Month: December 2005

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Can’t Win

For years, one of the most common complaints about The Archive was that the layout was frames based. I’ve always been aware of the problems that frames present, but felt that the nature of the data being presented lent itself so well to a frames layout that I was willing to accept the consequences, even though advertisers pay less for impressions on a framed site. Still, getting rid of them was one of the big design goals of the new site, and I felt I had accomplished that pretty well.

Now that I’ve finally gotten that particular monkey off my back, guess what the most common complaint about the new site is? “Where did the frames go?” “I hate the new layout!” “This is much harder to navigate than the old site!” Sigh.

Now, to be fair, these commenters have raised a valid point: It’s no longer possible to quickly access all of the mishearances of a particular song, or all by a particular artist. Without the frames, you have to click your back button to return to the listing. And the javascript list collapser I’m using doesn’t remember which sublist you had open when you left the previous page. So these recent comments, in a way, are validation of the very reasons I used a frames layout to begin with.

During development of the new site, I was so focused on the voting system that I did almost all of my test browsing via the Vote button. Had not even considered trying to consume the site in such an orderly fashion. But one commenter had a great suggestion: Why not include a mini-list on every lyrics page containing all related songs and artists? </me smacks forehead>. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that eight years ago? Hey, that’s why it’s called a public beta. Will work on that next week.

Music: Smog :: Hit the Ground Running
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How To Wake A Zombie

For the past few months, I’ve been spending nearly every free late-night minute working (finally) to rebuild The Archive of Misheard Lyrics from the ground up. The site had become very long in the tooth, and a total design embarrassment. Not to mention the fact that I’ve done virtually zero work to maintain the database itself over the past five years (and am now sitting on more than 60,000 unprocessed submissions!)

The idea was not to mention a word before the site was baked and ready to come out of the oven. Then, last night, received email from an old friend saying that kissthisguy had been linked to in a story on Slashdot. Argh! Why couldn’t they have waited two more weeks? Timing couldn’t have been worse: Had to teach a class in five minutes, then race home, wolf dinner, and attend a 2-hour meeting at the pre-school. Think fast.
Continue reading “How To Wake A Zombie”

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Happy Kwanzaa

Would you send a Christmas card to a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian friend? The thing that strikes me about the movement to boycott stores that promote generic holiday messages rather than specific Christmas greetings is not just that it’s ignorant, but that it’s so willfully mean, so intentionally and obviously anti-American (anti-freedom).

Now the same groups are tweaked that the White House is sending out non-religion-specific holiday cards. I’d like to get a list of addresses for these groups and send them some lovely Kwanzaa cards. These fundamentalist minds are so twisted up in knots, they end up defying everything Christ stood for:

“I think it’s more important to put Christ back into our war planning than into our Christmas cards,” said the [council general secretary of the National Council of Churches.]

Oh yeah, I’m sure Christ would be on the front lines in Iraq. His message always pro-war and anti-inclusive. Cripes.

Update: Looking back on the piece, it appears that the quote above was placed in a weird context, and that the secretary was saying that our war planning is missing Christ’s message. I stand corrected. Thanks Gilbert.

Music: Sonny Rollins :: Blue 7
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Little Nemo in Slumberland

Nemo Inspired by a recent post at Weblogsky on the re-publication of Winsor McKay’s original Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, which ran from around 1902-1911. For nearly a century, virtually no one has seen these dreamy, highly detailed, deco/surreal strips at the full “broadsheet” (newspaper) size in which they originally ran. Checked out the book at Cody’s today and was floored — these are so gorgeous, so unlike anything you’ve ever seen, coming from another time and seeming to come from another people… Suddenly you’re seeing what your grandparents or great grandparents were reading in the Sunday comic pages a century ago, and realizing there was some pretty avant-garde stuff going down back then.

Reproducing the strips at their original size results in a book so large it presents a real storage problem — but one well worth overcoming. Couldn’t help getting a copy for Amy’s 40th birthday. She’s swimming in it now.

Music: Sons of the Pioneers :: Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds
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Free-Range Flu Vector

We’ve always bought free-range poultry and eggs, both for ethical/environmental reasons, and because it tastes better (set me loose with a grill and a pile of Rocky Range legs and thighs and your belly will be a happy place by night’s end). But the cover story in this week’s East Bay Express casts a shadow on the growing movement to get battery-caged poultry and eggs out of stores. Turns out the best way to encourage the spread of avian flu is to let birds wander around outside as nature intended. Containing a potential avian flu epidemic means keeping birds strictly confined.

Factory farming may be cruel to animals and environmentally ugly, but weighed against the prospect of millions of human deaths, the free-range farming movement suddenly faces a painful dilemma. Frickin’ reality.

Of course, one can imagine ways to confine chickens indoors without cooping them up in battery cages. It’s harder to imagine factory farmers making that happen without financial incentives.

Music: Minafra Reijseger Bennink :: Part 1
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Emo, Wipey, and Dipey

About a month ago, we decided Miles was old enough to have a pet, and got him a small fish tank, a goldfish, and two zebra danios. He named the goldfish “Emo” and the danios “Wipey” and “Dipey.” He’s enjoyed having it in his room, feeding them, gazing into its glow at bedtime.

Today, when he was supposed to be napping, he started calling us urgently: “Mommy Daddy, come see what I did!” We walk in and find the tank clouded milky pinkish white, totally opaque. He had dropped three whole canisters of Play-Dough into the tank, thinking Wipey and Dipey would enjoy playing with it. But Play-Dough slimes to sludge within seconds upon contact with water. We transferred the fish quickly to clear water, but all three were dead within half an hour, their gills probably clogged. M took it pretty well considering, but also understood his responsibility. A sad afternoon.

Speaking of emo (with a small “e”) but apropos of nothing: How To Be Emo (21 mins, QuickTime).

Music: Meters :: It Ain’t No Use
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Explorer Destroyer

Explorer Destroyer offers a set of scripts webmasters can install to encourage their readers to switch from MSIE to Firefox… and make some extra coin in the process.

Get this tool for switching people from IE to Firefox. For each person you switch, Google gives you $1, Microsoft loses marketshare, and an angel gets its wings.

The goal: To get your site’s traffic down to less than 50% IE users — which is a pretty lofty goal.

Stats 1105 FWIW, browser stats for all of birdhouse.org for November (includes this blog and birdhouse classic; not sites hosted by Birdhouse Hosting). Currently at 59% MSIE, which is surprisingly close to the goal. Not sure about installing the actual script though… thinking about it. If I do, it will definitely be in “Gentle Encouragement” mode.

The outstanding question for me is, where are all these dollar bills coming from? Is Google really offering $1 to switchers? And what evidence do they have that anyone has actually switched? Had trouble digging up real information on this, save a small mention on Google’s support site: “AdSense publishers can generate earnings by referring users to Firefox – just follow these instructions, being sure to select Firefox as the product.” Slashdot story here.

Thanks mneptok

Music: Ray Brown :: Jim
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Mouse Pride

There are a lot of exciting “firsts” for a new parent: Experiencing the sound of your child’s first word, their first steps, first time they eat with a spoon, first time they tell a joke, first time wearing “big boy” underpants, first dream, first drawing… but what can possibly compare to watching your child use a mouse all by themselves and navigate the web for the first time?

Tonight Miles grokked the causal relationship between moving your hand over “here” and the cursor moving across the screen “there” and was able to surf all by himself from the Jay-Jay site to the Arthur site, then from there through a whole stack of Arthur trading cards (which was kind of odd, since he’s not into Arthur at all).

Clicking was kind of tough – I had to hold the mouse in place while he pushed the button, to avoid accidental dragging. But he was positively beaming and giggling, and so was I.

Music: The Electric Prunes :: Get Me To The World On Time
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Free Eggs

Once upon a time I wrote a note to customer service at Albertson’s (grocery store) complaining that they didn’t offer a single brand of eggs in a non-styrofoam carton, and provided them with some information about the environmental effects of polystyrene in landfills. Two weeks later I received from Albertson’s a computer-generated form response thanking me for my “recent correspondence.” Included in the envelope was a coupon… for a free carton of eggs in a styrofoam carton. Their little way of connecting with customers and assuring me that my voice had been heard.

Two days ago I wrote to customer service at gap.com complaining about the fact that if you visit their site with Safari, you get kicked out with a message: “We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.” I provided some information on Safari’s excellent standards compliance ratings, and asked “If you can’t make your site work with Safari, how can you make it work with anything?” I also noted that, yes, I could fire up Firefox and use that instead, but that I refused on principle — I’d rather shop elsewhere than play that game. Today I got a message back from gap.com reading, in part:

Currently we support AOL, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Firefox for PC users. Unfortunately, we temporarily do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh. …. Safari users having problems accessing our site can download the free Firefox browser.

I guess failing to understand or even apparently to read my message was their little way of connecting with customers and assuring me that my voice had been heard.

Why even bother? Speak a smidge of sense into the void and you end up feeling like Quixote, raging against the machine. Corporate retards.

Music: Sun Ra :: The Alter Destiny