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Crap, crap, CRAP!

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie.

That’s from the guy who was Adams’ biographer. Damn it, damn it, damn it yet again. And now, like the second and third Matrix movies, I have to go drop $8+ to go see something that not only can’t live up to expectations (which I was prepared for), but something that a qualified person hated. HATED.

Oh, and quotes like this aren’t helping either:

There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create.

But, as someone pointed out, keep in mind the most useful thing in the Guide: Don’t Panic. Yes, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard about this situation yet.

[Via Slashdot]

If you visit this page via a browser, you’ll see a new design today. It’s not huge, just some color tweaks in the CSS and a banner image instead of the default MT stuff. Tweaking may continue, or I could just forget about it for another few months. I’m not designer, so bumping content around with the CSS or making graphics that need to be positioned in pixel-perfect fashion just isn’t going to happen for a while.

But, this whole thing started as a learning experience and that’s what I’m doing. Experiencing a learning… erm.. experience. If I’m internalizing any of this has yet to be seen.

Oh, if you find something that’s busted, displaying improperly, or just plain bad, let me know.

If you’ve ever had to generate a color scheme (say for a website) but didn’t go it professionally, the availability of color wheel resources on the web is pretty depressing. Lots of people want to teach you about color, which isn’t bad, but few enable you to do real color design, such as generating a tetrad color scheme. You can buy an app for it, but I don’t want to spend $40 for something I do once a year.

But, this morning as I fuddle with this site, I finally found the motherlode; [ws] Color Scheme Generator. This is an awesome tool: triads, tetrads, color blindness simulator. A very robust tool, online. Check it out.

I think the DNS attack that’s hitting the East coast is spreading to AA. My connection has been flaky all night.

When can we get some vigilante justice for the fools that are poisoning the DNS servers? Idiot spammers.

Side note: I know that “flaky” spell-checks properly, but shouldn’t it really be “flakey”? I may have missed that day of class.

UPDATE There is a fix if you know how to edit your DNS server. Change your primary DNS to 4.1.1.1 and your alternate to 4.2.2.2 (solution from Broadbandreports uberforums)

Awesome article about buying a budget (read: under $400) LCD, with gaming in mind. The NEC LCD1770NX came out on top.

Budget LCD Roundup

I have a news reader (duh) and with that comes about 500 feeds. I’ve never counted them, but that seems like a reasonable number. One of them happens to be Robert Scoble, who works for Microsoft. His title is something like Evangelist or something like that (I’m too lazy to look it up), but he’s basically a technology-enabled brand-builder for MS. He’s a marketer who gets the web. He’s a salesmen with the soft sell for geeks (well, geeks who aren’t rabid MS haters). In short, he’s someone who works for a company and promotes that company. Evil, right?

He also has a (wildly popular) blog. People can subscribe to this blog. People can not subscribe to this blog. What amazes me is that people think it’s necessary to broadcast that they are now no longer subscribing to his blog. BIG NEWS TYPEFACE INITIATED.

First, nice little traffic booster. Second, who gives a flying…. uhm, fark? You know what, I don’t subscribe to Scripting News. You know why? It’s none of your damn business! If you want traffic, do it like the rest of us; suck up to A-list bloggers.

Oh, wait…

Link

[Via Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

This hand slap to the head once again brought to you by Technical Writers. Someone with the title Technical Author (cue eye roll) posted a one sentence question to a Help-authoring tool list. To quote: “Can anyone tell me what ‘structured authoring’ is?”. This was met by links to a Google-searched PDF. The person read about, oh, 7 words, then skimmed and then came back to the list with (paraphrasing) “So, it’s using templates?”.

Cue hand to forehead.

Ok, this message is for all you Technical Authors, Content Developers, User Assistance Engineers, and plain ole’ Technical Writers. (The rest of you can leave if you want.)

You. Are. Not. Helping. In the immortal words of Jon Stewart, “Just stop.” If the following phrases don’t mean anything to you, start polishing your resume:

• Content Management
• Information Architecture
• Metadata
• Business Objects
• Format separated from Content
• Assembling documentation (and not in a binder)

And I swear to God if any one of you mentions that XML will solve your documentation issues (such as short timelines and content management) and you don’t have the first clue about how to accomplish those goals in the absence of a consultant, I’m going to really lose it.

I appreciate the communities that exist out there for authors, I really do. There are some really good ones. But, and I mean this in the most abrasive way you can imagine, some of the people that come there are so damn clueless, there needs to be an official person who virtually (or literally) clubs them over the head when they ask dumb questions. Google is your friend. If that doesn’t work, at least think about what you’re going to ask. No one hands you information anymore, and as a documentation person, you should know that first hand.

After that, post away but at least put something there for people to react to. Don’t come like a child with your hand out asking for an M&M; put some damned effort into it. I know you’ve had that job for like 20 years and don’t want to change, but too bad. I wrote for less than 5 years and I had to change more than once; it’s the new way of the world.

Actually, it’s not, it’s the way business has been for a very long time, you just haven’t had to work in a business environment because you’ve been treated like a cost, a necessary cost of doing business. It is in the interest of anyone who wants to keep writing to make themselves valuable. If you don’t, you’ll find out quickly what happens if you aren’t.

Get a “taste” of The Culinary Institute of America’s professional wine courses by taking this exciting course online—for free. We’ll give you a sample of our in-depth, on-site courses by taking you on a virtual journey through three of the world’s top grape varieties. You’ll learn about where they grow, how they’re made into wine, how the wines they’re made into taste, what foods they work with best, and why they’re hot in the marketplace. We’ll suggest a few simple but great tastings you can do at home, and share some delicious wine-matched recipes from our CIA chefs. Along the way, you’ll meet some of our expert wine instructors and get a look at the full program of professional wine courses we offer. In this short course you will:

• Learn about three of the world’s most exciting grape varieties from the diverse perspectives of CIA wine instructors, growers, winemakers, chefs, and wine marketing specialists.
• Discover the principles involved in matching wine.
• Participate in exciting guided tastings that you can conduct at home.
• Receive a sampling of delicious wine-matched recipes from CIA chefs.
• Learn about the CIA’s full program of professional wine courses.

Link

[via Kottke.org]

If I ever meet the author of AAiOR, I so need to buy him/her a beer/wine/stiff drink, mainly for making me laugh my ass off at the absurdity of this town. The term “overrated” barely scratches the surface of this pompous, over-marketed, elitist town. Too bad they have one of the best employers around (despite what GEO thinks).

Take today’s post today over at AAiOR:

So if you’re keeping track, the DDA’s plan for a parking lot at First and William is marginally less bad than a putting a landfill or a war zone there, and about the same as an oil drilling operation. No word on how it would compare to a nuclear waste dump or a bioweapons facility.

See other posts at AAiOR about the Greenway/DDA dispute

ann arbor is overrated: a weblog: More Overheated Greenway Rhetoric

It’s like you could replace the University in this story with “University of Michigan” and no one would bat an eye. It hasn’t happened at U-M, I’m just sayin’…

Last year, it was the fashion among campus conservative groups to hold anti-affirmative action bake sales: In such sales, prices are calibrated by the buyer’s race, with women and minority groups receiving discounts and white male students paying a presumably “full price” for the same cookie. It was also the fashion for administrators to try to prevent such sales, and, when prevention failed, to shut them down and punish the students who held them. The bake sales weren’t great commentary on affirmative action–they convinced no one who was not already convinced, and they angered people who might have been open to reasoned argument. But, inadvertently, they were great commentary on the state of free speech on campus, as group after group succeeded in flushing out the censors in their midst. There is no question that holding such a bake sale falls within the realm of constitutionally protected speech–but administrators persistently refused to see this, and consistently cited their schools’ anti-discrimination policies (with no sense of irony whatsoever) as justification for refusing to let the sales proceed and for disciplining those who were holding them.

Tales of anti-affirmative bake sales and the censors who hate them have been comparatively rare this year. There is a classic case brewing at Northeastern Illinois University, however. The College Republicans (it’s always the College Republicans) are planning an anti-affirmative action bake sale, and the administration doesn’t want the sale to take place. So the administration has threatened to punish the CRs if they hold the sale, even though a campus feminist group recently held an analogous “pay equity bake sale” geared to criticize inequality between the sexes. The other part of the pattern is typical, too–FIRE has stepped in to defend the group, and has today gone public with the details of NEIU’s unconscionable refusal to recognize the expressive rights of students whose opinions do not reflect the accepted institutional orthodoxy. Read all about it at www.thefire.org.

Critical Mass: A high price to pay