May Randoms

Possibly useful thoughts collected throughout May:

sIFR 2.0.1

Sorry about the point release, but we had a tiny regression bug between RC4 and 2.0 which was only noticeable under rare circumstances in old versions of Mozilla. It is now fixed, and the update, as usual, requires only the swapping of your sifr.js file. Head over to the Official sIFR Landing Page for the download.

The Other Mike D.

I’ve always loved Mike Doughty’s lyrics and vocals but could never figure out what I didn’t quite like about his former group Soul Coughing. Now I know. The rest of the band. I went to Doughty’s show in Seattle earlier this month, and it blew me away. Usually when singers leave bands to go solo, they get worse, but Doughty has not only gotten better as a singer, he’s a better songwriter as well. More soul, less coughing, as one magazine puts it. The guy loves touring too. Before the Seattle show, he stood on the streetcorner outside the club with his acoustic guitar taking requests from fans and cracking John Curley jokes. I’ve never seen anything like it. Oh, and not only does the man play for free on streetcorners, but he’s a Movable Type user as well. How can you not love that? *Note to Doughty’s IT guy: The man gives you music. Please get him onto MT 3 or WordPress already.

The Decemberists

Their latest album “Picaresque” is my Album of the Year so far. The band’s previous release “Her Majesty the Decemberists” never did a lot for me, but this effort is epic. Long live folksy pirate music.

Downloading Live Shows

Croftie may not like live music but I do. As a result, I’ve found myself downloading a ton of shows lately off of Archive.org. It’s a bit frustrating that most shows are only available in lossless (see: overkill) formats like SHN and FLAC, but you can convert these to MP3s with a program like xACT. Can someone please point me in the direction of an app which automatically tags your converted MP3 files from a playlist file or something? Manually entering song info for each track you download is a pain and a half. Is there an AppleScript perhaps (or Automator workflow maybe?) which will convert an entire folder of FLAC/SHN files to MP3 and then tag them? That would be of incredible use.

Hybrid Bikes

If anyone is in the market for a good city bike, I just picked up a Marin Fairfax and I love it. Hybrid bikes are usually either heavy, ugly, or both, but this thing is only slightly heavier than a road bike and made of brushed aluminum and carbon fiber. I got mine for $599 at a local shop, but you can get the 2004 model for $329 online at REI if you don’t mind different components and a few other details.

TV Season Is Over

Thank god the end of good TV season coincides with the beginning of summer. This year, we had some great reality shows and some dud dramas. Survivor made a strong comeback from last year’s miserable season proving that it’s still the king of all reality shows. The Apprentice was entertaining, if not much better than the previous two seasons, and finally The Donald hired someone who isn’t a white male. Surreal Life was its normal entertaining self, making you embarrassed to be a human being, in a good way. And the newcomer, The Contender, proved to be a great addition to Mark Burnett’s lineup, despite Sylvester Stallone’s and Sugar Ray Leonard’s complete incompetence as hosts. On the flip side, I’m sad to say that the hitherto spectacular show 24 appears to be on its last legs. This season went south after about the 8th episode when the plot climaxed prematurely, the most interesting characters were killed off, and the least interesting (a.k.a. Tony Almeida) were brought back. The most pathetic episode saw mild-mannered Chloe O’Brien wielding a machine gun and shooting up a Jeep. Ummm, yeah. Time to put this show to rest. Quit while you’re ahead Fox. Somehow I don’t think they’ll listen to me, and somehow I’m sure I’ll still watch season five.

New Favorite Ice Cream Flavor

Haagen Dazs Crème Brûlée. I can’t believe it took this long to invent this flavor… or maybe it just took me this long to find out about it.

Kicking the Soda Habit

I’m not too concerned with getting off of coffee, but if you’re looking to kick your Coke and Pepsi habit instead, I highly recommend replacing your thirst for fizz with high quality mineral water. I didn’t drink mineral water for the first 20-something years of my life, but I’ve really taken a liking to it lately and have been virtually pop-free for about six months now. I recommend San Pellegrino especially if you’re new to the stuff. It’s a lot milder on the fizz than most other brands.

We’re Hiring In a Pretty Big Way

Just a quick note to let all Mike Industries readers know that the Walt Disney Internet Group is looking to fill over 80 positions in our North Hollywood and Seattle offices right now. These are mostly technical positions ranging from the creative side of things to the engineering side of things, and I can tell you from the over four years I’ve worked here that it’s a great place to get your groove on.

To list every position available in this blog entry would take quite some time, but just in the Seattle office, I know we’re looking for engineers, technical producers, designers, managers, Java people, SQL people, project managers, and a handful of other positions. The North Hollywood office has other openings as well.

If you’re a talented, motivated person who is interested in working for Disney, please check out the Walt Disney Internet Group job site and submit your information through there, or also feel free to send me your stuff through “disneyjobs at mikeindustries.com”. I’m not sure every opening is listed on the WDIG Jobs Site so if you’re a talented web professional, send us your stuff and we’ll try and see if there’s a fit.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in WDIG jobs out of the Orlando office, there are some openings there as well.

iPod Giveaway #2: Great iPods in History

UPDATE #2: Maybe the big red exclamation mark will help here — all images must be EXACTLY 418 pixels tall by 418 pixels wide. Not 418×200. Not 500×500. It is not a “maximum width”. 418×418 please. The management thanks you.

UPDATE #3: iPodLounge.com has just offered to send a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds and a sportcase to the eventual winner. Thanks iPodLounge!

Baton Ruse

What is a musical baton?

I don’t know, but my beard idol Rob Weychert and my Google-juice idol Keith Robinson just passed me one. I will now waive it over my head and tell you all sorts of things you never asked about!

Total volume of music files on my computer:

18.05 GB… Mostly from actual pressed CDs

The last CD I bought was:

“The Runaway Found” by The Veils

Song playing right now:

“Mojo Pin” by Jeff Buckley

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

1. Ten Years Gone by Led Zeppelin
   Best group ever. Any suggestions to the contrary will be deleted.
2. Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns by Mother Love Bone
   If you live in Seattle and you’re in your 20s or 30s, this is your anthem.
3. The Pink Life by Mike Doughty
   This pick is currently in ridiculously heavy rotation. Over 50 plays in the last few months I’m sure. And I’m seeing Doughty live tomorrow night. Bam!
4. Salvation by Citizen Cope
   Unclassifiable music is the most impressive music of all. Citizen Cope and Calexico are two of the least classifiable bands I know.
5. Bonnie and Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg
   The all-time winner for song most ahead of its time. Sounds like it was composed in 2005. Was actually composed in 1968.

* Honorable mention: Any of Inman’s favorites from the “Video Game Beeping” genre.

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

• Andrei Herasimchuk (as a last gasp attempt to revive Design By Fire)
• Jeff Croft
• John Gruber
• Matt May
• Stephen Lodefink

iPod Giveaway #1: We Have a Winner

He entered early. He entered often. He is Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, and he is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition.

Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food”. Davin followed up his well received goat butter creation with a Parsnip Shuffle, a Tofu Shuffle, and the eventual winner: The Banana/Apple/Spaghetti Shuffle (shown above as the first piece in our honor roll slideshow).

Davin’s winning entry was both creatively assembled and brilliantly photographed, which helped it withstand the onslaught of entries throughout April. Stephen Lodefink’s Spam Shuffle garnered the most attention around the web and gave Davin a run for his money, but the toughest test came only 90 minutes before the contest closed when iPod case designer extraordinaire Nikki Sevcik submitted her tantalizing “Morning Shuffle”, consisting of a frothy espresso drink, chocolate covered strawberry, and exquisitely placed “Shuffle wafer”. Nikki’s entry is the second in the slideshow.

The Mike Industries staff (me) thought long and hard about how to pick the winner, but in the end, there was no perfect solution. At least 12 entries were award-worthy, but since Davin had four of them, his food sculpting prowess was the most clearly established of all the contestants.

I’ve provided an honor roll of 20 of the most worthy entries above and I thank everyone for participating in this first of 9 contests. Besides the first two slides, the honor roll is in no particular order. Enjoy.

Thanks also to Jason Anderson for concocting the first competition. His baby boy is already enjoying his Shuffle. Remember, the submission pool is open until the end of the year.

And finally, although I can’t award a second place prize, I’m happy to point readers in the direction of Nikki’s portfolio of custom iPod cases. They’re one of a kind.

April Randoms

Every month, I end up with several items I’d like to post about, but none is particularly worth dedicating an entire entry to. Rather than let these little things go unposted, I figured I’d just aggregate them into one post per month, and perhaps together, they are worth one post. Here goes:

Logotypes.ru

I’ve used this site for years but I don’t think most people know about. It is a huge repository of logos from various companies, mostly in vector format. If you’ve ever found yourself doing mockups involving corporate logos you may not have easy access to, check out logotypes.ru before trying to grab badly compressed web versions from production sites. Is it legal? I don’t know. But the .ru means Russia, and I doubt our comrades overseas really care about such formalities.

Safari 1.3 is out

Dave Hyatt announced the release of Safari 1.3 today, which uses the same codebase as the version of Safari (2.0) that comes with Tiger. I just downloaded it and I’m quite impressed. Aside from the 35% speed improvement, Safari 1.3 adds support for such features as getComputedStyle and contentEditable (yay!). This version of Safari also squashes the long running bug whereby Safari would need an innerHTML “kick in the ass” in order repaint elements which had been changed via the DOM. As you can imagine, all of these under-the-hood improvements benefit sIFR greatly. In fact, we used sIFR to help Dave and Apple squash a DOM bug a couple of months ago. I personally can’t wait to begin using contentEditable on some of my projects. I’ve always loved how it works in PC IE, and now finally Mac users can use it too. Firefox, where are you?
UPDATE: There do appear to be some newly introduced bugs in Safari 1.3 from looking at all of the latest comments over on Dave’s site. Some caching issues have arisen, as well as some JS and DOM issues. Hopefully a quick update will be forthcoming.

Levis Jeans

Did you know you can’t even buy Levis at most department stores anymore? I walked into my local Macy’s last week to buy some Silvertabs and was shocked to find no Levis whatsoever. The salesman told me that barely any department stores carry them anymore because most Levis are now sold through discount warehouses like Costco and Sam’s Club. Turns out that in order for Macy’s to sell Levis at a competitive price, they’d have to take a loss on them. I know there are plenty of other jeans around these days, but I have to wonder if Levis’ decision to whore their jeans out to discounters might bite them in the long run. In the short run, I’ve been reduced to shopping at J.C. Penneys (ouch!) in order to get a pair of Levis… they still sell them for now.

Incomplete Redesigns

There seems to be a practice lately of relaunching sites before they are ready. It’s mainly blogs, but I’ve noticed a lot of relaunches lately with disclaimers like “try not to pay attention to the navigation” and “the comment system doesn’t work yet” and all sorts of other warnings. Maybe I’m just old school about design, but I would never dream of launching anything that was less than about 90-95% ready. If you have a few chunks of invalid code or a couple of enhancements which aren’t ready yet, fine…. but if the state of your site requires a disclaimer of incompleteness, it probably isn’t ready to be launched. And if it isn’t ready to be launched, then don’t launch it.

The Pontiac Solstice

I have never come close to buying a Pontiac. I’ve never seen one which had any appeal to me whatsoever. Being a European/Japanese car snob my whole life, I’ve pretty much tuned out American cars as being anything I’d ever want to own. Pontiacs, to me, have done nothing to dampen this sentiment. They are often rental cars, and they are just never fun or attractive (apologies if you own one). But wow… have you seen the new Solstice??? It was featured on The Apprentice this week and I am just completely taken aback by how beautiful it is. Take the emblem off of there and you’d think it was an exotic car. The Apprentice has really set the new standard for product placement on TV, and I must say, whatever Pontiac paid for that placement was well worth it. I’m still not big on two-seaters, but the Solstice’s appearance on The Apprentice is enough to at least get me out to the lot.

Mind Control

If you’re at all interested in the power of persuasion, check out some of Derren Brown’s tricks of the trade. Interesting, and a tad scary.