UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

My mother-in-law bought me the 2-DVD Rush concert set “R30: Rush 30th Anniversary Tour” for Father’s Day. (No, I don’t think she knows about my prog rock obsession, she’s just good at selecting from my Amazon.com wish list.)

Anyway, I was watching some of it today, and it was nice to see how the boys have loosened up with humor in their concerts. (OK, the humor’s always been there; it’s just more blatant now.)

In particular, I was stunned to see what was on the stage behind Geddy. No, it wasn’t a pair of Marshall half-stacks. It was a pair of Maytag half-stacks. Yes, he had two Maytag clothes dryers behind him on stage, spinning nonstop throughout the show. And next to them, one of those rotating sandwich vending machines from a cafeteria. (Well, I didn’t get the best look at it… that’s what it seemed to be, although it might have been a pie display case like those often seen at lowbrow coffee shops.)

Clearly this made quite an impression on me. It wasn’t enough to tell a pair of coworkers plus SLP, as well as emailing two old high school friends who were also Rush fans back in the day. (And when is anyone more of a Rush fan than in high school?) I had to take it a step further and share it with the two and a half people who actually read my blather.

You may be familiar with mashups, but this has to take the cake. It’s a mashup from three music instruction videos.

http://curved-air.com/bitties/kels.mov

And just so I don’t seem like a bandwidth hog, the original page in context is here. (Even though I’m being less of a bandwidth hog by linking straight to the video because I’m not forcing you to download three long QuickTime movies simultaneously! But don’t get me wrong; all three are worth watching… as long as you have broadband.)

Very cool idea. Gets a little stale (and not as well-executed) by the end, but still impressive. And of course, Beaver Felton is the guy who sold me my Music Man StingRay 5. (True, I bought it from his shop, not him personally, but I did have direct contact with him personally both by email and on the phone. Not that that makes me cool or anything.)

First, a qualification: Since I got a flat-panel display at work, I no longer have my PC connected directly to the display; I view the PC’s video output via Remote Desktop Connection on my Mac. I’ve learned over time that RDC does not provide a direct, unaltered feed of the PC’s video. For understandable reasons (faster screen refresh), but by perhaps unjustifiable methods, RDC re-renders parts of the video display. The result is that you do not see a pixel-perfect (or even simply downsampled) representation of the actual PC video; it appears to be redrawn completely for network transmission.

In particular, this does funky things with Internet Explorer’s output. Last year I spent a few hours trying to figure out why borders around my buttons were extending by one pixel both down and to the right, until I realized that on the actual PC’s display this wasn’t happening… it was just an RDC quirk.

With that out of the way, I have to admit that perhaps my current problem is an issue with RDC and not with Internet Explorer. But either way, it’s a Microsoft problem.

After making some CSS adjustments to a page I was working on, I noticed that the main body seemed to be extending 3 pixels wider than it should be. Further testing revealed this only happened on certain pages, and after resorting to commenting out each CSS class one-by-one, I tracked this down to an inline class that simply italicizes text. So, for whatever reason in the grand Microsoft scheme, a word or two in italics can cause a much larger section of the page (at least 2 or 3 levels up in the document tree) to expand by 3 pixels.

Again I ask… WHY???

And again my cry for explanation goes unheeded. Time for another lame workaround?

Addendum: As it turns out, in this particular case a workaround will not be needed. I went to our test PC and confirmed that this is an RDC glitch, and not an Internet Explorer one.

For web geeks like me whose design ambitions occasionally outpace our abilities, it’s always fun to come across tools like this:

Color Palette Generator

Just give it the URL of any image anywhere on the web (such as, for example on your own site) and it generates color palettes for you to use in your design, based on the colors in the image.

Look for yet another new Room 34 site redesign in the near (or not-so-near) future using this tool!

Although before long (well, about two years) I wanted nothing more than to get out of there, I have to admit, southern California did have an almost mythical allure. Maybe it was the perfect weather 50 weeks a year… or the close promimity to natural wonders of sea, mountain and desert… or the fact that we lived in a place that people all over the world actually know about, thanks to Hollywood, that just made the place seem important.

At any rate, practically speaking, there was a great triumvirate of businesses throughout “SoCal” that made life seem just a bit more heavenly than anyplace else on Earth. I loved them mostly because of their conspicuous absence back home in Minnesota. But one by one, they’re appearing here in the hinterlands.

First there was IKEA. And it was good.

Today, delight of delights, the second opened for business… Trader Joe’s.

Now, if only we could get In-N-Out Burger to expand east (and, for that matter, north) of Phoenix…