Peter Rojas published his 5000th post this evening. I don't think I've posted 5000 words in the same amount of time. He's a machine. Nice work, Peter!
Brian Alvey
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The Bionic Blogger
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Desktop Detective
I saw a hot ad for the Batman Begins movie on Yahoo. The ads and the site are stunning and high-quality like the ones for Sin City. I haven't paid much attention to the television ads yet, so I wasn't really excited about the movie, but the ad for the movie site was hard to ignore. The amazing production design from the film translates perfectly to the web. Four days away from opening day is a good time to get me hooked.
It looked so good that I raced to the downloads section and snagged a new desktop. Gone is the default widescreen HP Pavilion desktop (which was pretty good looking) and in its place I now have Batman, with his head hung low because he is depressed. Think if I cleared out some of those files he'd cheer up? (Yes, I did look at all of the available desktops to find one that would work with my crowded desktop.)
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The new Charles Addams?
Banksy is similarly subversive, but his work doesn't have the harmless morbidity of Charles Addams' timeless cartoons. Most recently in the news for adding a new piece of caveman art work to the British Museum, his site also features realistic paintings of outdoor life and advice like "Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for."
Watch out for parachuting cows. Nice.
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Springtime in Paris
It's Norwegian Independence Day (again) and in honor of my ancestors' holiday, Capgemini (headquartered in France) has released their new look website, powered by a CMS I had a hand in building.
They have some nifty navigation that lets you drill down with a spectrum of breadcrumbs down the right side of the page. It is no small task to get a new website launched at a giant company, but François got it done.
And it validates!
The best part is that I no longer have to say that I built a Linux/PHP/MySQL-powered CMS for a global consulting firm last year, but it hasn't launched yet so I can't really say who it is...
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TV ups and downs
Over on TV Squad, I saw that ABC is dropping Eyes and 8 Simple Rules. That's too bad because 8 Simple Rules has had some laugh-out-loud episodes in the two years since they lost John Ritter. All three kids are great actors and where will I get my David Spade fix? Oh yeah, Capital One commercials and Joe Dirt II.Eyes never had a chance, but it was a great show -- like Las Vegas with a brain and slightly less hot characters.
Luckily, and you might think I'm kidding, John Stamos' Jake In Progress was renewed. Jake's friend Patrick is one of my favorite characters on television (up there with Rose from Two and a Half Men and Chloe on 24). Plus they have Ian Gomez and Wendie Malick.
The real shocker today was that Desperate Housewives was renewed. I'm a total fan, obsessed with DH trivia and I was really worried that I wouldn't get my weekly fix of the zany adventures of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda and all their crazy Star's Hallow neighbors every Friday night this fall. Maybe they had a write-in campaign or something. Good for them!
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Good for Nick
Where would I be without Paid Content? If I don't read Rafat's newsletter every morning I might miss things like NewsGator snagging Nick Bradbury and his fine Windows-only FeedDemon news reader.
Nick is a great guy and I use his Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe HomeSite web editing every day, so it's nice to see him making the jump and getting more resources for expanding FeedDemon.
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Ace, the crime-fighting Bat Hound
My enthusiam for Smallville dipped when I found out they were having an episode that featured Clark Kent's dog, Krypto. Niki's tripled.
The other day I mentioned that Batman had a crime-fighting dog, but I didn't know what breed it was and I couldn't recall its name. Named Ace, he was originally a German Shepherd and later on has been portrayed as a Great Dane.
This has brought back memories that I thought were gone forever. There was a super-horse (Comet), Beppo (a Kryptonian monkey who stowed away in Kal-El's rocket unnoticed) and Supergirl's pet, Streaky the Supercat.
The highlight of this trip down repressed memory lane was discovering a narrative titled Postmodernism and the Batman Phenomenon, which explores the evolution of the Batman mythos and how it has been a reflection of the general culture or American society. It shows how the four Batman movies of varying quality had their parallels in the decades of Batman lore that came before them and how McCarthyism and Dr. Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent attacked the comic industry and drove the plot lines over the edge:
He felt that three men (Batman, Robin, and their butler, Alfred) living alone in a beautiful manor where fresh flowers were placed daily in vases was the dream home of homosexuals. Batman writers had purposefully stayed away from romantic or sexual adventures or innuendoes to keep the comic kid friendly, but had inadvertently left themselves open to this attack. The editorial staff at the time attempted to combat this by requiring the addition of more bat-characters (Batwoman and Batgirl) to add a feeling of "family" instead of the isolation of the Dynamic Duo. They also made the authors kill off Alfred in favor of a housekeeper named Aunt Harriet. They even went so far as creating a bat-hound, the perfect bat-family crime fighting dog.
Same Bat-time. Same Bat-kennel.
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Not usable
When people leave comments on our blogs, we send them a confirmation email. If they click the link in the message, they have confirmed their identity and we publish the comments. One problem is that many people use spam blocking software or an ISP like Earthlink that offers spam protection.
We're not sending spam, but we get bounce-back email to our service address all the time that read "If you want this message to go through, fill out this form and type the word you see in the picture. Then we'll release your mail to the recipient." I get a lot of these. I fill the forms out and I do my best to make sure that comment confirmation email gets to the people who made the comments. The one that I hate doing is Earthlink's. They incorrectly parse our service account's name into first name "Inc." and last name "Weblogs" and if you submit the form without correcting it, they give an error message that your name cannot have a period in it.
Why give me a form that is already populated with values that are guaranteed to fail?
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A face for radio
So this afternoon Jason added his first podcast to his blog and it got me thinking about when I'd be podcasting. Checking our stats, he has more than ten times as many posts as I do, so it looks like I'm due for a podcast in 2015. Maybe I'll start sooner than that.
If I podcast as frequently as I blog, we can call it The Brian Alvey Annual Podcast.
If I did one this week I think I'd steer clear of things like c|net slamming Engadget or the ads in our RSS feeds. I'd probably cover the angles of popular news stories that mainstream media are missing. Like what if Jennifer Wilbanks, that bride-to-be who wasn't really kidnapped, and her fiance John Mason really do reschedule their 600-person wedding? Will anyone show up? What if he hires real Hispanic thugs to kidnap her in a blue van right before the wedding? Will anyone even look for her? That would be great revenge.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to podcast. Just not soon. There's lots of stuff left to build and we're not done moving servers around.
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Time Traveler Convention
They are holding a time traveler's convention at MIT in a few days. The cool thing about a time traveler's convention is that you only have to have one meeting ever. I'm busy this year, but I'm sure I'll end up going to it a couple of times with my family when I'm older. See you there.
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance