Posts from — July 2005

The Pirate Bay, a bittorrent file-sharing site, has a hilarious legal page with emails they get from companies and their sassy responses. Yar!

Chris and Jen got married on Saturday… they had a very nice ceremony and it was great to see so many old friends from high school. I even got to see a few people I hadn’t seen since graduation (reminiscing about Spanish teachers with Dan Shapiro is always fun). Come to think of it, I’ve seen more friends from high school in the last month than I have at any point while I was an undergraduate. I wish I could spend more time with them… my friends here at school are great, but it’s different in a way that I can’t really explain.

Looking back, everyone seemed to be very similar to how they were during high school, or in some cases, better than before. Chris and Jen should get married more often.

I forgot my camera so I don’t have any pictures, but if I find some I’ll post them.

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Google Answers… Where do laugh tracks come from?.

I think I should do more photography around here. Tripods are cheaper than I expected, maybe I will get one. Then again, I need to be a bit more careful with my money, so I’ll wait a bit.

I just watched American History X, and I noticed the cast included Beverly D’angelo. I had no idea who she was before, but her name was in this week’s family guy episode, so it was quite a coincidence.

Dana Stevens has a good article on Slate about the Daily Show’s new set (unveiled this week). I agree her analysis (except for when she slights Charlie Rose), the new set seems too serious. The show is still excellent, though.

This game is very fun. You have to look at a few obscure shots from a movie and guess what movie it is. It’s amazing how often you can figure out what movie it is even if you haven’t seen it.

I really don’t understand why people on AIM have both an idle time and an automatic away message. What is the away message supposed to convey to me? If you’re going idle anyway (which you should), some generic message isn’t going to clarify anything for anyone, it just looks lame. If there’s an actual reason for it, let me know, I can’t figure it out.

While I’m at it, the away message “Sorry, I ran out for a bit!” doesn’t make too much sense to me. Why are you apologizing for leaving your computer? Do you apologize in other away messages? “Sorry, I have class for a bit!”… “Sorry, I went to lunch for a bit!”… “Sorry, I’m getting my appendix removed for a bit!”. There’s no shame in not being at your computer at all times. Really, it’s ok. Go do things, I’ll leave a message and you can get back to me later. If you’re apologizing about forgetting the away message instead of apologizing for leaving, the message should be rephrased as “I ran out for a bit! Sorry, I’m too lame to leave an away message.”.

A couple of books I’ve finished in the last two weeks and have been meaning to write about:

The Devil in the White City is a historical narrative about events around the Chicago World’s Fair (in the 1880s and 1890s). The book interleaves stories about the Fair’s designers with the story of one of the first American serial killers (who lived in Chicago at the time of the fair). This juxtaposition provided for some good variety but it seemed a bit strained at times. I was hoping the stories would interact more instead of just being told in parallel (of course, the author was constrained by what happened in history, so his power is limited in that regard). The descriptions of life in the Gilded Age was the most fascinating part of the book, it was really immersive. It was interesting to see how people lived in such different worlds than we do today, but they had the same flaws we do.

If you’re interested in that time period in history, you’ll definitely enjoy the book… despite my aforementioned criticism it was a good read.

I just finished The Non-Designer’s Design Book. I had seen this book a couple of times on lists of “essential” books for programmers (or whatever), so I decided to get it. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. The focus of the book is on printed publications, but the author covers web design when appropriate. The fundamentals of design are so simple and so often ignored; having them enumerated, explained, and exemplified was really helpful. The section on typography is also really good, I learned the most there.

There’s a common misconception, especially among programmers, that graphic design is just meant to make things look better, but an ideal design focuses much more on making it clear how elements are related, what is most important, and where the readers’ eyes should go. Since people don’t really read most things, text that can be scanned by the eye (unlike this text, for example) is much more effective. Anyway, I strongly recommend that book for anyone who designs anything. It’s not as much of a black art as it seems.