UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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.

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?

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.

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.

Sure, it’s true that I’m often perhaps too willing to disregard tradition and take things in a brand new direction without adequate regard for the past, but I for one am ready for a radical redesign of American currency.

I’m not extremely well-traveled, but I have been to Canada, Australia, and several countries in Europe — pre-Euro. So I’ve seen a reasonable assortment of international currency and ours is by far the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, and frankly, boring-as-hell. So much more could be done with our currency, in terms not only of creativity but of incorporating new high-tech means (or some not-so-new, since Australia’s been integrating clear plastic in its currency since at least when I visited there in 1995) of confounding counterfeiters.

Alas, the redesigns we’ve seen in the past 15 years or so have been conservative, timid, and way too reluctant to break with the past. But Richard Smith’s Dollar ReDe$ign Project hopes to change that… or at least to allow us to fantasize about a world where American currency is cool-looking.

I agree with Ministry of Type that the following designs, by Michael Tyznik, are among the best, and they’re something that I could actually see some country using on its currency. Too bad it probably won’t be ours. (Not that American presidents and landmarks would make sense on another country’s bills, but you get my point.)

Upon closer examination, I also like how the designer has eliminated the $1 bill, replaced it with a $200 denomination, and bumped each president (or statesman) up a notch (Washington on the $5, Lincoln on the $10, etc.)… with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who, in deference to P. Diddy, must remain associated with the $100 bill.

Grant leapfrogs from the $50 to the $200. Wait… he’s on the $50 now, right? I don’t see a lot of currency these days, and rarely anything larger than what’s dispensed by an ATM. Oh, and I see Hamilton has been replaced by Jefferson for the new $20. A debatable decision, but at least it’s not Aaron Burr.

There’s also a nice civics lesson, in the form of the Bill of Rights, written on the backs of the notes.

No, those aren’t scalper prices. From kottke.org:

Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.

Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.

The thing that scares me most is that even after last year’s Wall Street collapse, there are probably still plenty of New Yorkers (though probably not so many who actually live in the Bronx, where the Yankees call home) who can easily afford these tickets. Personally, I’d take the mini-vacation and use the extra $2,200 I saved to buy a 55-inch flat panel to watch the other 160 games. But I guess the Yankees have to pay those 8-figure player salaries somehow. I just figured the $10 hot dogs and $15 MGDs would do it. (I’m just guessing at those prices — they’re probably more.)

This makes me a bit nervous as I anticipate the 2010 Twins season at Target Field. Sure, there’s no way in hell the Twins will be able to justify those kinds of ticket prices, but I fear the days of my beloved $8 “cheap seats” are numbered.