September Randoms

September 26th, 2005

Some items of interest from this month:

Keith, Matt, Nick, and Brian just launched BlueFlavor tonight. Head on over and check out their new shop.
Andy, Richard, and Jeremy launched ClearLeft last week. Very check-out-worthy as well.
I just won my fantasy football match against Scrivs tonight and am quite happy about it. In all fairness, my linebacker injured his wide receiver on Monday Night Football so it should have been closer. In other news, the NeinRÃ¼Lz network continues to grow impressively.
Finkbuilt is having a ketchup label design contest. Enter and win yourself some two-dollar bills.
The 6th Monthly iPod Giveaway doesn’t have a ton of entries yet but has raised over $1600 so far for the Red Cross in the first week.
I’m at the end of my rope with this Comcast HD PVR, and let me just tell you once again how badly it sucks. If you want to start watching way less TV, this is your device. If you like watching TV, however, definitely stick with your Tivo or another alternative.
Speaking of annoying TV-related things, Rita Cosby, MSNBC’s new correspondent has a very annoying way about her. Am I the only one who is totally creeped out by her voice?
Stan pointed me to the Leo Burnett site recently. It’s one of the most creatively designed and produced sites I’ve seen in a very long time.
If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale. I just found out the Black Keys played in Seattle last week. Slipped right past me, as these things sometimes do. I know there’s Upcoming.org, but for some reason they seem to miss a lot of stuff and aren’t very timely either. Is there anything better out there right now?
I am liking Flash 8 quite a bit so far. The built-in components are still bloated as all hell though. I needed to make a simple MP3 player the other day and using the built-in media controller, it was 80k. I ended up hand-rolling a player instead and got it down to 3k including the skin. Hand-built components are still apparently the best way to deploy media in Flash… for audio at least. Also, with regards to Flash 8, we’ll be releasing a new version of sIFR pretty soon which takes advantage of the new Saffron text-rendering engine. I wouldn’t call this a mandatory upgrade at all, but it will provide crisper text — especially at small sizes — for people who have Flash 8 installed.
One of the best articles I’ve ever read on electronic media evolution is Seth Goldstein’s Media Futures. It’s a five part piece with the fifth part itself being five parts, so make sure to read the whole thing when you get a chance. I first read Seth’s essay a few months ago but have re-read it a couple of times since. Great stuff. Seth also led an interesting discussion at Foo Camp on Attention Trust.
Bananas Foster ice cream from Haagen Dazs is very, very good.
Trimming your blogroll can be quite therapeutic.
Crest Vanilla Mint toothpaste tastes a lot like a Captain & Coke.

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26 Responses:

Kyle says:

You have no idea how good it makes me feel to hear someone else wants a *good* concert feed. I want to type in my zip code, enter in a radius of travel, and get updates of bands / genres I like and have it tell me about the concerts. I’ve missed far too many shows because I’m not keeping up with the 10 different venue sites on a daily basis.

#1 - September 27th, 2005 at 12:20 am
Fred says:

That Leo Burnett site is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

#2 - September 27th, 2005 at 6:51 am
Anonymous says:

You are so right about Rita Cosby. Who the hell hired her?!??! Every time I hear her (right before hitting the Mute button) I think
of the old saying he’s got a face for radio but in this case she’s got a voice for newspaper.

#3 - September 27th, 2005 at 7:01 am
Beth says:

“If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale.”

I’m working on a project that will offer this soon. Email me if you’d like to try out the beta when it’s available.

#4 - September 27th, 2005 at 7:14 am
Jeff Hartman says:

The Leo site is nice.

My parents actually live in his former domain outside of Chicago. An occasional grandkid drops by to relive the memories of growing up and visting there. (Probably one of his several homes though).

#5 - September 27th, 2005 at 7:38 am
Jonathan Eckmier says:

I’ll second the comments made about the Leo Burnett site. That’s probably the most creative site I’ve seen in a long time. I love the navigation and am especially impressed by the alternate navigation methods.

#6 - September 27th, 2005 at 7:49 am
Kevin Tamura says:

Crest Vanilla Mint toothpaste tastes a lot like a Captain & Coke.

Are we going to need an intervention to get you to put the toothpaste down?

I’m with you on the Leo Burnet site. I could spend hours there trying to find everything.

#7 - September 27th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Bryan Veloso says:

Damn if I don’t open my own shop soon, all the CSS properties would have already been taken as names.

#8 - September 27th, 2005 at 9:00 am
James Archer says:

If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale

Perhaps Eventful would meet the need?

#9 - September 27th, 2005 at 9:02 am
Steve Williams says:

Crazy I know, but that Leo Burnett flash extravaganza featured on WebPagesThatSuck recently – just goes to show, you can’t please all of the people…

#10 - September 27th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Hollobaugh says:

I’m with you on Rita Cosby. She’s like a bad SNL skit.

#11 - September 27th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Joe H says:

Mike, try out bandnews.org. They crawl official band sites and are able to serve you up some nice RSS feeds of concert dates and other official news.

I found the Black Keys for you. Black Keys

#12 - September 27th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Jason Jang says:

Leo Burnett – Everytime I see work like that it reminds me of how much more learning I have to do. That was beautiful.

I love it when people come up with an interesting way of presenting a lot of information in a way that is impossible through HTML, yet usable.

#13 - September 27th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Jim Ray says:

Hollobaugh’s lucky he got out when he did and doesn’t have to listen to her asthmatic smoker’s cough voice at work.

#14 - September 27th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
John says:

Oh, sure, the Leo Burnett is cray creative. BUT, it’s incredibly frustrating to use. I get sick of it rather quickly.

#15 - September 27th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
Dave Metcalf says:

As much as I hate them, Ticketmaster.com is probably the best place to get concert notifications. They have more invested in advertising the shows. I guess that’s what the “Convenience Charge” is for.

#16 - September 28th, 2005 at 5:49 am
Benjy says:

Rita Cosby and that Nancy Grace on CNN, too! I can’t stand either one of ‘em. It like every cable news network has to have their distraught female host to cover the Natalie Holloway, the Runaway Bride, etc. I guess Greta van Sustren fills that role for FoxNews.

#17 - September 28th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Chad Edge says:

Mike, I can’t really talk about it on here, but I have a service that’s in the works to squash the whole “dammit, I missed another show” problem (which is the whole reason I started the project). A little digging and you’ll understand.

Perhaps I could consult you at some point in November? Say, two-three days hire.

I’ll e-mail privately – I could really use an interface/usability/design eye to help kick my team into high-gear.

#18 - September 28th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
J. J. says:

Maybe you should try to Build Your Own PRV.

#19 - September 29th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Peter says:

Seems we’ll have a lot of feeds for concerts soon :D

#20 - September 30th, 2005 at 4:40 am
Marty says:

Mike,

I completely understand what you mean about that Comcast POS PVR. The more we use it, the more we want a TiVo. The small hard drive, the fact that it clicks over to a new recording regardless of what you are watching, the fact that you can’t change recording times of shows if they start at 9:59, the fact that it stops working if you fill up more than 80% of the hd space.

Oh, and did I mention that they make it nearly impossible to get the information off of the thing to any format other than VHS?

Me, I’m looking seriously at the TiVo with a DVD-R…

#21 - September 30th, 2005 at 8:10 am
Bryan says:

Thx for the Eventful plug James! Seriously, you can set up a smart calendar that will notify you when specific artists or concerts in general come to your town. Check it out and let us know what you think.

#22 - September 30th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Cathy says:

I was just searching the net to see who Rita Cosby was related to. How else would she get a job as an anchor? Is MSNBC hard up or something? “Irritating” is the word that comes to mind. She’s like a stressed-out, unattractive Barbie doll with a scratchy voice. I hope everyone writes MSNBC and complains!

#23 - November 9th, 2005 at 11:14 pm
Tony says:

I can’t stand her voice either, why do they have her on the air. I just change the channel if I hear her voice. It kind of sounds like a sick person with a hoarse smokers voice who just got a asthma attack. Very hard to listen to.

#24 - January 6th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Bill says:

I think if they would have someone on the show with her regular that has a speach problem making it hard for the viewers understanding them it would make Rita Cosby not be noticed as much with her voice.

#25 - June 21st, 2006 at 12:18 am
amiri.info says:

Leo Burnett Refurbished

Got to be one of the most creative sites I have come across in a long while, it is refreshing to see Flash being used to enhance the “Web” experience. With CSS designs almost everywhere ~ not a bad thing ~ there is still a lot …

#26 - September 27th, 2005 at 2:42 am

Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs. I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

50 Useful Coding Techniques (CSS Layouts, Visual Effects and Forms):

(via doug)

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is. Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared

At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!