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Outer Space

Miles-Barnacle 30 minutes before bedtime, Miles (pictured cross-eyed, balancing large barnacle on head) announces to me that, no, we aren’t going to start listening to Cinnamon Bear as planned. He’d just remembered that he’d made plans with four of his kindergarten pals to travel to outer space on Monday, and that he needed to get ready. Thus began a flurry of preparations, including:

– One scuba diving flipper (made from an empty Kleenex box) [check]

– One piece of maritime artwork featuring a glued-on wooden sign reading “The Brain,” accompanied by a hastily scrawled diagram of a human brain [check]

– One pair of binoculars made from two toilet paper tubes lashed together with blue masking tape [check]

– One small flashlight [check]

– One space helmet, made by widening the opening of the aforementioned flipper [check]

– One compass (real) [check]

Should be quite an adventure.

Update: This morning Miles added a pointy stick “for poking out alien’s eyes.” We suggested that it might be smarter to bring aliens back for scientific study, and he agreed. Ditched the pointy stick. Once he arrived at school with his bags of gear, his teacher got curious and wanted to know what time he was departing. “I’ll probably blast off at snack time and get back to earth at lunchtime.”

Music: Marcus Carl Franklin :: When the Ship Comes In
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Geekdad, Hovercraft

Hovercraft Crazy how things come together. Birdhouse user and cell phone haiku proprietor Dylan Tweney is an editor for Wired Magazine. He’s also a dad and a contributor to Wired’s Geekdad blog. Wired recently started collaborating with PBS on an interesting TV show called Wired Science. Recent J-School graduate Sasa Woodruff just spent a season as a researcher for Wired Science, helping to select and assemble pieces for the series. Sasa was also Miles’ babysitter last year (being a J-School dad means access to an endless supply of interesting babysitters!).

Thanks to the Geekdad connection, Dylan recently did a segment for Wired Science on building a hovercraft in the comfort of your own living room, with his daughter Clara as helper and co-star. Which means Miles recently got to watch his once-or-twice playmate building a UFO on HDTV.

The connections go still deeper, but I’ll leave it at that. Except to say, “My hovercraft is full of eels“.

Music: Peter Brotzmann :: Sanity
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Earthquake Preparedness and Guns

Over the past year, we’ve mostly filled a large rolling plastic trash bin with earthquake supplies. First-aid kit, blankets, lots of water, hand-crank radio, emergency rations, etc. The wheels on the bin are so we can drag it along with us if our area is evacuated (we live pretty close to a major fault, on soil subject to liquefaction). We’ve got a few more things to add, but are mostly ready.

Recently a friend of ours asked whether we had a gun in our kit. A gun? A friend of his who lived through post-Katrina said that after a couple of weeks of no public services, people who had supplies but no guns were sorry they didn’t.

As you can guess, guns aren’t my bag. What happens when someone with a gun approaches and asks for our water? Am I supposed to have a gunfight with them? I’m more inclined to give them the damn water and drink from the reservoir left over in our home’s water heater. But it’s hard to imagine what actually living through that kind of Mad Max world would actually be like, and how my thinking might change in that kind of situation.

What about you? Is your disaster kit ready? And does it include firearms?

Music: Screaming Headless Torsos :: Smile In A Wave (Theme From Jack Johnson)
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Gravatar

Headshot Fur Bulletin board readers are accustomed to using icons/avatars to represent their identities in online discussions. But because blogs are scattered to the wind across a bazillion servers, this capability is not generally available on weblogs. What is consistent across your participation in multiple blogs is your email address (even though it’s never displayed publicly, it’s usually required for comment posting). Gravatar leverages this consistency by letting you create a (free) account with them. Your avatar then appears automatically when you participate on any Gravatar-enabled blog.

All a blog owner has to do is add a few lines of code to their templates (or install a plugin), and the right avatars show up in the discussion automatically.

Auttomatic (the hippy/corporate entity behind WordPress) has acquired Gravatar, giving the the service the juice it needed to keep performance up. I’ve enabled Gravatar on Birdhouse — set yourself up a free Gravatar account and watch all of your historical posts on this site grow a magic tumor avatar.

Aside: WordPress now powers almost 1% of the web. Don’t tell me it’s just a blogging tool.

Music: Van Morrison :: Madame George
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Depends on What “Is” Is

After the initial glow of playing with social networking again wore off, I (predictably) reverted to ignoring Facebook. Except that every time someone friends me or begs me to add the app for their pet cause, I get an email ping reminding me that Facebook exists and that I, apparently, have unmet social obligations. Which reminds me that I really need to update my profile so I don’t look like an abandoner. 99% of my Facebook activity over the past month has been relegated to obligatory updating of my “Is” status.

Scot is contemplating Joomla.
Scot is digging the new William Parker disc.
Scot is no longer contemplating Joomla.

and so on. Not much, but it keeps my crackers from getting too stale. In so doing, I’ve been flummoxed that the “is” part is required. If I want my profile to say “Scot digs the new William Parker,” it comes out as “Scot is digs the new William Parker.” Lame. But Machinist says Facebook has dropped the “is” requirement, and that the verb is now free-form. Thank god for small miracles. But did the “is” play an important linguistic/artistic role?

What Flaubert meant was that it is precisely an artform’s constraints — and not the lack of constraints — that juice people’s creativity; the Facebook “is,” no differently from Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, forces people to look for interesting ways to say things.

Nevertheless, the new API lets the user control “is,” not the API. But hold the phone… that’s all lovely, but apparently not yet in play.

Scot is wonders when Van Morrison jumped the shark.

Standing by…

Music: William Parker :: Corn Meal Dance
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Comicon

Lulu2 As kids, my brother and I heard plenty of stories about how people dug 30-year-old comics worth thousands of bucks out of their garages, and entertained fantasies that one day our own comics would be worth a mint. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, we dutifully bagged our X-Men, Fantastic Four, Richie Rich, Epic, Mad Magazines and Howard the Ducks, then stashed them in cardboard boxes to “mellow” for a few decades.

A year ago, I finally excavated the collection from mom’s basement and moved them into our own garage, planning to finally see what they were worth. Today, actually got around to hauling them down to an actual comics shop. Though we had a few gems worth upwards of $20, the bulk was of the collection was barely countable, and represented nothing but a PiTa to the store owner, who would have to put a ton of effort into re-bagging, organizing, cataloging, and pricing, only to sit on most of it for god knows how long. And that Howard the Duck #1 I prized so much fetches only $3.75 today. Likewise for all those Mad Magazines — even though some go back to the mid-60s, the market remains glutted.

Was it worth hanging onto them at all? Hardly seems like it. But there’s another factor at work here – there just aren’t as many collectors around as there once were. Fewer comics are being printed, for shrinking audiences. Young kids don’t hop off their bikes on their way home from paper routes to pick up the latest X-Men anymore – they might download them from the internet and read them on-screen. But for most kids, the internet itself has taken the place that comics once filled in our lives.

Being in the store was like living through an episode of the Simpsons. The employees tossed impenetrable inside jokes back and forth: “Avengers #117! We should totally give this to Zach for Christmas! [chuckle chuckle]. And I loved that they referred to comic books with no term other than “books.” In the end, Mr. Comicon offered me $100 for five boxes of “books.” I couldn’t do it. I understand the market forces at work here, but come on… Decided to craigslist the collection and let individuals come and pick it over. Crossing fingers.

Music: Van Morrison :: Virgo Clowns
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Future Post

One of WordPress’ little-used features is its ability to set a “drip date” – to set a post’s timestamp in the future so that it doesn’t go live on the site until that time comes around. Recently I was working on a site for a client who needed an Events section. For various reasons, I didn’t want to use any of the existing events plugins for WP – I just wanted to override the behavior for future-dated posts so that they’d go live on the site immediately, without waiting.

For the past year or so, I’ve virtually never found a case where anything I wanted to do with WP hadn’t already been solved by an existing plugin or tweak to template logic. But amazingly, I couldn’t find anything to override the default future post behavior. Posted on WP-Hackers about the problem and got a few solutions volunteered within a few hours (there’s nothing like a vibrant open source community). By far the most elegant was this one from the magical Ryan Boren (same guy who planted the semi-secret WordPress t-shirt geocache):

Stick this in a php document in your plugins folder (remember not to include any whitespace after the closing php tag!), activate it, and create a post with a future timestamp. The post’s status field in wp_posts will be set to “publish” rather than “future” and it’ll go live on the site immediately.

You can also download this as a ready-to-go plugin.

Ryan’s too busy to host this trivial but super-useful plugin himself, but invited me to. I’ve submitted it to WP-Plugins and am awaiting a response – should be available there as well before long.

Music: Daniel Mille :: Les Minots
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Waffle Picker

Wafflepicker I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out Pixelmator – lets me do pretty much everything I’d otherwise do in Photoshop, but with almost no launch time or bloat (the new background gradient on this site was created in Pixelmator). But one thing missing from Pixelmator that I need frequently is the ability to extract the hex value from colors for use in CSS.

Hopefully that ability will be added soon, but while looking around for a solution, came across Waffle’s Hex Color Picker. There are a ton of little hex utils for the Mac, of course, but what’s cool about this one is that it modifies the Mac’s native color picker, adding another pane to deliver the hex value for the current color. Install this little gem and you get hex values available from any Mac app that supports color choosing in any way. Muy elegante.

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Cheap Thrills is Back

A student happened across this blog today, and nailed me on it.

“Didn’t you tell us that light text on dark backgrounds was fatiguing to read?”

“Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work on 20-somethings.

I knew when I tried that Darkwater thing that it was naughty. But something about the water compelled me. And now a combination of fatigue and public humiliation has compelled me back to Cheap Thrills, with a few mods, including a wider content area. And a rare foray into the red spectrum for the bg.

Feel like my old self again.

Music: Junior Kimbrough & Charlie Feathers :: I Feel Good Again