Tonight Show highlight: Twitter Tracker

I missed Conan’s Tonight Show debut on Monday… completely spaced on it. I heard it was a bit of a dud, so maybe that’s OK. But I watched the entire show last night. Tom Hanks was surprisingly crazy, with his somewhat deprecating, totally over-the-top impersonation of Ron Howard directing him in Angels and Demons, and his lengthy testimonial on the wonders of In-N-Out Burger. (Granted, In-N-Out Burger is freakin’ awesome, and is by a wide margin the thing I miss most about living in southern California.)

Green Day was good — and judging by their body language with Conan, Tom Hanks, Andy Richter, and whoever else was milling about on stage at the end of the show, they seem like they’re genuinely nice and courteous guys, which always surprises me about rock musicians — but this was now the third late-night program I’ve seen them perform this song on, and I already own the album, so it’s kind of enough already.

The highlight of the show, for me, was the “Twitter Tracker” sketch, where absurdly “extreme” (pardon me, “X-TREEEEM!!!!!”) voice overs and equally ridiculous motion graphics combined to try, and fail, to make utterly banal “celebrity tweets” seem exciting. A monster truck show, Twitter is not.

Burnt Snow: a new EP available at Sidedown Audio

Room 34: Burnt SnowI am very pleased to announce today’s release of Burnt Snow, my latest EP, as part of the Sidedown Audio Bite Size EP series.

Sidedown Audio is a Chicago-based boutique record label that is the brainchild of the inimitable Joshua Wentz. I’ve gotten to know Josh since we “met” during the 2008 RPM Challenge, and I’m continually impressed with his talent, creativity and ambition.

The Sidedown Audio Bite Size EP series is a monthly set of 3-track EPs by independent musicians, with cover art by Josh, available for a limited time as $2 digital downloads. He’s got some great musicians contributing to the project and I’m pleased to be among them!

Burnt Snow was recorded in April and May 2009. The first track, “Imperfect Storm,” is a symphonic prog-style, 7-minute epic with sweeping guitar melodies and plenty of Mellotron. “It Isn’t What It Is” is a lighthearted funky jam with traces of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and some crazy synths. “At the End of the Day (Is the Night)” is a piece of Summers and Fripp-inspired minimalist electronica, with interlocking guitar lines and intriguing synth washes.

The EP is available exclusively from Sidedown Audio now through September. For two dollars you get all three tracks, a 3-page PDF booklet, and a few surprises. Check it out!

New blog: Hall of Prog

It occurred to me tonight, while reading a post on outsidedown, that I know of two sources on the planet of encyclopedic knowledge of progressive rock: YouTube and my own brain. And YouTube is catching up.

With that in mind, I have started a new blog: Hall of Prog: A Curated Exhibit of Progressive Rock on YouTube. The idea is simple: there are tons of videos of obscure 1970s progressive rock bands on YouTube. All you have to do is search for them. But you have to know what to search for. That’s where I come in.

The plan is to post a link a day (or more) to interesting progressive rock performances available on YouTube, with a small side dish of my own commentary. Though not usually known for brevity (a trait I share with most prog rockers), I will keep my writing to a minimum, and let the music speak (ad infinitum) for itself.

How to not bother testing websites in Internet Explorer 8

Or: What Microsoft probably doesn’t really want you to do.

Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to be more standards-compliant. Ya-freakin’-hoo. (No relation to Yahoo!) I don’t especially care, and I’d like to think the best way IE8 could become standards-compliant is to not exist in the first place. But, it’s here, and when Windows 7 arrives later this year, we (the web designers and developers of the world) will have to get used to it.

I do have Windows 7 RC running in a virtual machine on my MacBook, so I can test IE8. But waiting for several minutes for it to log in (for some reason), I came to the decision that maybe it’s not worth testing in: maybe it’s best to just take advantage of its “IE7 Compatibility Mode” to not need to test in it. It’s not like IE8 being standards-compliant (yet, somehow, still not rendering pages like Firefox and Safari) is really going to save me any time, because I’ll still need to test in IE7 (and, God help me, IE6) for years to come. Why add a third Bizarro-world Microsoft browser to the mix?

IE8, brought to you by people who don't see anything wrong with this image.

Internet Explorer 8, brought to you by people who don't see anything wrong with this image.

So I googled ie8 ie7 compatibility mode and found a helpful, if slightly douchey, blog post from a Microsoft “developer evangelist.” Of course, his blog renders completely f’ed up in Firefox, and even if it didn’t it would probably still be displaying the hideous matted-to-white-transparent-GIF-on-a-dark-background you see here.

Nonetheless, he did still give me the code snippet I need. Stick this in the header of all of your pages (which, hopefully, means editing just one file, riiiight?), cross your fingers, bow your head in the direction of Redmond and, if all goes well, you won’t have to think about IE8 (ever?) again.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

I’m going to try it out now.

Perhaps I went out on a limb when I referred to this blog post as douchey. Never mind the fact that the guy is a “developer evangelist” for Microsoft, which is enough in itself. The two d-bag moments for me were: 1) the opening couple of sentences: “As you all know, the Internet Explorer team has been working hard to make IE8 the most standards compliant browser around. Unfortunately, not all web sites confirm [sic] to these standards today.” In other words, Microsoft has undertaken a noble effort to build something perfect and wonderful, but all you apathetic and/or malevolent web designers out there are conspiring to destroy it. And 2) “Lastly, for those of you running Apache instead of IIS (shame on you!)…” Yes, shame on you for using the most popular and stable web server software in the world. Actually, yes, shame on you for running Apache on a Windows server. You’re an even bigger douche than he is.

Update: Adding this meta tag to a client site I’m currently working on didn’t seem to have any effect on IE8, but that may be because I had manually clicked the compatibility mode button in a previous session, turning it off. (So, in other words, I am positing that if the user has manually turned off compatibility mode, it will stay off even if the page tries to activate it.) Turning compatibility mode on manually did work — the rendering issues I saw with IE8 in its normal mode went away.

Now, the thing that concerns me about all of this is that my page should be pretty damn well standards-compliant: the doctype is XHTML 1.1, which is very unforgiving, and I’ve validated it. The page looks fine in Firefox and Safari. It’s possible that the source of the problem is my IE-specific CSS file, that is fixing IE7 problems that don’t exist in IE8 (and thereby introducing new problems there). The next step would be modifying the conditional comments so that IE8 doesn’t load the IE-specific CSS, and checking whether that solves the problems. The culprit may also be IE7.js, which I viewed as a lifesaver when I started using it about a year ago, but increasingly seems to be of little to no benefit.

I can’t imagine anything convincing me to go to Denny’s… but this comes close

In this post-postmodern era, it’s difficult to admit to enjoying the humor of a mainstream TV commercial without a trace of irony, but… I freakin’ love this commercial. In particular I love the stoned unicorn. And apparently I’m not alone. You can read a slightly more insightful comment on the commercial here.

Update: After watching it for about the 20th time, I finally caught this exchange: when the leprechaun puts the pot of gold on the table and the server says “Do you have anything smaller?” the unicorn says “He’s like already tiny!” I’m usually laughing too much by that point to be able to make out what he says.