Author: Tim

An animator, video producer, Lego artist, and author—I am moderately skilled at a lot of different things.

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Jim Reekes doesn’t care who you are or where you came from

My first exposure to hardcore 12-year Apple employee Jim Reekes was when he stole the show as the jaded, contrarian voice in the ultra low-budget documentary Welcome to Macintosh.

Listening to him recall his sound engineer work at Apple, he is one part Dwight Shrute and one part Bill Hicks. I simply love his candor, honesty and frankness when talking about his work, his industry, his coworkers …and all the little blunders they never quite thought through.

Grounded employees like this are a valuable asset to keep a project on the rails, and simply to keep people from developing really bad ideas. I can only hope to aspire to be as much of an incisive crank as Reekes.

Here he is again talking to One More Thing about the Mac’s startup tone. (You haven’t gone crazy, the introduction is in Hungarian.)

OMT in San Francisco #3: ‘Let it beep’ from One More Thing on Vimeo.

…and now you know the origin of Sosumi.

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Start with HTML

At work, our web site code is becoming a morass of nested <div>, <p>, and <span> tags. Our CSS file alone is nearly 3,000 lines long. Since the CSS is so byzantine to begin with, whenever a redesign comes along, frequently us poor developers — rather than untangle this Gordian stylesheet — simply declare new classes and bolt them onto the end of our stylesheet; hence the 3,000 line CSS file. This has to stop.

I propose a new solution for developing web pages: start with HTML. Imagine you are developing a clean, informative page for Mosaic. Only once your HTML is done do you start mucking it up with CSS. Have we forgotten this is the way style sheets were intended to be used? We’ve let them be perverted to add rounded corners, fix IE bugs, and even add arbitrary spacing. Your CSS will be much cleaner and more meaningful if you start with the information as the structure, and then build on that.

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We’re gonna need a bigger phone

Nothing wrong with the Windows Phone 7 Phone Something Something OS, but I think they may have designed the titles for a bigger device.

Windows Phone 7

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“A wakeup call for the Drupal community”

Freeman recently wrote A wakeup call for the Drupal community and I wish I could have put the failings of the Drupal CMS as well as he has:

This is a common theme in the community. You can kludge your way to victory with just about any feature set you can think of if (and only if) you write enough hook_$n_alter() code, can find some contrib modules to pick up the slack, and have a designer who can code php tucked in your back pocket

Freeman’s states that the reason Drupal failed to win CMS of the year over WordPress is because WordPress is simply easier to use.

Continue reading ““A wakeup call for the Drupal community””
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It’s because Avatar is hopelessly generic

io9 has The Complete List Of Sources Avatar’s Accused Of Ripping Off.

Maybe it isn’t that Avatar is ripping anyone off, but that it’s just another grab bag of obvious science fiction-meets-environmentalism tropes.

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Creating Timecodes with Counter Display

I forgot to mention, the timecodes in Normal Activity were generated using a versatile Final Cut plugin called Counter Display, created by Piero Fiorani, who has lots of other free FCP plugins.

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Farscape will not be released in high-def

In light of Sci-Fi channel’s hit 1999 series Farscape getting re-released on DVD, Brian Henson admitted to the crowd at Creation Entertainment’s annual Farscape convention that there are no plans to release Farscape in any high-definiton format.

The series was filmed on 35mm, which is far superior to HD, said Henson, but the visual effects were created for a standard-definition format, and when looking at the costs of re-creating the visual effects in HD, it would have been in the millions of dollars. Per season. Understandable for a series that holds the Guinness world record for the most digital effects in a TV series.

Unfortunately, there was yet another cost that would kill the possibility of Farscape appearing in high-definition. At the end of each season, the original camera negatives were archived, which according to Henson left “a gymnasium of footage” that was particularly costly to store due to the volatility of the film itself. And so, I assume, the original 35mm prints of Farscape have been scrapped.

Henson stated that the Farscape series was produced in both NTSC and PAL formats, and that PAL’s 576 horizontal lines of resolution (compared to NTSC’s 480) was the highest-definion version of Farscape available. This is a far sight less than HD’s top resolution of 1,080 lines, and a sad fate for such a visually stunning and complex series.

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Drupal Internet Explorer 6 has a hard limit of 31 CSS files

I don’t know what’s worse, that Drupal Internet Explorer has an arbitrary limit on how many CSS files it can include, or that we’re developing a website with 32 separate CSS files.

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Assignment: Unexplained

Normal Activity—The #2 movie in America!

1/1,000th the budget of Paranormal Activity — 1,000 times the terror!! Witness these REAL and TRUE EVENTS CAUGHT ON TAPE of a couple being terrorized by an evil demonic force.

The ending will shock you!!

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Once In a Lifetime, never online

I have a midlife crisis about every 6-8 months. This time, Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” spoke to me. I read up on the album “Remain in Light” on Wikipedia, I bought a CD/DVD of the album off Amazon and scoured the internet for the video to “Once In a Lifetime”.

You can not find this video for love nor money.

Youtube has 33 seconds of it. MTV Music — where it is the second-highest rated video after “Thriller” — is “doing our best to bring it back.” iTunes doesn’t sell it. iTunes doesn’t sell any Talking Heads videos. Browsing the rest of Amazon I get True Stories or Stop Making Sense. That’s it.

Nevermind the video is considered a significant piece of artwork and is in New York Museum of Modern Art (thanks, Wikipedia)!

Only in the furthest reaches of the internet can you find the video, in all its interlaced, blocky, uh… glory. I mean look at this:

Once In a Lifetime, never online

A fond postscript is that my parents had Remain in Light on vinyl. My parents were cool.