I am the Internet.

"I bring pornographic pictures! And the opinions of angry children!"

Originally from in here somewhere I guess.

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Now You're Thinking With Portals.

Previously, previously.

Incidentally, the PS3 version of Lemmings really captures what was good about the original.

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Current Music: Luxt -- Lemmings ♬

You are here

Previously.
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TEDxOilSpill

TEDxOilSpill

Flying from the Source directly to the coastal area of eastern Alabama, the team discovered the shocking fact: the flow of oil from the Source was a constant slick all the way to the shore of Alabama. Slow and steady, a mixture of dispersant and crude oil was yards from beach lines that had people sunbathing in beach chairs. The most shocking realization was that everyone had bits and pieces of information, but really no one had any idea where it was going, when it was going to hit and who was safe. [...]

One of the ways BP controlled the media coverage of the oil spill was booking up virtually every available seaplane hour in the Gulf coast area. Luckily, our seaplane captain Dickie was fed up with how BP was trying to control the airways. A lucky situation arose which gave this rogue pilot complete flight clearance, even to the `Source'. Dickie and his seaplane was a rare find for the Gulf Coast during this time. [...]

When we departed the Deepwater site and Dickie communicated to the Orion (call sign "Omaha 99") our intent, the controller came back quite quickly saying, "You've created a hell of a ruckus with your flight today. We've got flights in and out of this airspace and you've been interfering with them." We got chewed out for several minutes straight. The funny thing is that we hadn't been given any advisories or instructions by the controllers the entire time we were orbiting the site. Furthermore, there were no other flights that came or left the immediate area while we were there. We'd have photographs of them if there were. Something tells me that we weren't quite welcome there and our presence was merely tolerated. [...]

The shed was deserted. A small sign read "Come see the truth. I will take you there. Boat trips for photographers and journalists. Call Al at..." I called Al.

"I switched to the other side. I work for BP now. Sorry, I can't take you out or talk to you."

Apparently this isn't an isolated incident. BP's buying up every boat and every boat captain they can lay their hands on. It makes our jobs a lot harder.

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I build a zeppelin.


Look at my Zeppelin. My zeppelin is amazing.

( --More--(28%) )


Previously.

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When Things Fall Apart

"When Things Fall Apart: Reporting from the Gulf, an offshore oil rig worker finds mundanity, a complacent obsession with safety, and the doom beneath it all."
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DNA Lounge: Wherein there are photos, and the website overhaul seems to be done.

Photos and videos of Bootie's Lady Gaga vs. Madonna party are up now.

Also, I think I've finished converting the web site to work on iPhones and other small screens. The top-level page, calendar, photo gallery indexes and the store should all be readable on your phone now without needing to zoom and pan around.

Let me know if you find any pages on the site that I missed, or that still seem hard to use on a phone.

It probably all works horribly in IE 6, but then so does the rest of the web.

My log files for last month seem to show this breakdown, after omitting bots and small numbers: 45% Firefox, 30% Safari, 25% MSIE (breaking down as 14% MSIE 8, 8% MSIE 7, 3% MSIE 6.) So, yeah, I'm not gonna lose any sleep over that one.

Wikipedia says these numbers are unusual. Huh.

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Conan the Barbarian: The Musical

Previously.

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Current Music: Crom!

The Whisperer in Darkness

The earlier teaser trailer:

Their previous movie, which was fantastic:

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more CSS stuff

I have visited CSS atrocities upon the DNA Lounge calendar and top-level page. Let me know if they work for you and look ok.

The calendar should now re-flow to fit in whatever sized window you have, instead of showing a horizontal scrollbar when the window is too narrow. It also does slightly different things when the window is really narrow, e.g., iPhones.

(See how I got that left column to have a green background that goes all the way to the bottom of the event box even when it's not the tallest column? That was fucking hard.)

(See how the calendar grid at the top resizes to the width of the window, but the boxes remain square? That was also really fucking hard.)

I'm curious to know how it looks in old browsers, and on older and/or less sophisticated phones.

Some CSS questions:

  1. Is there any way to flow text through two equal-sized columns?

    I want to present text it in a two-column format, unless the window is too narrow, in which case, one column. I've somewhat accomplished this on the tickets page, but it doesn't work great. I end up with columns of unequal height, because I have to arbitrarily select N items for the left column and M items for the right, because I don't know how much space they will occupy pre-layout.

    Also, when the min-width on those columns is exceeded and they float to be stacked above each other instead of side-by-side, they do not re-flow to respect their max-width; instead they stay at their min-width, which is dumb.

    Is there any better way to do this?

  2. I've got a bunch of text, and an image floated right. When the available space is limited, and the first few words in the paragraph happen to be short, I get crap like:

    All  -------------------
    work |                 |
    and  |                 |
    no   |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         -------------------
    tentacles makes Jack a
    dull boy.
    More sane wrapping would be:

         -------------------
         |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         |                 |
         -------------------
    All work and no tentacles
    makes Jack a dull boy.

    The only way around this I've found is to manually make the first three or four words next to a float be non-wrappable, like: <SPAN STYLE="white-space:nowrap">All work and</SPAN>.

    Is there some more sensible way?

  3. I seem to have rounding errors in the scaling of the images on the top-level page (sometimes the images end up not being the same height), and these rounding errors appear to manifest differently in all three browsers. Ideas?

Just for laughs, I also made the calendar pages be formatted as the hCalendar microformat. This is, as far as I can tell, completely useless, but maybe it won't be some day. (The idea is that your web browser can automatically notice that there are calendar entries here. None do. But hey, they cited me as required reading, so, why not.) Questions, though, for people who understand this microformat stuff:

  1. I'm using empty ABBR tags (<ABBR ...></ABBR>) for dtstart, duration, and tzid instead of picking some arbitrary text to wrap it around because I don't want to see a tooltip there and there's no way to turn that tooltip off. But the validator issues a warning about that. Does it matter?
  2. In iCalendar, I format my dates in local time and include a TZID, e.g., DTSTART;TZID=US/Pacific:20100625T210000. This works in Apple iCal. I saw an hCalendar example using <ABBR CLASS="tzid" TITLE="US-Pacific">, but I'm not sure that's actually legal. Is it?

Thank you. Drive through.

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  • Previously