UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

As I read this summary of complaints about some Google thing, it made me glad once again that I’ve made a reasonable effort to keep my truly private information to myself (as far as I know), and have always tried to keep in mind that anything I put into any Internet-based system, even if it’s supposed to be “private,” is something that could potentially be seen by eyes unknown to me.

Not that I disagree with the people who are pissed about this but… well, if it’s really sensitive information, don’t leave it in someone else’s database.

I’ve just added a new t-shirt design to my Born in 1974 shop on CafePress. This new design pays tribute — in a suitably retro cheesy style — to the glorious year of my birth.

And while you’re there (since I know you’re on your way at this very moment to buy one), don’t forget my other retro-ish designs, Seven Days without Pizza Makes One Weak and Old Old School (featuring a truly “old school” media format).

Checking Wikipedia, I discovered some celebrity birthdays of note: I was born a week after Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office) and 11 days before Lark Voorhees (Lisa from Saved by the Bell.) I’m also within a month or two of Kate Moss, Tiffani Thiessen (another Saved by the Bell alumna), Christian Bale, Seth Green, James Blunt, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (more Saved by the Bell), Jenna Jameson, Da Brat, Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, Penélope Cruz, Jewel, Alanis Morissette and Derek Jeter. And that’s just in the first half of the year.

Sheesh. And my greatest claim to fame is the freakin’ Chewbacca thing.

You may have noticed after the current site redesign that the sidebar panels now sport toggle buttons that allow you to open and close them with slick Scriptaculous sliding effects.

I’ve taken this a step further by using cookies to store your panels’ status, keeping the same panels opened or closed as you go from page to page (and between browser sessions… but since it’s client-side, it doesn’t follow you to different computers).

The next step will be to add handles, allowing you to change the order of the panels as well. Stay tuned! (Or not.)

For the geeks among you, I’ve facilitated all of this additional functionality by writing some object-oriented PHP for handling the panels. It’s much cleaner and less prone to error.

I would imagine that most people who are bothering to read my blog have at least a passing familiarity with the infamous Pokémon seizure incident back in 1997. After all, it was even parodied on The Simpsons.

I’ve finally united my interest in obnoxious JavaScript with my desire to pay my own tribute to “the incident,” and so, I present to the world my Pokémon Seizure Inducer. I’ve also made a permanent link to it in my Curiosities section.

If the former is true, it proves the latter. I’ll confess “yes” to both.

Today at work I was doing some miscellaneous web-related research (aimless surfing? no, no, never), and I came across a page of creative 404 error pages that inspired me to finally do something interesting with my own 404 error message.

Having lived in Atlanta (area code 404), I initially set out to do something that played off that. (I know, very original. I just wanted to make sure not to settle for “Tha 404.”) But it wasn’t long before my roadgeek tendencies kicked in and I thought of something even better.

Here’s my 404 page. (The image at right is a spoiler, of course.)

The sign image is (mostly) my own creation in Photoshop: I swiped the shield images for I-16 and Georgia 404 as SVGs from their respective Wikipedia pages, and the font is courtesy of another roadgeek. Whenever I start to question myself, I am reassured that there are others out there even sicker than I am.

Incidentally, there really is a Georgia 404, although the only place you’ll see a sign for it is on a small spur route near Savannah. Georgia’s Department of Transportation has a funny little quirk in that it has given all freeway-grade roads a state highway designation in the 400 range. (I suppose the “4” indicates 4 or more lanes.) As far as I know (and as this PDF from the GDOT website seems to confirm), there’s only one road in the system for which this is the main designation, however: Georgia 400, which is a main commuter artery running north (well, northish) from Buckhead out to the north-central suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country, since both I-75 and I-85 veer off diagonally out of the city (into the northwest and northeast suburbs and beyond into Deliverance country).

All of the other freeways in the state have a “4xx” designation too, but there are generally no signs indicating such, because they all also have a familiar designation, usually an Interstate number.

As it happens, Georgia 404 is better known as I-16 (hence the double shields on my sign image), which, interestingly enough, is not really “interstate” even though it’s an “Interstate”; it starts in Macon and ends in Savannah.