A couple of days ago I pushed out a major interface change to geistlinger.com, one of my other sites.

I thinks this is either only the second or third look to the site since it’s launch in November of 1999 (wow! it was really that long ago!).

Before

After

What’s new includes the following:

• While the previous UI was pretty much CSS based, this new version goes all in. Very few tables to be found, just a plethora of DIVs.
• CSS3 goodness – opacity, drop shadows, rounded corners (little of which translates well in IE8, *sigh*).
• CSS drop-down menu. No Javascript there.
• jQuery goodies – a couple of widgets for photos. These actually began the redesign – I was learning jQuery and embedded them in the old site, and then kept going with the UI change.
• Template-based. I have not yet fully separated the presentation layer from the functionality as it would be in a MVC, but getting closer.
• Tried to get all the CSS out of the pages and in the CSS master file. This is something we all do – stick styles inline or on a page to speed development, and then never get around to extracting same. I think I pretty much got it.
• A more consistent look, page to page. Before, each menu section had the same look, but a different color. Kind of stupid, and harder to maintain. But design was not then – and is not currently – my forte, as a look at either UI will bear out. But I think it’s an improvement. It’s fun pushing around the pixels and so on, but I’m not a designer.

This was a lot of work, but it was fun – and I learned a lot. Bonus!

It now looks more like a site of 2012.

If I was a big tweeter (I’m not), this could be an echo of so many political stories.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.

— A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (2005)

This applies to all parties. All political offices (not just president, but the crazy scale is higher the higher the office, to me).

Hey, it’s Vonnegut.

Is it just me, or would Vonnegut (RIP) have been a great guest on any of the political shows: FOX, Daily Show and so on. He’d just get stuff and would speak his truth.

I mean, here’s Vonnegut talking about language (and making fun of himself/Hoosiers):

The writing style which is most natural for you is the bound to echo the speech you heard as a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

— “How to write with style,” an ad for International Paper Co. Appeared in the 9/15/1980 Newsweek

I guess this screen grab says it all.

Links:

• DOJ Backs Equality (for military personnel)
• Christie Vetoes Equality Bill

And this come off a week of very bad (in my mind) politics for women (again, via TPM) – How The GOP Went Back To The 1950s In Just One Day.

Lots of sexual politics this week – hey, an election must be coming up!

Update: More disconcerting news for women (politically/medically) from Steve Benen, commenting on Dahlia Lithwick’s excellent – and disturbing – Slate article, Virginia’s Proposed Ultrasound Law Is an Abomination. Republicans have always touted themselves as a small government party; I guess – in Virginia – they are making government small enough to, in many cases, fit inside your genitals (to perform an ultrasound) if you want an abortion. Hmm…smells like a shot across the bow to Roe vs. Wade…intentionally?

How is success achieved? Is it hard work, as mythologized in the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories, or is it more of brilliant insights by prodigies who seem to soak in knowledge, distill same, and turn the world around? Or is it something else?

In Outliers – The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell – in his typlical Gladwellian way – looks at ways success is achieved in very non-intuitive ways. Yet you’ll come away agreeing with him, for the most part.

Success in hockey? Look at the hockey leagues of Canadian youths. You first enter when – in the calendar year – you turn 10. So, those born on Jan. 1 (already 10) or Dec. 31 (9 years old at sign up) are in the same league/bracket. Guess who dominates? Yeah, the older kids – the difference between 30 and 31 years old is nothing; between 9 and 10 – when you’re still growing – the extra year/few months is a huge difference.

And those “better” kids will then get into the higher bracket the next year, with more skating time, better instruction and so on. So they keep getting “better.” Yet they aren’t better than the younger players overall, they are just born at the right time of the year. Time-shift the entry time up six months, and suddenly most of the better players will be from the third quarter of the calendar year.

Gladwell writes in Outliers – as he does in his other books and “New Yorker” essays – very cleanly, free of jargon. In other words, a pleasure to read. It’s not as deep in some points as I would have liked, but extremely accessible.

The insights – the tying disparate information together – are done very simply, and it’s remarkable Gladwell is, through a series of very non-linear examples, to pretty much make one question about how we learn and succeed. It goes beyond base ability, hard work and good schools.

Note: Gladwell does not really define “success.” It’s not an analysis of what constitutes success; to Gladwell, success is bettering oneself/things somehow: Better reading scores, fewer airline crashes, using street smarts instead of raw IQ to gain one’s goals. This isn’t a book that outlines how to make cool million or two.

The only quibble I have with the book – that it skipped over some very obvious points – is also one of its main strengths. If Gladstone had gotten down in the weeds to get to the bottom of all of this or that issue’s problems, it would have bogged down. And been a very different book.

I like this one.

WATCHING:
Moneyball
Starring: Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill

I heard a lot of good things about this movies, but I found it just “entertaining” and no more.

It was probably hard to pull a movie out the (Michael Lewis – of “The Blind Side”) book, and – to me – they didn’t succeed that well.

I like baseball, I like Brad Pitt and so on, but this was never anything more that just kind of fun.

I remember reading a review of the book when there was talk of a movie about the book, and that – the article – was fascinating, describing in more detail than is possible on film what the Oakland A’s did to have the tremendous year it had.

This did change baseball, a point made in the movie, but still rang a little Hollywood, rather than inside baseball.

All movies

WATCHING:
Ides of March
Starring: George Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Ryan Gosling

A taut, campaign-trail thriller, the plot is the main star – it keeps you guessing as to motives and what direction it’s going.

And saying the plot is the star is high praise, considering all the stars in this movie, most of whom deliver compelling performances.

A deeply cynical movie, showing politics for what it probably is: Where one does and says anything to get elected. Things happen, people get hurt, but the campaign just rolls over these minor inconveniences and steams on to hopeful victory.

And all but the candidate are interchangeable. One intern/campaign honcho leaves, another just slides into the slot.

Apt title, for just about everyone in the movie gets stabbed in the back at some point during the film. Et tu, Brutus?

All movies

And I could care less. So I watched a couple of movies this weekend, instead (see embedded reviews). Mixed bag.

Hmm…I just realized that I’ve been blogging for over a decade. Yes, that’s 10+ years of nonsense, but still somewhat remarkable. This blog has been – and continues to be – an outlet for writing (I was an English major in college and worked as a writer/editor for several years), as well as a platform to just try new tech things.

For example, the “Listening To” list in the rail – that’s auto-updated several times an hour by pulling my local iTunes song list via a local Linux server, massaging and uploading the recent listens. And it gets pulled into the rail via a AJAX call a few times an hour, so if I’m listening to music and you leave the page open in a tab, the list’ll change about every 15 minutes.

Stuff like that.

Hey, I’m a dork. I like playing with this stuff!

Sorry sports fans, but – to me – this type of stuff beats watching the Super Bowl…

According to an LA Times report, a new deal between Netflix and Warner Bros. includes a new rental delay provision:

Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues.

Marco Arment trots out the proper response:

If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime. If I can’t add it to Netflix, I’ll just forget about it and probably never see it.

While there may be some exceptions, I think this is basically true.

Let’s see if the other studios go down this desperate path for more DVD sales.

Nicely played, Warner Bros…

WATCHING:
The Lovely Bones
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci

This movie, based on the book by the same name by Alice Seybold, begins as the book does, with narration by the protagonist: “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”

Whoa – we’re in for a feel-good movie!

I have not (yet) read the book, but I knew the subject matter and was a little hesitant to pick it up, but whatever. Give it a shot.

I thought it was great. It’s an almost non-linear book, and one told from two points of view: From her perch in (almost) heaven, and from those she has left behind (family, friends and her killer).

Susan Sarandon, who plays Susie’s grandmother, gives a great performance in very little screen time. That said, I didn’t quite get the anguish of her father – Wahlberg – from his performance that reflected his character’s intensity/anguish as Susie’s narration outlined. He was OK, but nothing great.

Tucci, playing a pedophile, was his usual brilliant. Pedophile, hit man (The Pelican Brief), gay fashion designer (The Devil Wears Prada), statesman and solid husband (Julie and Julia) – this guy can act!

It’ll be interesting to see how it compares to the book – the movie, directed by Peter Jackson, has a lot of Lord of the Rings type fantasy sequences. I’m guessing fans of the book will say Jackson went with CGI at the expense of more character interaction – which, who knows, might be true – but the 2-hour+ movie was very satisfying to me, despite the distasteful subject matter.

And the girl – she is only 18 years old this year – who played Susie (Saoirse Ronan) was great. Very believable and vulnerable yet – at the same time – strong and wise beyond her years.

Glad I picked it up.

All movies

The web is, of course, a very fluid arena.

I’ve noticed recently some shifts in sites that I hit – some more, some falling off my radar. Here are some examples, in no particular order:

Reading more often:

• Readwriteweb.com – Once Flipboard became available for the iPhone, I installed it immediately. One of the media channels was readwriteweb, and this just reminded me about how I’d forgotten to remember to follow this site. Got that? Good stuff for techies.
• Pandodaily.com – Yeah, dumb name (but for a good reason…). Basically made of a lot of writers who bailed from Techcrunch.com after all the AOL/HuffPo fiascos. A daily must-read.
• Forbes.com – To be honest, I read this more on Flipboard than on the web, but a good source of tech and business news, usually very well-written and well-sourced.
• ParisLemon.com – The mad ramblings of Apple fanboy MG Siegler.

Reading less often:

• Techcrunch – As noted above, PandoDaily.com has filled that void. I only hit Techcrunch a couple of times a week vs. a few times a day in the past. Sad.
• Huffington Post – This site, while loading up a lot of fresh news daily, has a lot of crap. Fashion, headlines that belong on the National Enquirer, not a legit news site. Again, kind of sad.
• Kottke.org – Jason Kottke is, to me, the ultimate abstractor of the internet. Much like magazines devoted to providing small abstracts of large scientific articles – so you could scan or elect to read the entire report – Kottke finds what’s interesting on the web and points to same with a small excerpt or description. Useful. Yet a few years ago he (I applaud him) married well, has traveled, and really doesn’t need to blog as much. So he doesn’t. So I don’t go there that often. Still often find good stuff I would never have seen had I not gone there, so keep it up Jason.
• scripting.com – Dave Winer, the/one of the original bloggers, keeps writing, but I find – for whatever reason – less of it interesting. It might just be me. So I’ll go there occasionally to catch up, but it’s no longer a daily visit, more like once a week or so.

These are just a few, off the top of my head. Some of the changes have to do with changes to the sites; others are due to changes in me – my interests/priorities have shifted. As has my reading…

Thankfully, there are signs of sanity in Congress: It looks like the protests yesterday has pretty much made SOPA/PIPA, well, DOA.

MG Siegler, over at the new PandoDaily.com, has a good take on why it failed. Think buggy-whips and horses vs. cars…..

But [MPAA’s CEO] Dodd’s bigger problem — one that has plagued the entire MPAA for decades — is that they fundamentally don’t understand technology. And so they turn to fear-mongering. Television was going to kill movies. Videotapes were going to kill movies. DVDs were going to kill movies. Etc, etc, etc.

[…]Remember when VHS tapes were upwards of $100 to buy? Then they started making some priced-to-own and guess what? People started buying them. DVDs were priced to own from the start, but as their prices fell, guess what happened? More and more were sold. In fact, it became the bread and butter of the industry.

The iTunes model for music has proven that people will pay for content. You just have to make it as accessible as possible. That means both price and distribution points.

Instead, Hollywood has lost its collective mind. And its way. They want legislation that will puncture the fabric of the web. It’s insane.

Let’s say that both SOPA and PIPA are passed — does piracy stop? Of course not. It will find a way. No matter what happens, it will always find a way.

The best way to combat piracy is to remove barriers, not to put up new ones.

Update: It looks like the bills are – in their current form – dead.

Wikipedia has gone dark, and Google – with its huge megaphone – has protested, as well.

Good for them. Hopefully it’ll raise awareness of how this potentially damaging legislation could harm the internet as a whole, just to protect some rights of a minority (copyright holders).

Yes, piracy is a problem – and is wrong. Agreed.

But this is not, in my mind, the answer. To be fair, however, some of the more onerous provisions of the original bill (DNS redirects [blocks?] and so on) have been stripped out. But still, a chilling bill.

Proponents say it’ll be effective, just like the DMCA – but that has been a mess in many ways, as well. For example, reverse engineering can be a felony. So it makes it illegal to – for example – make cheaper laser cartridges that can interact with HP printers. Helps HP, but not the consumer.

Update: Tim Bray – a Canadian – has, as always, a clear-eyed view of this issue.

James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” popped up on my iTunes shuffle.

Damn. Spot on.

Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far 5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can’t make it here anymore

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams
All lily white and squeaky clean
They’ve never known want, they’ll never know need
Their shit don’t stink and their kids won’t bleed
Their kids won’t bleed in the dad’s little war
And we can’t make it here anymore

And “we can’t make it here anymore” cuts two ways – one, we’re not manufacturing here anymore, and two, we can’t make our economic ends meet.

Delivered by McMurtry in his flat, matter-of-fact monotone, it resonates even more.

This song is about a decade old, I’d guess, but it could have been recorded today.