UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

On my Tools page, I tout my use of jQuery, which is true (I do use it), but up to now I wasn’t actually using it on my own site. Like the unkempt barber, I was always too busy cutting everyone else’s hair and not my own. And by hair I mean websites. And by cutting I mean building. So, sort of the opposite of cutting. But (as usual) I digress.

Before, the Web 2.0-ish, AJAX-ified, buzzword*-izationalized features of my site were kind of a hodgepodge of built-in WordPress features, homebrewed JavaScript and partially-implemented and or modified plug-ins.

Now I’m trying to streamline and consolidate it all on jQuery and, when applicable, jQuery-based WordPress plugins, dropping the last vestiges of Scriptaculous and prototype.js (oh how they’ve served me well). To that end, I’ve changed my navigation menus from my own quick-and-dirty style to something jQuery-based and unnecessarily showy. (I may drop the sliding animation once it starts to annoy me, which will be in about 14 minutes.)

I’ve also finally addressed my annoyance with the less-than-amazing new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5. Granted, it’s way better than what I was using before, but I really don’t like how clicking a thumbnail loads another blog page that just contains the larger version of the photo, with the photo’s filename as the title. Yuck. But I found a nice jQuery-based lightbox plug-in that does exactly what I wanted. Now anywhere on my site where I’ve got a link directly to an image, that image loads in a lightbox layer instead of redirecting to another page or just a blank window. (And I didn’t even have to add a bunch of rel="lightbox" attributes to my old code like before! [And even better, I didn’t have to take out the ones I had already added!!!!])

So… well, you are either a web designer/developer, in which case you are ever-so-slightly interested, or you’re not, and you’re not. But I am, and I am, and I am very pleased with the results so far!

And the last thing I have to say is, given my inclination to talk in circles tonight solely to amuse myself, it’s probably a good idea that I decided to spend the evening tinkering with my own site rather than working on a client’s project!

* I just love how the page I linked to notes that “This page may not work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.xx.” Only on a page whose URL contains both .edu and a tilde. I just installed Multiple IE in my new copy of Windows last night, so maybe I should fire up IE 3.1 and see if he’s right.

An enjoyable but otherwise relatively uneventful trip to the Minnesota State Fair today was jarringly disrupted near its conclusion when I spotted a 70-something man wearing a gray t-shirt featuring a cartoon of a 70-something man and, in very large cartoon block text, read:

When I die, bury me at Walmart so my wife will visit me often.

Wow. Where do I begin?

I guess most of my initial reactions probably do not even bear mentioning here. Suffice to say, I was appalled at all levels. But I was even more deeply disturbed by what I found when, unable to suppress my curiosity, I googled the phrase. For the love of God there’s even a song about it. I didn’t bother listening to enough of it to be able to tell if it’s a joke. Well, obviously it’s a joke, but I didn’t listen long enough to determine what kind. But judging by the brain ache the hosting site gave me, it’s not one I’d appreciate anyway.

Ultimately, they could come up with the coolest new logo on the planet, but it’s going to be tough to shake their old image.

I saw Star Wars: The Clone Wars today. Not because I’m such a huge Star Wars fan because… I’m not. Sure I’ve enjoyed getting swept up in the (largely unfulfilled) hype of the release of the prequels, but to be honest, I just wasn’t into it that much as a kid. I was too young when A New Hope Star Wars came out. I did see The Empire Strikes Back on the big screen and while my memories of life at 6 are fuzzy, I do remember enjoying it, even if I didn’t really get it, much less get why people were totally obsessed with it. And of course I saw Return of the Jedi too, by then, at age 9, old enough to get swept up in my friends’ excitement. But let’s face it, Jedi kind of sucked, and it was more a foretaste of what was to come than a grand last hurrah for the old series.

Although initially excited by the first previews I saw in theaters several months ago, by now I had grown deeply wary of this new installment. Reviews ranged from scathing to… well, even more scathing. But I have a 5 1/2-year-old son, and he’s loved Star Wars since almost before he could talk, so I had to take him to see it. Three things struck me most about the film, two as I watched it and one only just now as I’m writing this:

1. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Which is not to say it was great, but I managed to avoid falling asleep, and not just because it was so loud.
2. Rather than sticking out as a pathetic piece of garbage in contrast with the glory of the six live-action films, it revealed how truly ordinary and not spectacular the live-action films are. The first may have been revolutionary in 1977, and Empire may have been the real masterpiece of the series in 1980, but honestly, this franchise was great for four years and has now sucked ass for a quarter of a century.
3. My son is now about the same age as I was when I first saw Empire in the theater. Empire was my cinematic introduction to the Star Wars universe, and his was… this. At least neither of us had to suffer Jar Jar Binks. Or Ewoks.

I’m a little surprised at just how negative the reviews are, honestly. This is no great cinematic work, but it’s not complete garbage. It’s not the worst film of the year. From what I’ve heard it’s not even the worst space-themed animated feature film of the year, but then again I don’t know anyone who’s actually seen Space Chimps, so who knows?

Apparently it’s all just a set-up for the animated series coming to Cartoon Network this fall, and that makes sense. I was somewhat surprised by the relatively low quality of both the animation and the off-brand voice acting, but if this is really designed to pump kids up — and establish their expectations — for something they’ll be seeing every week on TV, it’s good to have a little truth in advertising. Funny though that Sam Jackson and Christopher Lee voiced their own characters. I can see Mace Windu having little to no role in the series, but Dooku’s pretty central to the story. We’ll have to see what happens in the fall.

The most jarring thing for me was the music. Much of it was recycled from the films, but there was also a lot of worldbeat electronica and occasional rock themes (granted, it was Moody Blues-esque rock-with-orchestra, but there was still a driving rock beat). I know Lucas carefully chose to go with 100% orchestral “classical” style music for the films to give them a timeless quality, but it does seem that this new animated direction is… well, just that, a new direction.

Recommended for die hard (and I mean really die hard) Star Wars fans and… um… their parents.

I used to spend a lot of time on deep thoughts. Or at least, what I thought was deep at the time. When you’re in high school and college, you have lots of time, more than you can possibly realize. Gradually it dawns on you that your time isn’t so infinite, but by then it’s being squeezed in both directions… it’s running out and filling up simultaneously.

As I’ve gotten older (now unequivocally in my “mid-30s”), I’ve come to see the world in ways I could never have understood when I sat around indulging my erstwhile sophistry. But the opportunities to really explore my own thoughts are almost nonexistent, occurring mainly while sitting on the toilet (the fortress of solitude) or sitting up in a caffeine-induced zombie state in the middle of the night after the kids have — finally — gone to bed. (Right now it’s the latter, in case you’re curious and/or grossed out.)

Every stage in life seems to pose its own challenges, and presently for me it seems to be about finding a way to just slow the whole damn world down for a second and catch my breath. There’s a precarious balance in your 30s, where the wisdom of age has at long last begun to crack its way through your impenetrable cranium, yet you still have enough youth and health to get out there and do something with it. If only you weren’t consuming 99.999% (give or take a thousandth) of your time and energy on the mind-numbing banality of driving to work or sitting through pointless meetings or trying to keep the kids from eating plastic toys or cutting their own hair.

Are we humans or hamsters? Sometimes I’m not so sure. When we spend our days sitting in a little box, endlessly engaging in routine tasks as pointless as running around a little wheel, sipping at our water bottles and taking our food in pellet form (well, some of it might as well be), it’s hard to see much difference.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, but we get into the groove (or is it a rut?), bear down, and charge ahead without really looking around us. After nearly a decade of fairly anonymous apartment dwelling, SLP and I finally settled into a real house in a real neighborhood nearly four years ago, but it still took until this summer, and another looming (although ultimately scuttled) relocation for us to really make a connection with our neighbors.

More and more these days I’m starting to see the third dimension of strangers. It’s kind of like shattering the ancient understanding of the cosmos. I used to see the world with myself in the middle, the small group of people who really mattered to me (first my parents, then school friends, later SLP and now our kids too) orbiting in their perfect spheres, and finally on the outer sphere the vast array of everyone else — tiny, immobile pinpoints of light. Of course it hasn’t taken me 34 years to realize the world doesn’t revolve around me (regardless of what SLP might tell you to the contrary), but it can still be incredibly difficult to process the depth that exists in every face you pass by day after day.

When you’re a kid, everything is new. Every person you meet, every experience you have, is something that’s never happened before. There’s no history, for you or anyone else. (And since so many of the people you know are also kids, that’s a literal truth.) But one of the great things about meeting “new” people as you get older is that each person is a walking vessel of history, overflowing with interesting stories and storied interests.

Everything can change in an instant. Somewhere, for someone, it is. Right now. Babies are born. Grandparents die. People fall in love, others get divorced. Most of the time, these things aren’t happening to us or the people we know. And so for a long stretch, maybe from 18 to 34 (is that why the demographics are broken down that way?), it’s easy to feel invincible, even as our knowledge to the contrary becomes ever more acute. I’m on that line now, statistically poised to enter the next phase of life, and the cracks are showing. That long, smooth (well, not always so smooth, but definitely long) stretch of road is coming to an end. I see the curves ahead, but I don’t yet know where they’ll take me, take us.

For now, the best we can do is embrace the moment, and brace for the next.

No, I’m not talking about fat ladies singing, I’m talking about the most marginal web browser that somehow manages to keep hanging on. I guess it has a niche with certain non-traditional devices. (It’s the web browser on the Wii for instance.) But I don’t know anyone who has ever used it regularly on a computer, and I also don’t know anyone who still has it installed, just as a curiosity (or even more justifiably, for testing purposes).

Yet, someone at Apple must love Opera. I just got a new MacBook and I’m presently going through the ritual of tweaking settings so, for instance, all of the web-type files (.html, .php, .js, .css, etc. and no that last one isn’t a filename extension) open in my text editor of choice — which at present is TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit. I’ve used BBEdit for years when my employers were buying it for me, but now that I’m on my own, I took a careful look at the feature set comparison chart between the two, realized that I rarely, if ever, used any of the features that BBEdit had but TextWrangler didn’t, and decided that it was ridiculous to pay $125 for features I don’t use, when I could get the ones I do use for free. So there you have it.

All of which has nothing to do with the reason I’m writing this today. My point is, as I was going about the business of telling Mac OS X to use TextWrangler for these file types, instead of opening .html files in Safari, .php files in Dreamweaver (which I only have because it came with CS3), and .js and .css files in Dashcode, I noticed in the list of possible applications not one but two versions of Opera. Neither of which (I verified) is installed on my Mac. So what the hell are they doing in the list? For one of the file types, the only options it offered were the two Opera versions plus TextWrangler. WTF?