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The 4400, Season 4

Another summer drawing to a close, another season of The 4400 over.

I've heard this show called many things: sci-fi lite, vanilla, unwatchable. I'm kind of puzzled to hear these reviews, but the show does ride the line; too mainstream for the uber-nerds, too strange for the casual viewer.

I'm not writing this to sell you the show. I've been with it since the pilot and I'll watch it until it's cancelled. Luckily, that won't be soon, since USA just ordered 13 more episodes for Season 4. To all the detractors, you know where to stick it.

Sneak Peek

Found this page on the Clear Channel site, offering a lot of Top 40 full album streams. If you can get past the "Sneak Peek: Hear It Here First" every minute or so, you can preview a bunch of albums. Nothing special, just another resource. I imagine it's updated rather frequently.

jQuery, Web Forms 2.0

jQuery hit version 1.0 on Friday last week. I guess it's about time I work it into my repertoire.

Relatedly, a Web Forms 2.0 spec made into a W3C draft last week, too. Maybe we'll finally get some new additions to HTML forms.

Tideland

I came across a link to this photo album from Jeff Bridges on the set of the new Terry Gilliam movie Tideland. Bridges has a good eye. For some context, head over to the bizarre movie website.

DHH on TWiT

Today I was listening to the Inside the Net interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. During the interview, Hansson got into "man hours" on a project versus actual working hours per day. By his definition, a "man hour" is 8 hours of work, which he stated is virtually impossible to accomplish in a 8-hour work day. Now, this is work focused on a specific task, not just time spent at work.

On any given day, it's nearly impossible to spend the total working hours toward one task without interruption. Therefore, he said any project manager that dictated deadlines by 8-hour days was "delusional." I tend to agree with most of this argument; most developers/designers don't get 100% of a working day on a project.

My question for the people out there who work project-based jobs is: how many actual hours of work toward a goal do you average per day? Hansson said about 4-5 hours in an 8-hour day was average. Sound about right?

Livin' Strong

Why I still read Golden Fiddle daily.

Roll Rampant and Free

The Roll Rampant and Free project from Maya Hayuk is rad. It's a huge painted skate track in Pittsburgh, PA completed back in June of 2005. The other noteworthy piece from her portfolio is the packaging for the last Prefuse 73 album, Security Screenings.

Alive In Joburg

I don't get too excited by Halo news, but the short film Alive In Joburg, from the recently announced, unknown director Neill Blomkamp, has a nice sense of eerie realism.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Whitley

Happy 30th birthday to Reggie! How's work, buddy?

Jakob Says

Jakob Nielsen says it's time to design for 1024x768. I love this quote: "anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600x1200 screen resolution."

Hebrew National

If you haven't had Hebrew National Beef Franks, then you need to pick some up for your next cookout. They are by far my favorite hotdogs now. All from the power of a good TV commerical.

Trent Reznor has no neck

It's true, Trent Reznor no longer has a neck.

Photosynth

Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs seems pretty amazing. It technology takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Aesthetic Apparatus

Aesthetic Apparatus put together a hilarious video documenting their process on YouTube. Here's the resulting print.

Tablet Hotels

Looks like I need to check out Tablet Hotels next time I get out of North Carolina on vacation.

Last.fm Update

Looks like Last.fm just updated. Unfortunately, looks like they're moving away from the "less is more" ideal. I was at least glad to see they gave me the option of remove the artwork from my charts. Overall, I will give them kudos for cleanly laying out all of the information on the profile pages.

Step On It

I should be packing and tying up loose ends before I leave, but instead I just spent 15 minutes watching this Orchid Footwear BMX film Step On It. I'll leave half to watch next Sunday, but the gap attempted around 6:50-7:00 is insane. I'm not surprised he couldn't land it.

It's always better on holiday

I'm off to Holden Beach until next Sunday! I'm glad to get away from comptuers, work, Charlotte, and the internet to hang out with my family on the beach for a week. My Ta-da list keeps getting longer and longer, but we'll worry about that when I get back.

W3Counter Global Web Stats

I know this is only pulled from sites feeding into the W3Counter, but having Global Web Stats is pretty handy. Interesting to see that they put Firefox at around 24% of total browser usage.

BumpTop

Two guys at the University of Toronto developed a new desktop interface called BumpTop. The prototype requires a TabletPC, but I could see this working for folk that go the desktop PC and stylus route.

Google Notebook

You've probably already heard about Google Notebook, but the best part about this new service is the Google Notebook Firefox Extension. Google and Firefox are getting to be quite the dynamic duo.

Might as well throw out Google Browser Sync, too. Use it to sync multiple installations of Firefox.

The House Always Wins

The House rejected Net neutrality.

Eric Schmidt Weighs In

Eric Schmidt published a note to Google users regarding the impending Net Neutrality bill in the House and Senate. It seems it's now down to the people calling Congress and telling them to shape up.

HTML Email

This article on the woes of constructing HTML email over at Vitamin reminded me to mention Campaign Monitor's a great blog solely on this subject. They hype themselves, but that's expected.

Impossible Team

Adidas went all out for this bridge-sized billboard of German keeper Oliver Kahn for their Impossible Team World Cup 2006 advertising. I usually hate billboards, but that is just amazing.

The Screen Savers

For any fans of TechTV's The Screen Savers out there, here's a YouTube playlist of 33 episodes from 2004. It was fun while it lasted.

The Proposition

Apparently Nick Cave wrote a screenplay and it was made into The Proposition. The movie looks violent. I want to see it.

Net Neutrality Act

The New York Times and Massachusetts representative Ed Markey are doing their part to help the Net Neutrality effort. In case you're interested, here's a checklist of ways you can contribute.

Colbert at White House Dinner

AP invited Stephen Colbert to speak at the recent White House Correspondents' Association dinner. It seems the President and some others weren't that thrilled about some of his comments. Here's the full video and there's a wrap-up at The Huffington Post with a slew of related links.

Spanish Anthem

I'm all for everyone getting a fair shot in this country, but writing a spanish-language "Star-Spangled Banner" is going a little too far. It was written by a British music producer, nonetheless.

Net Neutrality

I've watched this fiasco build for a couple months and now it seems it's do-or-die time. For those of you who don't know, the massive telecommunication companies in the US are pushing for Congress to allow them greater control over the internet. Basically, bad news for the internet.

The term Net Neutrality is being thrown around a lot lately. The idea of neutrality guarantees the end user fair and equal access to any corner of the web, any time. It's essentially the internet's First Amendment.

Many fear this new power will allow the telcos to begin shaping and filtering internet traffic in such a way that many companies will have to pay premiums, on top of their current fees, for access to the "fast lane." If companies choose not to pay these premiums, then the internet provider can choose to slow or block their services. Not to mention, this helps open the doors for a host of other censorship and extortion issues.

There are plenty of points to go back and forth on, but the central issue is that the internet is a currently a level playing field; everyone is essentially given the same opportunity on the web. However, these impending decisions could change all of that. So, if you think the internet is pretty awesome now, then take your pick between Don't Mess With The Internet or Save The Internet and let your voice be heard.

For those who might just chalk this rant up as liberal, idealistic hogwash, there are plenty of people lining up to support Net Neutrality. Among the companies are Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Intel, Ebay and Amazon.

For the sake of being fair and balanced, here's a CNET article that features a rebuttal from the AT&T CEO and FCC chair.

Wii

Nintendo dropped codename "Revolution" and announced Wii as the official name for the upcoming console. The jury's still out for me, but doesn't change the fact that I'm going to get one the day it comes out.

The Morning News

Question: do you have hipsters?

CSS Vertical Align

Aligning things vertically in CSS seems to befuddle most. I still need a refresher course from time to time to remember what actually works. Vertical-Align Misue over at iBloom Studios clears it up.

Find All Instances

This may be common knowledge to some of you, but up until today I didn't know how to find all instances within a movie clip with Actionscript. After emailing Mason, he sent back exactly what I needed to know. Of course, once I learned that it's called a "for-in" loop, I found references to it all over the place. The example in the movie clip chapter over on the O'Reilly site is essentially that same idea. Thanks again, Mr. Poe!