November 2009 Archives

I had the pleasure of attending the midnight screening of The Room over the weekend in San Francisco. I was a little bit worried about high expectations. I'd heard so much hyperbole describing the movie, that I thought there was no way it could live up to expectations. But, as one review writer on Amazon said:

There is something so magically wrong with this movie that it can only be the product of divine intervention.

So true, so true. He goes on.

If you took the greatest filmmakers in history and gave them all the task of purposefully creating a film as spectacularly horrible as this, not one of them—with all their knowledge and skill—could make anything that could even be considered as a contender. Not one line or scene would rival any moment in The Room.

The late night screening was key. While you can buy the DVD or download it online, you're not going to get the magical mixture of standard audience responses ("what candles? what music? what sexy dress?") and truly inspired improv commentary. As a noob, I was even inspired to add my own, largely through the enthusiastic efforts of the brash young girl seated to my left, clearly a Room veteran.

But enough of my yapping. You can get a taste of it yourself with the trailer:


Or check out this excellent in-depth analysis on Trinity News. Happy Rooming!

There is a whole sub-culture on Amazon where people write mock reviews of outrageous products. The first one I saw was the gallon of milk, which prompted the rather obvious review:

1 star: who the in the world buys milk on the internet?!

And thus was born a new art form: the review-as-entertainment. This unassuming gallon of milk now has over 1,000 reviews, including this nod to Poe. Then other products got the mock-review treatment: the Badonkadonk tank; 1 qt of wolf urine; a $500 audio cable; some uranium ore; a book of random numbers.

But my favorite as of late is the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. The reviews are funny, but the customer images are the best.

The 4×3 aspect ratio is a rapidly becoming a footnote in history. The majority of monitors and laptops these days are wide-screen. This makes them great for watching movies, but not well suited for applications that were designed in the old 4×3 world.

Take a look at this screen grab from the next version of Microsoft Office - Word 2010:



There are two things to notice:

1. Notice the big, blank, gray bars on either side of the document? Wasted space.
2. Notice the scroll bar on the right? It indicates you're only seeing about a half page of the document on the screen.

I used to deal with this by getting a swivel monitor and rotating my screen into portrait mode. That made it great for reading web pages and working on word-processing documents. However, the bulk of my job is working on specs and presentations that are in landscape orientation. It's easier to keep the screen landscape to work on these.

The idea to steal here is a pretty simple one: just move the UI from the horizontal ribbon across the top to a vertical sidebar next to the document. Word for the Mac already does this to great success. It minimizes the wasted space to the side of the document, and it regains valuable vertical real estate, so you can see nearly 20% more of your document on the screen at once.

Version 10 of Yahoo! Messenger is now out. I'm partial to the official Yahoo Messenger client since I worked on the design of it for several versions. However, I simple loathe the ad in the main window. Since I tend to keep this window up on my desktop most of the time, the ad really draws the eye, especially when it's aggressively animated. I finally got annoyed enough today to do something about it.

A quick search led me to this tool: Ad Banner Remover Plus. It works perfectly for me, and also has a few additional features as well, such as replacing the startup animation sequence, or even adding a search box for finding emoticons quickly. (tho I still prefer my method better).

I'm all for Yahoo! monetizing their services, but I really wish they could do it in a much more intelligent way. There are so many other ways to do it better. I think Pandora is a good example of monetization done right. Contextual ads—such as those seen in Gmail—would be another way to do it within a conversation window. Heck, I wouldn't mind even leaving the ad in the Messenger window if I could turn off the animations and also request only top-tier ads (e.g. no lower your bills or refinance your mortgage ads with the craptastic visual design and seizure-inducing animations).

I love this video. It is so wise. I know the 20-something me wouldn't think so, but the 30-something me knows so. I'm sure this is the reason I basically gave up on my music composition back in my mid-20s.

The stuff I was making just didn't live up to the high standard I had for what I considered to even be adequate, let alone actually good. It's so hard to do, but the trick is to power through that period and be OK with churning out crap, because the experience of creating all that crap ends up making you better. And then—only after you put in your 10,000 hours—will you start to create content that lives up to your expectations.

I look back on the user interface designs I created early in my career, and some of them are just crap. I mean horrible. C-level work. But it's a necessary part of getting to A-level results. Ira say it well:

So you've got really good taste... but it's like there's a gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good... It's trying to be good; it has ambition to be good; but it's not quite that good.

But your taste—the thing that got you into the game—your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you...A lot of people never get past that phase, and a lot of people at that point quit...

Everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste, and they could tell what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short... Everybody goes through that... It's totally normal, and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work... Because it's only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will finally be as good as your ambitions.

Read the full transcript here.

In a word: awesome.

“So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home. Or Don't. I don't care.”
[Cue eagle scream]

I Love Local Commercials

I really hate Trebuchet. I really want to like it. After all, it's a humanist font, and those are my favorites. But the lowercase g and the ampersand just grate on me and the lowercase i and j with their crossbars feel cumbersome. I took it upon myself last year to tweak this font to try to salvage it. But here it is a year later, and I'm still not happy.

When posting in the Typophile forum on my Trebuchet project last year, I mentioned that the lowercase g was inspired by the on in Meta. One snarky commenter suggested I simply substitute all of the Meta characters into Trebuchet. So that’s what I did.

Well, not really. What I did was I took my copy of the Meta font and changed the Family Name parameter to Trebuchet MS. Then I deleted the Trebuchet font files from my system and copied in my new font files. The result was simply fantastic. I loved the result.

So of course I didn't stop there. Arial is boring. I replaced it with Myriad. Gentium is the serifed font that replaced Times New Roman. And Consolas is my new monospaced font, replacing Courier New. I even replaced the universally-hated Comic Sans with Mighty Zeo, one of the fantastic options offered by Blambot.
 
When I tried to do the same on my Windows computer, however, it didn't work out so well. The fonts looked awful. Microsoft ClearType is great for optimized fonts, but for other ones, their font renderer is simply awful. I ended up using all ClearType fonts as my replacements (Arial→Calibri, Trebuchet→Corbel, Courier New→Consolas, Times New Roman→Constantia).

Most of the fonts I chose to use have commercial licenses. (I tried to use Delicious as my sans serif font, but I just didn't like it as well as Meta or Myriad.) However, Gentium license does permit redistribution, so here are the modified font files. Just delete all the Times New Roman files out of your system's Fonts folder and copy these in. Enjoy!

Download the Gentium font family to replace Times New Roman

The business model of pet meds is identical to human prescription drug model. The cost per application is the same, regardless of the dosage. This means that flea or heartworm treatments cost the same for a 10 lbs dog as they do for a 100+ lbs dog. You can use this to your advantage (presuming your pet isn't in the largest category).

Buy the meds in the largest dose available, then cut it down to the appropriate level for the size of your pet. For example, my dogs are 30 and 40 lbs. So I get the dosage for a 89-132 lbs dog, and split one dose between the two of them with a bit left over for the next month.

You can also save money by buying meds online. I've been buying Frontline from Amazon for a while now. And I just bought a year's supply of HeartGard from Pets Life Rx.

The formula to use is pretty easy to derive from the doses on the different packages. For Frontline, it works out to be .011 fl oz/lb of pet or 1/3 mL/lb.