or just people. [via MJ]

Small picture in Alaska Airlines magazine

2009-11-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

One of my pictures is featured in this month’s Alaska Airlines Magazine alongside a blurb about Save the Redwood League’s Plant a Redwood Seedling program. It was part of the magazine’s Holiday Gift Guide, in the section about cause-related gifts.

It’s just a tiny picture, but it’s one of my favorites, so I’m glad they chose it. And that they credited me ; )

I often take photos of events for SRL, where my wife works. Most of them are on Flickr, and a 2007 set from Mill Creek, Humboldt County, is where the seedling photo comes from.

Thanks to the SRL folks for letting me know about the magazine, and letting me borrow their copy.

Thursday Top 5

2009-11-12T06:12:00.000-08:00

Explicit Content Only
N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton edited down to only the explicit parts.

Titanium Sporkestra
Velma and I saw this awesome drum line from Seattle at Burning Man this year, in a Marching Band March-Off held at Center Camp. I posted some pictures of them to Flickr, although they’re kinda blurry. I found the girl with the dreads, Cheryl I think her name is, incredibly hot. I liked her sense of style and she and another guy seemed to have a great sense of humor. Well, they all did, but she stood out to me ; )

Lols

The lols keep a-comin’

MacWorld bloopers
As my friend Jason likes to remind me, Steve Jobs isn’t perfect.