Archive for April, 2006
Wacky Packages
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
More Nostalgia? Yep. My next purchase on eBay will be a complete set of the 1973 Wacky Packages trading cards, Except Mountain Goo, which I found in my old relics box I pulled down from the attic. I had the whole set at one point, not sure what happened to them. Seeing as how I now have a permanent storage locker here in Florida I can stuff tons of wortheless crap into, I might as well fill it it up!
Wacky Packages is a series of editorial trading cards featuring parodies of consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has been revived every few years since. At one time the product briefly outsold baseball cards.
The cards have parodied a variety of well-known brands, relying on the talents of such comics artists as Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, George Evans, Jay Lynch and Norman Saunders. For example, one card featured “Blisterine” instead of Listerine and another had “Neverready” batteries rather than Eveready batteries.
The initial series was followed by a similarly designed Wacky Ads line in 1969. Wacky Packages was then brought back in 1973 for a highly successful run. For the first two years, these cards were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than its flagship line of baseball cards. They continued until 1976 through a total of 16 series.
Start, Pause
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
Today, I dug down into my entire CD collection with the intention of burning every last CD to disk. The job was a bit more tasking than I expected, augmented by the collection of CD’s I shipped back from San Francisco. I was figuring I’d have it all done in a few hours, but it turns out burning over 500 CDs can take, well, a lot of time. I’m about half way through. I started around 12 this afternoon, and it’s now 11pm. Over the next week after work I’ll dig back in and try to finish the other half. Overall, my music collection is pretty wide, I’ve been through quite a few phases over the years, from grunge, to classical, to dance, to trance, to hard rock, to classic rock, to country, and quite a few in-between albums that can’t possibly be classified. Over all, so far, the top albums I’ve listened too today, are, in no particular order:
Smashing Pumpkins – gish
Crystal Method – Vegas
Sasha and Digweed – Northern Exposure volumes 1, and 2
Elvis Costello and The Attractions – The Very Very Best of Elvis Costello and The Attractions
Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I Might See, She Hangs Brightly
Rebirth Of Cool (UK Imports) – Volumes 1, 2, 5 and 7 (disc 1 & 2)
Brenda Kahn – Epiphany in Brookland
Natalie Merchant – Ophelia, Tigerlilly, and Live in N.Y. City
Underworld – Dark and Long
Ween – The Pod
Grateful Dead – Birth Of The Dead
Spalding Gray – Terrors Of Pleasure (Macky Auditorium @ CU, Gang Of Seven spoken word series)
Janes Addiction – Ritual de lo Habitual
Sarah McLachlan – Solace, The Freendom Sessions, Touch
Toshack Highway-Sianspheric – Magnetic Morning
Urge Overkill – Saturation
More to come. I’ll try to get back to this and link.
Databases
Friday, April 28th, 2006
Tim O’Reilly does an interesting set of Q/A sessions on database design with the developers of Flickr, Bloglines, memeorandum, Craigslist, Second Life, and a Google Earth like app at NASA. Interesting read.
Second Life
Bloglines / Meme
Flickr
NASA
Craigs
Computer Speak
Friday, April 28th, 2006
“The samples of speech on this recording were produced by an electronic digital computer. They are a by-product of a research project at Bell Telephone Laboratories to obtain a better understanding of the nature of speech.”
Circa, 1961. To cool.
Boing Boing has some additional background.
More Digital Nostalgia
Friday, April 28th, 2006
My first job in San Francisco -
> —–Original Message—–
> Sent: Saturday, January 04, 1997 2:55 PM
> To: James C. Mathies
> Subject: Re: Checking in…> > Just out of curiosity, what’s the dress code around the office?
>
> Dress code? What dress code?
Chicago Bans Foiegras
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Sounds like a good idea to me. If your curious what foiegras is, take a look at nofoiegras.org. Hopfully other cruel methods of animal farming get nixed as well someday. In particluar it would be nice to see veal farming illegalized – locking cattle up in crates to prevent them from moving seems a bit cruel to me. The Humane Society has a good web site on the subject.
UI Simplicity
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
Windows is plagued with over-complexity, simple option dialogs are a very good example. Right-click on something like My Computer or the Recycle Bin and you find yourself presented with a dialog that offers three option buttons – “Ok” “Cancel” and “Apply.” If you’ve changed anything in the options within the UI, the “Apply” button will be enabled. Oddly enough, clicking “Ok” or “Apply” will save those changes. Wouldn’t it have been clearer to the user if initially a single “Close” button was displayed, and after the user edits options an additional “Ok”, or “Apply” button was displayed? Why are there three buttons? Am I missing something?
Apple seems to have taken a slightly different approach. They like to customize the buttons based on the situation and they also like to mix up the order of buttons. Sometimes it’s “Ok”, “Cancel”, sometimes it’s “Cancel”, “Ok” , and sometimes there are no “Ok” or “Cancel” buttons at all – once you’ve changed an option it’s considered changed.
In developing Daisy I’m going to go with a simple standard. Two buttons, “Close” and “Ok” will be displayed. If any option in the dialog or property tab changes, the close button will change to “Cancel” and the “Ok” button will be enabled. I think that’s the simplest approach overall.
Internet Explorer a Blunder?
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
I was going to write a post in response to Dvorak’s attack on Internet Explorer, but Nick Bradbury beat me to it.
What Dvorak ignores is the huge number of Windows applications that have benefited from the ability to embed a web browser. Microsoft has done a great job making it easy for developers to host Internet Explorer in their software, and this has been a good thing for customers. Think of all the software that relies on an embedded IE – not just commercial web authoring tools, feed readers, email clients, etc., but also the thousands of in-house applications that need to display web pages. This isn’t a minor point: millions of people rely on software that requires an embedded web browser, and in this regard, these people benefit from having the browser included in their OS.
(And yes, I know that theoretically you can embed the Mozilla engine in Windows software. The problem is, embedding Mozilla is a pain in the ass. I speak from experience: TopStyle provides the option to view your work in either an embedded IE or Mozilla (or both at the same time), and despite the fact that the people who use the embedded Mozilla are in the minority, we’ve had far more support problems with it than we’ve had with IE.)
I would also add that the concept of an embeddable HTML rendering engine was pioneered by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 5.0. I remember working on my first embedded project back when IE 5.0 came out, it was simply mind blowing what you could do. The number of applications since that leverage this technology is huge. (I myself have developed 6 different applications that reuse the web browser control.) Technology like this has helped the Windows ecosystem flourish. So although Internet Explorer ‘proper’ has cost Microsoft plenty (law suits, developer resources, etc.) it has helped generate who knows how many billions in revenue from sales of operating systems and software for both Microsoft and their development community. I also agree with Nick that integrating IE into Explorer was a mistake, and that Microsoft never should have pulled those OEM stunts – they were destined to destroyed Netscape anyway by simply building the better browser.
Buying Property in Cali
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
For 600 grand, you get an 1100 square foot shack. The no-trespassing sign is probably thrown in for free.
Hey, it’ll most likely appreciate.
Arab-on-Arab Violence
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
Scary, fanatics killing fanatics, with innocent civilians caught in the middle. Sometimes I wish the Cold War would never have ended, it seems more civilized now.
