I'm not going to get to be an editor

This summer I have been working to redesign the website for a local newspaper. In the process, I've been putting together mock-ups of the new design. While the standard procedure is to fill these models with Greek text, I've mostly stuck with filling in some recent news stories to make it look more realistic.

Naturally, this means I get to be Editor For A Day and write my own headlines:



Perhaps I won't be sharing these with the boss...

Any other scathing recent headlines I should sneak in?

How Delta should deal with the coming PR crisis of someone videotaping their 7-hour delayed flight

Watch this entertaining video (courtesy The Consumerist) about a man that was smart enough to videotape being stuck on the runway for almost 7 hours in a plane:



I now present 1-act play that I call...

Delta Crisis Response Squad

[Scene: Delta CEO's office]

DELTA CEO: "I feel like going for a plane ride today." [Picks up phone.] "Yes, I'd like 2 tickets... one for me and one for that suspicious-looking guy that works in IT... yeah, yeah, the one with the beard and the crazy eyes. ... tell him it's a business lunch."

[Scene: Airplane interior. Delta CEO and Suspicious IT Employee are sitting next to one another in coach]

CEO: "Thanks for joining me on this not-at-all-strange midair business lunch."

SITE: "Oh, no problem. It's nice to get out sometimes. And with the CEO, no less!"

CEO: "Of course. Would you mind taking a picture of me?"

SITE: "Sure thing, boss!"

[CEO hands camera to employee]

CEO: "HELP! This suspicious-looking man with a beard and crazy eyes is trying to learn the secrets of air travel! Homeland Security! Batman! George W. Bush! Any properly diligent citizen! Stop him!"

[A puff of smoke appears. Dick Cheney emerges from the blackness]

CHENEY: "We have underestimated terror. Clearly it wishes to expose the foibles of modern air travel through the black magic of 'film' and 'moving pictures.' I banish thee to Gitmo, Guillermo del Terror!"

[Lightning flies from his fingers and strikes Employee, who disappears.]

CHENEY: "Furthermore I ban all cameras, camcorders, and camera phones from planes! Or else terror will win!"

CEO: "Hooray!"

CHENEY: "May I have some of those peanuts?"

CEO: "No, they weren't budgeted for this flight."

CHENEY: "Awww..."

[Fin!]

Some website housekeeping

Please forgive the following wankery about the site's minor redesign:

Blogger has been kind enough to finally allow easier and more extensive customization to their templates, so you'll be seeing some changes around here.

I've already added a customized site banner to spruce things up and differentiate this site from all the countless others using this template.

I'm still tweaking the color scheme overall, so don't think you're going nuts if links and headers and such change colors suddenly. Blogger keeps suggesting ugly ass orange for some things and I can't have too much of that.

The sidebar is totally revamped. I've added a set of images showing some of the books, DVDs and CDs I've had in rotation that I think you should check out. The images don't link to anything intuitive like Amazon; they link to my Flickr account where they're tagged as "inrotation" with notes about what they are (in case you don't immediately recognize that I want you to listen to Wilco's latest album). Until I get a dedicated host for my stolen images (thanks, Amazon!) it'll have to do.

I've also greatly expanded my link list to include lots more of my sources of joy and strange news. If you read this and have a web site and you feel you have been unjustly left off, let me know and I'll fix it ASAP.

There's also a link roll from my del.icio.us account. I'm new to this social bookmarking thing; at the moment I mainly use it as a dump for tutorials and guides (particularly for Mac, web, and interface design stuff) that I don't want to lose track of. But I'll also save cool stuff like a searchable database of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons (try searching for "snowflake", "f-14", "snowman" and "raccoon" for some of my favorites) or funny t-shirts, or awesome articles about action movie one-liners. I also know that my tagging system is haphazard at best... I'm going to work out a better, more consistent way to keep them all straight.

Oh, and if you wanted to check my profile now, I use the word 'cock.' You'll just have to look and see how.

And now for something even more pointless:



Always funny.

Robot Chicken and Star Wars: joygasm!

Update! There's a better version of this available direct from Adult Swim. It's in 4 parts but it has nifty little pop-up video elements (look for the TV icon in the lower right corner). Courtesy of Pajiba.

If, like me, you've ever thought, "I love all those Star Wars parodies on Robot Chicken, but I hate having to track them all down individually on YouTube. Also, I wish there were more."

Well, look what I found:



You're welcome. The "Empire on Ice" musical at the 3:00 minutes left mark is not to be missed.

My half-completed to-do lists

Here's another pile of links and recommendations presented in the form of works-in-progress.

I make a lot of lists...

Reading List
1. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
2. Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
3. Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
4. The World is Flat by Tom Friedman
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
6. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Normand

Video Games to Beat (as represented by links to video game comics and YouTube videos)
1. Metal Gear Solid 3
2. God of War 2
3. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
4. Guitar Hero 2 (on Expert) (If you've every played the game, you really need to witness the utter insanity of that video)
5. Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (yes, still...)

Music To Enjoy
1. Wilco - "Sky Blue Sky" (People hold fierce Wilco positions, so the comments get a little crazy by hipster rock standards. Just skip to the wonderful comment titled "Better than Revolver and Dark Side of the Moon")
2. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - "Living with the Living"
3. Penguin Café Orchestra - "Preludes, Airs, and Yodels"

Action Movies I know were or will be retarded but enjoy anyway
1. XXX
2. Crank
3. The Protector (Argue with me that this 4-minute uncut battle isn't one of the coolest ever)
4. Unleashed
5. Live Free or Die Hard

Childhood Heroes To Mourn
1. Mr. Rogers (If you read any one link, read that one.)
2. Captain Kangaroo
3. Mr. Wizard
4. Optimus Prime
5. Darkwing Duck

Excessive Home Office Equipment to Purchase
1. 20" Widescreen LCD Monitor
2. Ridiculous ergonomic keyboard
3. Ridiculous ergonomic mouse
4. 30" Apple Cinema Display
5. Two of #4
6. A personal tank (Ok, for this one you must read the first few user reviews.)

Events to Witness
1. Pretty White Girl dies under tragically ridiculous circumstances. EVERYBODY PANIC! BAN EVERYTHING!
2. Someone recreates the LOTR Battle of Helm's Deep with candy
3. Olympic Committee unveils logo that looks like Lisa Simpson blowing a slot machine. . .
4. . . . that gives people seizures

5. Paris Hilton realizes her lack of worth
6. A baby buffalo survives an attack by a pack of lions. . . and an alligator.
7. The greatest day of a courtroom reporter's life
8. Ragnarok

Jobs To Have
1. "Can You Hear Me Now" guy a.k.a. Network Technician
2. Drone a.k.a. Corporate Insurance Underwriter
3. Hater of all humanity a.k.a. Waiter
4. Staffwriter a.k.a. very bad journalist
5. Asshole a.k.a. Web Designer
6. Hero a.k.a. The Daily Show or The Onion Writer
7. Hero a.k.a. X-Man

Very funny, Google Maps

So I was messing around with Google Maps the other day, when I found out that it now does driving directions in Europe.

But does it do driving directions to Europe?

Here's a map from Pittsburgh to Paris:



Hmm, interesting. What's that big line in the middle?



Har har. Very funny, Google.

Fill in the blanks

While I wasn't working this afternoon, I saw an interesting use of ellipses in a USA Today article about Michael Jordan praising LeBron James:

James was thrilled to learn of Jordan's approval. "It's great any time you get praise from the guy who basically laid down all the stones for you to get here," James said. "I grew up idolizing his game and how he played . . . basketball."

Huh? What got cut out in those ellipses at the end?

I have some theories:

". . . how he played and by the way, I think I'm much better than him at basketball."

". . . how he played. If you were wondering about how I'm celebrating, well, I've been vegging out at Starbucks and using the Poincaré Conjecture to evaluate the Ricci folds and three-dimensional manifolds of a basketball."

". . . how he played. If you're from Cleveland, I'm the feel-good story of the year. I'm just like Omar Epps' NBA superstar character in that movie Love & Basketball."

". . . how he played. And on a personal note, after game 5 against Detroit I'd like to see more in the news about how the combined weight of my balls is roughly that of a basketball."

". . . how he played with unsuspecting little boys. Oh, wait. I wasn't talking about the MJ that played basketball."

All of those seem pretty reasonable to me.

The Link Roundup

Since I've been doing anything but work this past week, I thought I might share the love and give you all some reading material this weekend.


First, it's not a blog post around here unless someone is mocking Star Wars. This link also mocks stamp collectors at the same time. Double bonus!

If you're think websites could look more interesting, well, you're right. Here are sixty website designs that really show the kind of visual pizazz and refinement that a graphic designer can bring to even the plainest or most poorly designed websites. (Those last two were courtesy the gang at The Big Noob.)

Speaking of design, did you know the Helvetica typeface is 50 years old this year? Let us celebrate in a clean, efficient manner.

Google continues their campaign to spy on your every moment. Or at least take pictures of your cat. Or leaving a strip club. Eeep. Since the big story involves a cat, you could expect the LOLCatters to jump in.

Speaking of cats, I found another LOLCat that's worth a chuckle if quantum theory is your thing.

In NY Times Most Emailed Town, the Gray Lady is kind enough to justify slacking off at work (thank God!), loves the crap out of Knocked Up, takes a moment to describe me, and provides a stunning example of how a picture can make a story. You can also have some fun calculating your economic class and prestige; the relative prestige levels are the most fun. Apparently writers are prestigious. Could have fooled me.

Speaking of the New York Times, The Onion really nailed it with this summary of the 'Most E-Mailed' list. They've also been ruthless in their mockery -- both indirect and slightly more blatant -- of Barry Bonds.

Speaking of sports, if you're not reading Deadspin, you're missing out on some of the most fun on the interbang. Just today they were kind enough to point out that LeBron James is not of this world, that there's a good reason to get interested in pole vaulting (who knew?? Here's some more on Miss Stokke. I know, and you're welcome.) And, self-aware to the bloody end, they even tear themselves and all other sports blogs a new one. AJ Daulerio truly is the balls. And I haven't even touched on the fun you can have if you follow the comments. Deadspin is the only one of two (the other is a FARK Photoshop contest) places on the interweb that I encourage people to follow the comments. As their editor says, the commenters provide about 76% of the entertainment on any given day.

Let me just get this out there: if Rupert Murdoch buys my precious Wall Street Journal, there's a good chance I'll never read it again. Like hell is he going to get my 9.95 a month.

While I'm on Slate, they continue being the masters of miscellany with wonderful slide show of church signs. The also explain the high suicide rate in Japan. Expect a follow up about the high suicide rate in Cleveland if the Cavs can't bring in one more win this weekend.

Did you see that you can buy tracks without copy protection on iTunes as of this week? Well, you might want to hold off on that. Also, if you've wanted an excuse to brush your teeth with milkshakes, you can thank China for the excuse.

Dan Carlson cracked me up quite a bit with his strategy to take down Ken Jennings (who also has a blog, if you were curious), recounts his first trip to a gay nightclub, thanks me for humoring him, and receives a harsh but deserved letter from HR.

If you use Gmail and Firefox, do yourself a favor and pick up the Greasemonkey extension and Lifehacker's Better Gmail tool to really take advantage of it. Lots of nifty little options and hacks, including new Gmail skins (I'm partial to Airstream), extra keyboard shortcuts, built-in TinyURL support, attachment icons, and a handy tool that reminds you to actually attach files if you typed "See attached" in your email. Priceless!

Finally, my favorite new blog catches some workplace smartasses in action. As a frequent author of passive aggressive notes in the workplace, I approve this message.