News From the Homefront

My home state of Maine made the top of the news cycle today, even all the way out here in Los Angeles.

Turns out Portland is making waves by allowing middle school medical clinics to offer prescription birth control.

The usual debate of "sex is horrifying and this encourages it" versus "kids are having it, let's treat the reality" is playing out on a municipal (and, I guess, national) level. Big surprise there.

pro·gres·sive (adj.): Promoting or favoring progress toward better conditions or new policies, ideas, or methods.

Because with 17 (!) pregnancies in three schools over four years (!), clearly everything is working fine.


[Note: Follow the link and look at the picture of the "horrified" woman. This is what we're fighting here, people!]

The Greatest City?

Here's a fabulous essay (with fabulous photography) by Geoff Manaugh over at BLDGBLOG about why Los Angeles is the greatest city in the USA.

That demands repetition: he claims Los Angeles is the greatest city in the Unites States.

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use... No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.

Amen. Whether or not you choose to hold this up as a paragon of greatness is purely a matter of taste; I tend to agree with his sentiment that LA is a singular place, unique and incomparable.

Now don't get me wrong; I'm a country boy to whom Boston will always feel like the Big City. And I love New York, albeit in a removed fashion; I haven't lived there, so my concept of it is more romantic. It's the source of our dreams of Gotham City and Metropolis. Home to the best and worst.

But Los Angeles doesn't play that game. It's a true empty canvas, because it isn't waiting to be filled. Los Angeles may not give you anything, as Manaugh says, but it also doesn't ask anything of you in return. Live and let live, drive and let drive, and nothing more. The rest all comes from yourself.

Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void...It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.

Certainly not heaven, but definitely fascinating.

Goddamn HTML

Pardon the brief rant, but sometimes HTML and Web Browsers piss me off.

CSS allows me to do so many beautiful things... modern browsing can really be a well-designed experience. Think of how many pages you visit that look quite nice.*

But then, you look at the browser's title bar to see the name, and you get only a literal character representation of the code.

Bullshit.

Follow the jump, and take a look at the title of this post in your broswer bar. The page renders it as "Goddamn HTML." And that's what you should see. But the browser renders— no, it displays the code as "<i><b>Goddamn HTML</b></i>." Wrong!

But there's nothing I know to fix. I'd noticed it on several sites in the past, and thought it was bad coding... but getting into myself, I just don't know what to do. One of these days, we'll get a next-gen browser that'll render full HTML and CSS in the title display; until then, get used to my little friends “ < ” and “ > ”.

[* Even this site looks pretty good. Although it'll look much better when I've redesigned it from scratch... someday...]

Audio What Now?

If any of you think that it's confusing when I talk about the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray hi-def disc format war, be warned: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.*

Standard definition DVD audio is already home to many formats: Stereo, Mono, Dolby Digital, Pro Logic, PCM, DTS, WTFLOL.** But what I hadn't realized (and perhaps should have) is that each format has its own "High Definition" upgrade, some with compressed and uncompressed versions. 5.1 gets upgraded to 7.1, sometimes if you can't do one the same encoded audio will downgrade itself for backwards compatibility, sometimes not, uncompressed PCM audio streams that branch... my head is already spinning.

Fortuitously, Hi-Def Digest has posted a great article detailing all of this info. Well organized and well explained, if the next level of A/V equipment and standards gets your juices flowing, this is a must-read.

But I'll be god-damned if all of this technology doesn't make for one hell of an expensive upgrade.

[* C'mon, take a guess... I bet more of you know this than you think... okay, well, it's the top search on Google.]

[** So I made the last one up. Sue me.]

Batty

Going nuts here trying to get some serious tasks accomplished so I can go chill on the beach with my brothers...

And man, do I have a mono-brow...

Unbelievably ______

Unbelievably fast.

Unbelievably complicated.

Unbelievably dangerous.

Unbelievably awesome.

Check out the real Cannonball Run.

I can't imagine doing this in 32 hours. I just can't...

Another HCE Piece

Over at Apple.com/Trailers, at least today, one of our pieces for Gone Baby Gone is on the front page item. Awesome!

Here's a direct link to it; it's the one called "Featurette."

Don't Try Eating

Had this sent to me yesterday; another fine entry in the "SNL Digital Short" line. Does get a bit weird at about 2:10, but redeems itself in the end.

Random GIFs

Things I've seen on the internet recently (or not so recently).

I have no attribution, but I wish I did.

YouTube, The Bar Is Raised

Today's noodling led me to Vimeo, a YouTube competitor I hadn't heard of— and odds are, neither have any of you. I can't claim to be especially impressed— it's a pretty enough site, but the ubiquity of YouTube realy makes it hard to be able to count on something like Vimeo; will it have what I need when I want to show someone exactly how I feel about Spider-Man 3?* This is very similar to my thoughts on Zooomr, a Flickr alternative— too close to the original (or dominant) player to be worth the trouble of switching, not special enough to be set apart.**

But Vimeo does have one quality; HD content! I've always felt terribly frustrated by YouTube; in an age of DVD and HiDef television, it's super-shitty and compressed (and out of sync!) quality has no excuse. Vimeo, in contrast, looks pretty damned good.

Two videos caught my eye: "Little Booger" is an extremely well animated opening credits scene for nothing; I was particularly impressed with the excellent faux-camera work, and the music gets stuck in my head.

"DeSlime" just looks damn cool.

[* This is a truly hilarious video, by the way. Check it out.]

[** What's that, you say? That this reminds you of the whole Mac/PC debate? Well let me tell you, mister, it is nothing like that at all! ]

Consider Yourself Warned

Some sites have spoiler warnings.

Cigarettes have surgeon's general warnings.

Riverbeds have flash-flood warnings.

This, right here, is a worst thing ever warning.



I keep wanting it to turn into a Napoleon Dynamite-like performance, but no, it only hurts.

I'm sorry Jamie, this is certainly not a good thing.

Right and Left

Take a moment and visit this website. When you get there, don't think, just look: which way is the dancer turning?

Don't continue reading until you've visited this link.

The fascinating thing here is that this optical illusion actually measures (or at least claims to) which side of the brain is dominant for you. I fall into the right brain camp; the second I look at this image, she's moving clockwise. The article claims that most people see her moving counter-clockwise (or "anti-clockwise," as the article is Australian), and that most people are left-brainers. Showing it to people around the office, that seems to be true so far...

It's fun; stare at her shadow for a second or two, and you can make her switch directions. I've gotten pretty good at it...

What did you see?