Month: April 2006

I had to disable the recently-added “Recently Played” (songs) item in my sidebar.

Last.fm exports it as an image – and the image is too wide to fit in my sidebar.

If I scale it down to fit, it’ll be teensy-tiny and unreadable.

I can pull my recently-played tracks from last.fm as an RSS feed. If I do it that way, I can format it however I wish. It’ll just take some doing and a little bit of learning.

SIGH… I’ll add that to to-do list.

In Firefox, there’s a little circular thingie in the upper right-hand corner, in the menu bar. It spins around when a webpage is loading.

If you click that little circular thingie, it will stop what it’s doing and take you to the Firefox home page.

It will do this even if the page was in the process of re-publishing your entire blog to your webserver. Even if you didn’t want it to do that. Even if it was a complete accident, and you now have to re-re-publish it.

So don’t click that little circular thingie. Like I just did.

I’ve added another item to the sidebar, via Last.fm, my most recently-played music. It’s an experiment in using yet another “Web 2.0” site and all the social internetting that’s been going on lately.

I listen to a lot of music, and I’m always interested in finding more. Last.fm seems like a good way to do that, and to share my musical tastes with… um… whoever is out there reading this.

Right now, of course, it shows nothing. The playlist will fill up eventually… that’s the idea, anyway.

Haven’t paid them yet, so I’m using their free features. And if their “iScrobbler” plug-in munges my iTunes I’m gonna be madder than mad.

So drop me a line if you like (or dislike) what I’m listening to, and feel free to make suggestions based on what you see.

I’m a speed freak at the U-Scan. I try to hurry through it as fast as the machine will let me. Most times I’m already in position for the next option before it even comes up. I don’t know why (I’m the same way with ATMs). I just don’t like waiting. And it’s not because there are often people behind me. Like I care about them.

I got into trouble once at an unfamiliar store, where they must have set the response time on super slow. I confuzzled the machine greatly, requiring the attendants intervention and frustrating me. I must have grumbled at my friend about the damned machines for at least seven minutes and forty-seven seconds.

But last night, at my local QFC, where I’m on my home turf, I was zipping through just like normal. Until I got to the part about paying. I had a twenty-dollar bill, and I could tell it was a bit wrinkled so I used a precious second or two before the machine asked me to insert my money to try to flatten it out. Just being efficient. But trying to feed it into the machine wasn’t working. It just kept rejecting it. Again, it was slowing me down which is a cardinal sin and harshes my groove.

The nice attendant-lady gave me a couple of suggestions but it still wasn’t so work-y. Apologetically I offerred to pay with my debit card but she waved me over, took my twenty and surprised me by ringing me up at the center aisle, and giving me cash out of her drawer there.

“Wow, I didn’t know that was even an option” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied, smiling, “it helps sometimes.”

I mentally upgraded her from attendant to actual cashier.

Dear Harvey Danger,

Since your front man, Sean Nelson, has been having a run of bad luck lately, and is down in the dumps, I think the best thing for you all to do is to go out on tour. Surround yourselves with loving, adoring fans. Accept the accolades that those in the know, those who matter, are only too grateful to heap upon you.

I mean, I guess, sure, he’s run off to party in the ruins of New Orleans (the bastard!). But as soon as he gets back, tour.

And when you hinted that you’d start touring again in February, did you mean this year? ‘Cause in case you haven’t noticed, it’s practically May.

sincerely,

A Super Fan
Portland, OR.

OK, so it looks like I’ve wandered into a minefield with my new design. Y’know, the one that doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 or less. Which is the browser the vast majority of the public is still using stuck with.

Funny, I didn’t notice that during the design phase. I thought about booting my new sexy thing into XP last weekend to check it out, but it’s such a hassle to reboot and I didn’t think it mattered. Also, I didn’t want to be stuck in XP forever.

At any rate, I’m doing a lot of research on the topic, and as it turns out, there are a lot of workarounds and bug-exploits that will trick Internet Explorer (versions 6 or less) into rendering CSS2 elements the way every other browser does. It’s like a riddle: when is “the standard” not standards-compliant?

So I’m learning about the CSS box model, and the star HTML bug and the underscore hack, and conditional stylesheets and all sorts of other stuff.

And learning is fun.

It’s just not so fun when I’m doing it to support something that’s both widely-used and brain-damaged.

At any rate, don’t give up hope, IE >=6 users! First, as noted you could upgrade your browser to something more 21st Century:

• Firefox
• Opera
• …for those on Apple hardware, Safari works just fine

If you can’t switch from IE, you could try Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, just released this week. I haven’t installed that, because I still need a version of IE 6 to test my fix, but I’ve heard it’s more *ahem* standards-compliant.

If you can’t upgrade your browser at all (shame on you, surfing from work with such restrictive IT folk! You’re going to get fired doing that!)… well, you can try to not load the CSS at all. I’m not sure how to do that, but that sounds like a great feature to add to my site, huh? I’ve seen it on other sites so I know it’s possible, though.

Still, hold on, I’m working on it. I do want people to be able to read my site. I swear. It’s not just for me and my closest friends. Honest.

I mean, c’mon. I’m a blogger, for crying out crab! I want attention!

I love the internets! I’ve uncovered a billion-dollar idea, and here I am just giving it away for free.

Accessories for iPods are, it’s been said, is a billion-dollar industry.

Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory, estimates Steve Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group, a research firm. That works out to three or four additional purchases per iPod.

There are cases, and stickers, and add-ons, and car kits… you name it. However, there’s one simple item that, it seems, no one has yet made.

I’ve got a beautiful iPod (30GB Video model in iconic white), and I keep it in a case. It’s been in a case since the day I took it out of the package. First I had one of those gel cases, but it didn’t have screen protection so I cobbled something up from some cell phone screen protectors. But I didn’t like that solution – it hid the iPod too much and the clear plastic over the screen made it hard to see.

Also, I have a Griffin iTrip, which lets me play my iPod over any FM radio. I don’t own a car, but I use FlexCar, so the iTrip was the perfect solution for me. It gave me a temporary connection to whichever car I was using at the time.*

But the iTrip doesn’t fit into the dock connector when it’s in the case. I have to take it out of the case to use it. Up ’til now I’ve used the old gel case, which I’ve modified to accept the iTrip – but that means the screen, the most important part to keep scratch-free, is exposed. My solution to that? Put the whole thing into a ZipLoc bag. Ugly but functional.

What I’d like is a simple connector, adapter, or cable that had a male dock connector on one end to plug into the iPod, and a female dock connector on the other that would accept the iTrip, and would allow me to use the iTrip without taking the iPod, the beautiful beautiful scratch-free iPod, out of it’s protective clear case.

I asked the geniuses at the Apple Store. They’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve looked online. Couldn’t find it. In the forums on iLounge, I found a thread that suggests that I could make one from an old dock. Yeah, I suppose I could do that. If I wanted to drop another $40 on a new dock just to tear it apart. Ugh. And if I’m going to do that, why not just buy the iTrip Auto, which already does what I want? I mean, besides the fact that that little doohicky costs seventy smackers and would be yet another cable I had to carry around, rather than a cheap little adapter…

Why doesn’t someone just, y’know, make something like this, already? I know there’s folk out there who would buy one?

* And if this doesn’t prove the point about accessories, I don’t know what will. In addition to my $300 iPod, I’ve bought not one but two cases and a radio transmitter that I infrequently use. Actually, the iTrip is my third one – I’ve had two previous models, for earlier iPods. Of course, neither of those fit my newest iPod… which can only be solved with the application of mo’ money.

It’s published!

It’s late and I need to get to bed, but the new site is published and working.

Feel free to poke around and see if anything is broken and let me know. I’ll be doing the same over the next week.

I still want to update the photo gallery to match the look of the rest of the site. I have some other, smaller things to fix, also – old links that now point to dead URLs, trying to reverse the order of the Archive list, giving the Maps an actual page, updating and re-posting my trophy page… probably other stuff, too.

But for now, this is my new beautiful home on the internets.