On The Scene

Last weekend I attended the Sasquatch Festival in Gorge, Wa., and it was fantastic. 3 days, 72 bands, but one thing stood out for me, and that was being at the second showing ever of Christmas on Mars, the Flaming Lips’ movie. I would have been at the first, but the oompa-loompas in construction suits neglected to mention that we needed tickets.

The movie itself was shown in a big circus-style tent, complete with fog machines, lasers, and Wayne Coyne, the Lips’ ever-enthusiastic frontman, in attendance. In front was a large poster reading “Eat Your Own Spaceship,” and the tickets read the same. I’ll try not to spoil anything, but just in case anyone is really concerned I should put, in big letters:

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

The movie was not at all what I expected. I had not watched any previews that existed, although the friend I went with had. I was expecting some sort of rock opera, or something of the such, or something more whimsical, and while there was arguably a great deal of whimsy, the end result is a far more jarring film than I had anticipated.

The film started with an announcement from Wayne about the film, specifically about how loud it would be. It was explained that this loudness was to increase the intensity of the film, and I must say it worked — I was in a constant state of sensory overload throughout the film, and sitting through it was actually a fairly uncomfortable experience, which isn’t to say I regretted it. The film featured many disturbing hallucinations suffered by the protagonist, accompanied by loud, dissonant synth chords, and by the end of it I was feeling rather lightheaded. It was certainly an experience I would encourage to anyone, once, but not something I’m eager to repeat, at least not at full volume. Intense is the word.

It’s difficult to critique the acting or the plot, because neither of these things were really the point of the film. It was designed for interpretation, which I will avoid at this time because I don’t want to spoil anything.

At the end of the day, I still view the movie as one big old mindfuck, a thoroughly memorable experience that I would recommend to anyone save the infirm and pregnant, just for the experience.

A.viary.com is the home of an ornithologically-themed flock of web apps designed in part as really cool Rich Internet Applications with stunning feature sets (for a Rich Internet Application), and in part as serious design tools.  I just got my beta invite, which gave me access to Pheonix, their image editor, and Peacock, a novel pattern generator capable of some amazing things.

They’ve got a whole host of similarly-named products planned, including a video editor (although there already exist some impressive offerings, such as Jumpcut and Eyespot), audio editing, and a few interesting specialty ones.

I’ve got 4 3 invites left, so if anyone wants to give it a shot (and I urge you to do so) leave a comment and I’ll send you one.

Happy Creek Sawmill specializes in custom millwork, including flooring and moulding.  They also provide top-notch wood-drying with their kiln, and can even manufacture products for homeowners from trees cut down while building their house.

They are located in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island — specifically in Duncan, BC. 

That’s what my mom always told me. I never believed it — through high-school and well into college I wore almost exclusively second-hand clothes, save the first week or two on a job when I was trying to make a good impression. But I sometimes felt out of place, especially when I had to put on my not-so-well-worn suit and a tie and make like it didn’t feel strange. However, two months ago I placed an order at Indochino.com for a tailored suit, after having read about them in UVic’s student paper (The Martlet) several months prior. The suit came in two weeks, and as soon as I tried it on, I knew I had made a good decision.

Nothing looks quite so good as a properly fitted, stylish suit. You can’t slouch in a suit; you have to stand straight up, chest out. And I can tell you, when you know you look good, it really helps your confidence. I can’t tell you why, but if you’ve tried it you’ll agree with me.

Anyhow, a few weeks after that Indochino announce a sale, giving three free shirts with a suit or outerwear purchase. Having found that my usual vintage outerwear did my newfound business apparel no justice, I opted for a James Dean-esque peacoat, which proved to be another excellent purchase. I wear the shirts whenever they’re clean, and I always feel like I’m ready to take on the world, even when taking on the world involves not leaving the house.

In closing, I have two points. One, Indochino is worth checking out. I’ve had several contacts with the guys who run it, and they seem very down to earth and service-oriented, and the suits they sell look pretty sharp too.

Two, if you dress well, you feel good, and if you feel good, you live, work, and play better.  Of course, sometimes dressing well means my comfortable second-hand stuff, and that’s alright too.

This layout came to me as I was sitting around, bored, and started drawing in my notebook for something to do. There are many things I’m proud of, and many things about it that I don’t like too. I’d love to hear what anyone who happens to read this thinks about it, but I’ll start you off with a list of critiques.

No Title

Firstly, it has no title, and besides the context there’s no indication of its blog-hood. I guess the title is my name, but I should probably mention something else somewhere.

Basic Layout

The layout is sort of basic and done to death. Header bar? Check. 900px wide column? Check. White content background, with shadows on either side? Check. And the pixel-patterns like those in the background are quickly becoming a cliche. (No offense to freshview for being the only one mentioned. I’ve seen many sites with such patterns recently.)

And speaking of the shadows on the content section, if you try loading this page in IE you’ll see another problem - the transparent .png turns white. That’s just no good.

Mild Haphazardness

The footer could have had more work put into it, and from a marketing perspective I could have tied everything in a bit closer to my main web design site.

The header image is quite large, and it’s a bit confusing for the first few seconds while the rest of the page loads in a flash (I even indexed my .pngs to make them a few kb smaller - that’s how much I care.) However, the way it is it’s simply impossible to reduce, I’ve already posterized it as far as it will go.

The colors in general are quite bright, and were picked without any palette in mind.

And finally, I had meant to break the border to give the page a sense of wholeness rather than header | content, but I couldn’t figure out what to do it with.

Good Stuff

I don’t think I got it all wrong, though. The header is visually interesting, I think, and the brown background looks fairly sharp despite being a bit unoriginal. Also, the way the two images for the background (the repeating pattern and the darkening gradient at the top) will line up is a thing of beauty, given their small size.

Also, the design looks very much like what I sketched out. It’s always nice to be able to capture an idea well, even if you find out later that the idea wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Your Mission

Should you choose to accept it, you can do one or both of two things:

1) Tell me what you hate about this site.

2) Go do the same for your own site, and then come comment about that. I’d love to hear it.

I stumbled across Aptana quite by accident, while I was looking up some Ruby on Rails resources, as the beast formerly known as RadRails is now a part of Aptana. Aptana is built on Eclipse, which carries some good and bad news. Normally, I use PDT, Eclipse’s official PHP development framework. However, unlike PDT, Aptana provides editors for CSS and JS, superior HTML abilities, and its very own php editor.

The Good

Aptana supports html, css and javascript editing natively. It includes Subclipse as a supported plugin, and has plugins for PHP, Ruby (as discussed), and Adobe Air environments. It even does iPhone-specific development. Stability is not a major issue — Aptana is built on Eclipse, which is a very mature open-source project.

Aptana has a built in site manager, sort of like Dreamweaver’s, which will allow you to make updates to your local copy and then click “synchronize” for instant gratification. Unfortunately, I tend spread development between my laptop and my desktop rig, so the ftp synchronize can be deadly. I prefer to use Subversion to keep the two up to date with each other, then upload the changes from a third control directory that I always update before sending off.

The Bad

Eclipse, and by extension Aptana, is built on Java. Apologies to major users of Java, especially those who will tell me how wrong this is, but the jvm is, at times slowwwwww. However, this was alleviated somewhat by switching my Ubuntu setup to use the sun 6 jvm, instead of the gcj.

The Editors

Aptana contains four main editors that I use - the HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP specifically. Of course, all can be used in the same document without difficulties. Each contains the usual goodies that any IDE for anything ever has to have before it’s called an IDE: Error checking, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and function lookups.

(more…)

It really is. I haven’t had to use Word in years, and I have never had a problem. Here are four reasons that you should have and use openoffice, if you don’t already.

1. Publish your Documents

When you deliver final documents, which is typically the end result of using a Word processor, it’s essentially publishing them, if only to those who need to read them. So why send a .doc file? If the person has no need to edit your document, why force them to open a Word processor just to read it. PDF has come a long way since the days of Acrobat 5, which took minutes to load and was slow as can be. Modern operating systems that aren’t windows (Mac and Linux) both come with built-in support for PDF viewing, and it’s rare to find a Windows computer without Acrobat installed. These viewing programs are, for the purposes of viewing documents at least, vastly preferable to Word, which still takes a long time to load.

2. Supports Everything

Sure, it’s no big deal to tout support OpenOffice’s support for .doc, and .docx. But does Word support .odt? I thought not, even though plenty of people do use OpenOffice and prefer to save in its format (that is to say, its superior format—more on that later). The open… menu supplies one with a massive list of supported formats, from Wordperfect to Lotus WordPro to MathML. I feel comfortable saying quite definitively that there are no formats supported fully by Word that are not fully supported by Openoffice.

3. ODT is an ISO standard

Go ahead, look it up, it’s ISO 26300. This means that it’s staying around. If you still think it’s not a widely-used format, consider this: Google Documents supports odt as well as doc. Microsoft is attempting to get its DOCX format, another XML format, endorsed by the ISO, but it doesn’t look good for them.

4. It’s free

This is obvious, but it’s true. Probably the primary benefit of OpenOffice to most is that you don’t have to pay for it—or, you don’t have to feel guilty about stealing it.