Monthly Archives: November 2007

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.”

Good Web Designers are like Good Newspaper Designers

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“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.”
– Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design

Zoe is Nine Months Old

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Dear Zoe,
Well, let’s see. This month you had your first Thanksgiving dinner at Eric and Jill’s. You caught a nasty cold and then gave it to your Mom and me. You developed a bit of separation anxiety. And it feels like I’m forgetting something. Something… Ah, yes, now I remember. You started crawling. Honestly, you develop these new abilities overnight, like there’s no learning curve at all. One minute you’re not able to do something, and the next minute you’re doing it all the time, and looking at us like it’s no big deal, you’ve always done this, and you’re not sure why we’re making such a fuss over it.

Sittin' and Chewin'

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Battlestar Galactica: Razor: One Paragraph Review

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Battlestar Galactica Razor

Last week, Annie and I went to Seattle to see the special two-hour episode of Galactica,Razor. Microsoft was sponsoring a free screening in select cities, and one of the theaters happens to be near Annie’s parents, and we weren’t going to pass up the chance to see Galactica on the big screen. It was totally worth it, too.Razor takes place during season two, and tells the story of Lee Adama’s first mission in command of the Pegasus. In flashbacks, we follow the new character of Kendra Shaw, from the moment she gets assigned to the Pegasus, through the Cylon attack and following months, filling in the holes in the story, and giving more background to explain how and why they made the decisions they did. In the end, I still dislike Admiral Cain and the decisions they made still sicken me, but I feel like I understand where they were coming from a lot better than I did before. If it feels like I’m avoiding any specifics of the plot, you’re right, there are some excellent surprises in here, and I don’t want to ruin them, so I’ll just say that this story is absolutely worth watching, and the events that happen here help to set up what’s coming in season four.