Note: To view the changes made to tumbledry, you may need to do a hard refresh. To summarize that link, it’s Ctrl+Shift+R in Firefox, Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer, and Command+Shift+R on Macs.
As I cryptically mentioned a couple of posts back, there was a realignment going on at tumbledry. Not a redesign, oh no. Those are rather a bit more costly. Anyhow, the seeds for this evolution in design were planted back in April. You see, I sometimes diddle in photoshop as a way of getting my creative side out (and as a homework break). So, I put together a horizontal grid with a vertical grid and started plunking tumbledry elements in. Thus, this is a realignment in both the vertical and the horizontal sense. Vertically, I have finally found my rhythm, with an 18px baseline. Notice how the horizontal pieces of text (it works best on the front page, I’ve been lazier elsewhere) line up nicely, even with the gaps between images, etc. (This trick is slightly broken on Internet Explorer. Curse you, Internet Explorer.) Oh, and you’ll find the line lengths are quite short. So, you only have to read about 10 words per line. This has been shown (by a few studies) to maximize comprehension. Here’s the idea: the human eye has an arc through which it moves (comfortably). This allows you, at a set distance, to comfortably scan a certain horizontal distance without moving your head. Having to move your head back and forth requires considerably more brain work, and slows down reading comprehension. Restricting the width of the line keeps your eye within its comfortable arc, minimizing head movement and maximizing comprehension. So I think/hope this evolution will serve us well.
Horizontally, the column width upon which tumbledry is based has been shortened up to 120px. Eight of these columns results in a 960px wide layout, which is pretty standard (it comfortably fits on most monitors). Plus, I really like the proportions that this 120px thing provides. I especially like the front page split: 50/25/25%.
Oh, and a final thing. Links are now chronologically interpolated between journal posts. So, you’ll get more of a stream-of-consciousness feel on the front page. I think the links were getting abandoned at the bottom of the page before… now, we can all share in link excitement. As usual, questions and bugs in the comments!
You know how here at tumbledry you earn a comment bullet after 125 comments? Is that starting to seem like an excessive number to everyone? Yes, me, too. I think I have found a better way to do this. I’ll code it up in the next week (or so) as I have time. Finding a job is rather a bit lot much higher on the list. I’d revise that sentence, but I thought it was funny. Your mileage may vary.
A bit over a month ago, I was watching an episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien, when I noticed the tie he was wearing looked awfully familiar.
“Hey, that looks like the tie I have from Express,” I said to Mykala. She seemed to agree. The thought of being able to wear part of Conan’s wardrobe was just plain cool. A good ice breaker, even (but probably not for interviews). Imagine: “Welcome to your job interview, tell us about yourself.” “Well, I have the same tie as Conan O’Brien, that is cool.” So, soon I was able to compare Conan’s tie to my own. They don’t match.
Well, I tried. Perhaps someday Conan and myself will share the same neck wear. Until then, onward!
iPod Protection - I have to ask: why get a full case (of which I have 2) for your iPod when you can just get a clear plastic sticky cover? I really like this idea because you can continue to hold in your hand and experience the efforts that were made to make the iPod so nice to hold, yet also protect your investment from scratches. Now I’m sounding like a commercial.
Ok, here we go. Since one of the purposes of this site is to preserve things in which I am interested for posterity: I will now embark on an image-powered summary of some of my interests from the past week.
Interest 1: Vega4
This music group sounds like Snow Patrol; that’s a good thing. I like ‘em … I caught them on the radio (not on the television, though I must admit that seems to be one of the best place to hear new, alternative music these days); I’ve been thinking about getting their album ever since. A quote from a PopMatters review follows:
Perhaps it’s the directness, the refusal of a band like Vega4 to house their emotions and their stories in deep symbolism, instead showing a preference for literal sentiments like “Life is beautiful / But it’s complicated / We barely make it” (quite obviously from the aforementioned “Life is Beautiful”). That’s one of those lyrics that could be brilliant, or it could be utterly stupid. It’s impossible to tell the difference.
…
That’s the formula here—repetitive verses with big fat choruses, all of them with easy-to-follow, eminently singable melodies.
Interest 2: Mandles
I thought the name of this was funny. With scents like “leather,” “yardwork,” and “wild alaska,” these are guaranteed to be masculine candles. Don’t think I’ll buy any (just out of college, remember … I’m poor)—but it’s a funny, catchy idea.
Interest 3: Funny t-shirts
I’ve been known to procure the funny t-shirt from time to time, and these two I really love. The first is not so funny:
Called “Reach for the Stars,” it was reprinted by Threadless because it was so popular. I really like it. Now then, next up is a great biking t-shirt:
I think that’s really funny. It isn’t elitist or tree-hugging, but it’s funny and has a powerful message. Plus, it has some great graphic design going for it. You can ask Threadless to reprint it—that’s cool.
Interest 4: Slashdot Humor
I’m almost embarrassed to mention this … but hey, I own a website where I blather on about the sorts of things I am interested it—if that’s embarrassing, then perhaps I should reevaluate the larger picture. Anyhow, this one requires a bit of explaining of the culture of Slashdot, a sign which should be sufficient to push me away from sharing this joke. But, I’m up for a challenge. Ok, here’s the back story: Slashdot is an extremely geeky hangout for people from many walks of life, but it attract a disproportionate number of folks with a predilection towards the many different flavors of computer geekery. Founded in 1997, the site is so big that it’s famous for crashing the servers of the websites to which it links. As Kottke wrote on the matter:
If you look at the second graph, Slashdot appears to have a significant “aftershock” effect on the traffic to kottke.org. The traffic went up and stayed up for days. In contrast, the traffic from Digg fell off when the link dropped off the front page and increased traffic a little the next day (compared to the baseline) before Slashdot came and blew the doors off at 4pm.
Digg gets all the press, but Slashdot still has serious mojo — 15,000 referrers in a little over three hours.
So, we’ve established that Slashdot is a site that has tremendous influence, with piles and piles (millions) of visits each day. Within this framework, a rather complex culture has evolved. There is one key to the humor here:
Slashdot assigns user ID numbers in the order that the user registered, so the lower the user ID, the longer they have been a registered user.
There is a (generally joking) sense of seniority afforded to those with these low UID numbers. There is also a reference in many discussions of articles of “RTFA,” which can be interpreted as “read the featured article.” “Featured” needn’t be the word for which “F” stands … there can also be a modifier for article; figuring out the specific word intended is left as an exercise to the reader. So, Colin Smith, with the UID of 2679, writes:
WTF? You don’t expect me to go RTFA do you? That’s what all those high UID peons are for. Someone post a cogent summary.
For reference, my user number is in the 18 million range. So, this guy does have some seniority. However, user Enry, with a UID of 630 responded with a comment of his own:
Exactly. Let me know when you’re done, newbie.
Interest 5: Pumping Iron
I investigated the film Pumping Iron, because I had heard a couple of people talking about it. It’s essentially a film from the 1970’s that, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the main character, examines everything that is wrong with competitive body building and the obsessed individuals at the center of the maelstrom.
Oh, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is, umm, really strong. See below, a photograph from the November 16, 1975 issue of the Los Angeles Times. In the linked larger picture, pay special attention to his left leg … have you ever seen anybody with visible veins on that part of their leg? Scary.
Interest 6: Doorbell Photography
I stumbled across this guy who makes great pictures of Italian doorbells: I found him because he uses the same camera as myself. Here’s an excerpt of one picture:
See the “L’INVESTIGATIVA” under one bell? Well, the extensive caption to the picture on the Flickr page that hosts this image tells the history behind that caption. It’s about a young Italian guy who really knew he wanted to be a private eye: the caption tells the story of his many failures, and his eventual success as the head of the largest organization of its type in the country (I won’t give away the ending—it’s worth a read).
Now then, there is more to say about the lol cats: they are essentially pictures of cats with really bold captions saying funny things. These funny things may have their grammar tweaked. “I has idiosyncratic conjugation” would the self-referential example cited by Anil Dash from the previous link. I have to include one lol cat picture.
Folks, I am at a loss for words. Except to point out that this is probably the first time the following phrase has ever been posted to the internet: “… One Vivitar 283 ball-bungied to my head w/ a coffee filter diffuser …”
Interest 9: BYU “University”
Brigham Young University is not a University. A University is a place where open discourse and learning can take place, unfettered by prejudice, prejudgement, and agenda (religious or otherwise). Take the “Do Ask, Do Tell” policy at BYU, covered recently by Newsweek:
“Behaviors that indicate homosexual conduct” are still forbidden, but now, “one’s stated sexual orientation is not an honor-code issue.” To gay students it marks a new era. But being gay is still a burden at BYU. All unmarried students must remain chaste, but gays can be punished for showing same-sex affection, for forming a gay student group or, says the code, “promoting homosexual relations as being morally acceptable.”
These types of policies are difficult to legally regulate—if they could be, then those schools wanting to be called “universities” could be better regulated and ultimately denied the name of university. In the meantime, as far as I can tell, BYU is just another Bob Jones “University”. To briefly summarize Bob Jones:
The BJU science department offers majors in biology, chemistry and physics and also offers courses in astronomy. However, no member of BJU’s science faculty holds a degree in geology, and only an introductory course is offered in the subject. The department supports young-earth creationism.
Regardless, raging against the specific policies and transgressions of these “universities” will do little. I’d like to cut to the heart of it: they are not universities and should not be called such. They can continue to misinform and misguide their students, as long as they cease to do so under the guise of education. Their’s (can I get an editor’s help with that word?) is a mission of indoctrination, not education. Margaret Nussbaum, in her book Cultivating Humanity, gets at the issue:
Human sexuality is an important topic of scholarly inquiry, as it is an important aspect of life. In many fields—including medicine, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, religious studies, classics, and literature—the relaxing of legal restraints on discussion of sexual activity has led to a flowering of research. … Such research is sometimes said to have a radical “political agenda” that will corrupt the young.
It is not clear why learning about a subject should be associated with the erosion of moral judgment on that subject. In many other areas of our lives we do not think this way. We do not think that studying the history of slavery or of religious intolerance would be likely to make students lose their grip on moral judgments about the badness of slavery or of religious persecution. On the contrary, we tend to think that historical understanding is an indispensable aid to moral judgment, since it confronts us plainly with what we do and have done.
Interest 10: Cargo Planes
There are planes designed and built for the express purpose of carrying huge awkward things. The internal storage capacity of the main cargo holds on these planes is about 3.5 times that of my parent’s home in suburbia. You could fit the cubic volume of over 80 of my last apartments in one of these planes.
The latest version of this plane has a rather conventional name, the Dreamlifter, which refers to the plane it is helping build: the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The planes that preceeded it, however, had rather different names. There is the Airbus Beluga, which looks amazingly like the beluga whale from which is takes its name. Even better, there’s the Aero Pregnanent Guppy, which does not look airworthy:
Check out that thing. You can see the original lines of the plane underneath: now it’s just a hulking mass of metal. Unbelievable. Oh, and food for thought: the successor to the Pregnant Guppy is the Super Guppy.
I’m thinking strongly about seeing the movie Solaris, whose plot revolves around an unknown force that makes manifest people using only the memories from others. Roger Ebert made a striking point in his review of the 2002 version:
The genius of Lem’s underlying idea is that the duplicates, or replicants, or whatever we choose to call them, are self-conscious and seem to carry on with free will from the moment they are evoked by the planet. Rheya, for example, says, “I’m not the person I remember. I don’t remember experiencing these things.” And later, “I’m suicidal because that’s how you remember me.” In other words, Kelvin gets back not his dead wife, but a being who incorporates all he knows about his dead wife, and nothing else, and starts over from there. She has no secrets because he did not know her secrets. If she is suicidal, it is because he thought she was. The deep irony here is that all of our relationships in the real world are exactly like that, even without the benefit of Solaris. We do not know the actual other person. What we know is the sum of everything we think we know about them. Even empathy is perhaps of no use; we think it helps us understand how other people feel, but maybe it only tells us how we would feel, if we were them.
Apparently the 1972 version is quite good as well, but who knows if I could even find it.
The iTunes we all know, love, and use has a convenient music sharing feature. It allows people on a the same network to listen to one another’s music. This is particularly useful in a University setting; you can see the music of everyone in a dorm, in a common area, and in the library. Recently, when Mykala and myself were studying for finals in the library, I decided to open up iTunes and see what libraries were available from my collegiate colleagues. The list of the library names that appeared follows:
DC’s music
zach neubauer’s library
porn starr
ballsack
snap yo fangalz 2 deez jangalz
What sort of college educated person names their iTunes library “porn star,” but with two r’s in “star”? It’s like these people’s 13 year old siblings named their iTunes library. They’re either not creative or offensive, with the notable exception of the final library name. That is a fantastic name. After that, I turned up the speakers on Mykala’s laptop and used the whoopie cushion dashboard widget. Who’s acting their age now?
Whoa. As I write, graduation with a B.S. in biochemistry and life-changing changes all crash down at once. I should brainstorm for some sort of longer form writing about these events. I could call my writing a “post” … and then, as they accumulate, arrange these “posts” in reverse chronological order on a sort of faux-forum online. I’ll call that a world wide web log of my life. Perhaps I could shorten that to “web log.” Or even “blog.”
Nah. That’d never catch on.
I lie awake because I’m scared
I’m not as fake as you once heard
But we’ll lay down now making sure we
Put these words between us
Can you hear us falling
We’re falling faster
It’s hard to remember
Where we were at a year before
