Yearly Archives: 2007

The Vile Musk of an Ash Tray

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“Today, it’s difficult to recall vividly that time when smoking was so prevalent in New York. Memories of that era are hazy and absurd compared to the altogether more sensible reality we experience today; that you can now spend an evening out with friends without inhaling the deadly byproduct of other people’s cigarettes and without returning home at the end of the evening bearing the vile musk of an ash tray is so thoroughly logical, I’m amazed by how long we tolerated what came before it.”
– Khoi Vinh, discussing the smoking ban in New York

Use Your Common Sense, People

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Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer

A coworker of mine recently sent me a link and said “Cool, I didn’t know the Germans had a walking tank!”

After a few seconds of conversation, it became clear that he was serious. To his credit, Kottke linked to this, and the stuff he posts is usually trustworthy. I’m not sure if Kottke was also fooled, or if his post is meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

Not to pick on my coworker (or Kottke), but use your common sense, people. Just ask yourself what are the odds that A) Nazi Germany built a 40 foot tall walking tank, and B) 30 years later George Lucas put an exact duplicate of a Nazi war machine intoStar Wars, or that C) the only web site mentioning this incredible feat of engineering lists its statistics for a table-top role-playing game?

Half-Life 2 Episode 1: One Paragraph Review

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Half-Life 2 Episode 2

I was going to write a review, but instead I’m going to quote from an email Miles sent me, because he puts it better than I ever could:

“It cracks me up how schizophrenic it is between apocalyptic horror and tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment. On the one hand: Alien slavers colonize the earth! They’re sterilizing humanity, draining the ocean for minerals, and infesting our ecosystem with hostile alien species. On the other hand: everyone of any significance to the story is a Physics PhD! SUPEREMPOWERED NERDS DUKE IT OUT FOR THE FATE OF HUMANITY! You spend the entire game running around with a 22-year-old babe who’s a self-taught physicist, roboticist, electrical engineer, sniper, and alien-technology hacker; she’s a crack shot with rifle, pistol, and shotgun alike; she climbs walls like a parkour master, and high-kicks zombies so hard that their heads come off!”

And a bonus paragraph from a letter that Miles is “mentally composing to Gabe Newell about ep2,” complaining about the death of CENSORED.

“I mean, I know that you’re Valve and hl2 is a Dark Catalogue of Human Nightmares like war, zombies, Orwellian fascism, environmental collapse, and extinction, but get real: The player has spent nearly the entire game tear-assing around the Bavarian forest in a chopped muscle-car with his electrical-engineer / commando / babe sidekick crawling across the hood to ride shotgun, with a literal keg of whup-ass hooked to the back bumper, earning the raucous cheers of the men when he uses said keg to dispatch looming alien tanks (with great dispatch, even.) It’s the height of insensitivity to cap this all off with, ‘and then two monsters came out of nowhere and killed CENSORED.’”

The Email Standards Project

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In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind.

This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

Our mission is to drive the use and support of web standards in email, working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently. This is a community effort to improve the email experience for designers and readers, and we’d love your help.

Given Microsoft’s recent slide backwards on this front in Outlook 2007, the need for a group like this has never been higher. Let’s hope they’re able to get the kind of results the Web Standards Project eventually got.

Last FM Charts

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Last.fm Wavegraph (cropped)

What you’re looking at here is one small slice of a waveform graph of my music listening habits over the last year, as recorded via last.fm. I generated this using the service at LastGraph, which makes it super easy by just giving your last.fm username and a date range. The guy who made LastGraph, Andrew Godwin, based it heavily on an original concept by Lee Byron. If you’ve got a last.fm account, this is pretty cool. It’s attractive enough to print up as a poster, and the individuality of the results are neat. My favorite part is how you can easily see when I was really into a particular artist by the size of their “island.”