[Originally posted on The Farm. I thought this might be of more general interest since it’s about design.]
The web application frameworks Rails, Django and Symfony not
only have the same general approach to their frameworks, they also
have the same general look on the banners of their webpages. These
frameworks all follow the what The Pragmatic Programmer called the DRY
— Don’t Repeat Yourself — principle, but that principle doesn’t rule
out repeating others!
“Scattered explosions and a 99% chance of gloating on Little Green Footballs…”
While I was busy celebrating my birthday last Saturday, others were
celebrating the accordion at the 8th Annual Northeast Accordion
Festival in Minneapolis. Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek sent me this scan [244KB JPEG image] of a local newspaper that covered the event (click it to see it at full size):
I haven’t been practicing as much as I should lately. Getting married
and getting Wendy moved in really disrupted all sorts of routines,
wonderful as both were. I’m slowly in the process of resuming all sorts
of things, not the least of which is a little regular keyboard practice.
Living in a condo complicates the matter; prior to getting married, I
lived in a house that was very well acoustically isolated from the
neighbours. I’m quite sure that even at medium volume, all three
adjacent units would be able to pick up the sound of me working on my
rendition of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie.
I can at least keep my keyboard chops sharp thanks to a pair of
headphones and my collection of old-but-trusty synthesizers — a Korg Wavestation A/D rack and a even more old-school Korg Poly-800
that Steph Fox gave to me a couple of birthdays ago. Perhaps I should
take a peek at some software synths as well — I figure my PowerBook
(1.3 Ghz 12″ AlBook, 1.25G RAM) should be up to the task. Anyone out
there have any favourites?
I’m also getting a little more accordion practice now that I’m back to regular attendance at Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli.
Wendy likes the opportunity to exercise her lovely singing voice in
public, and those who know me know how much I love being on stage.
Last Sunday’s session was a special treat. We got to take Dave from
Chicago over to his first Kickass Karaoke, and I also got a chance to
meet Bob “Let It Bleed” Tarantino,
one of the better and saner voices in the local right-wing blogosphere.
Carson covered mine and Wendy’s drinks as a birthday present to me
(thanks for the Jagermeister, Cars!) and the wind storm kept the crowd
to a minimum, giving me a chance to go onstage often and experiment
with a few numbers. I tried a couple of new ones, including Wheatus’
high school whine-anthem Teenage Dirtbag and the moshtacular Thunder Kiss ’65
by White Zombie. How Rob Zombie can vocalize through an entire concert
using that voice is beyond me; my vocal cords were shredded after that
one.
Who knew that Archie Comics were so interesting? Not only have I stumbled across a story in which Betty went goth, I’ve also come across a comic in which the nerd character, Dilton Doiley, has an inflatable “girlfriend” [117KB JPEG file]…
They kind of look like Chris Pirillo and Ponzi, don’t they? Click the image to read the comic.
The comic comes courtesy of the LiveJournal “scans_daily” community, where people post their favourite excerpts from comics. It’s always a good read.
Take a look at the random ad that got served along with the news story titled Gigantic Apes Coexisted with Early Humans, Study Finds:
[Slightly repurposed from this posting on The Farm]
The three images shown below are used as the banner graphics on the web
page for a product launch that took place yesterday. Can you guess what
the product is?
Perhaps it’s a new line of clothes? New bookstore? Perhaps something from Bed Bath and Beyond?
New sports magazine? New place to buy music?
Financial planning? Male enhancement pills?
Would you believe they’re for the 2005 edition of Microsoft’s programming tools, Visual Studio Express? That’s right, they’re images used in the promotion of programming tools
— the “lite” versions of their database, SQL Server, and integrated
developments environments for C#, C++, Java and Visual Basic.
While Microsoft is to be commended for not feeding the geek stereotype, I find these images to be a bit…unlikely.
I decided to have a little fun adding word bubbles to these pics…
* Note to Tucows shareholders, the human resources
department and my wife: this sort of thing does not actually happen.
Except for the ops plan; that’s real.
Accordion City writer James Reid and his girlfriend went out a Friday night to see a preview screening of Derailed, which came with a free search-and-seizure procedure:
…the line was moving slowly because they were asking customers to raise their arms so that they could be electronically frisked with a metal detector, and women’s purses were being searched by uniformed security guards. Try to remember that this is Toronto, Canada we’re talking about here, not New York, Tel Aviv or London.
People who submitted to the search (everyone from what I could tell) had their cellphones taken from them and checked at a table set up in front of the theatre and they were given a ticket to reclaim it when they left.
I was having none of this, and checked the back of my ticket stub to ensure that there was no mention of being required to submit to a search listed as a condition of sale.
As my girlfriend and I made it to the front of the line, the guard looked at me and asked me to raise my arms for the search. I politely declined saying “No, thank you”, and proceeded to the ticket taker. I could hear him calling “Sir! Sir!” behind me, but even though I slowed my pace in case he was really going to do something about it, as I had expected, I wasn’t stopped.
The ticket taker took my ticket and I waited for my girlfriend just inside the gate, as her purse was being subjected to a thorough going through by one of the guards.
Since she was there for work, and her deadline was that night, she was not ready to risk not seeing the movie. Her 150 words won’t have room for what happened next.
Her phone was taken from her and put in a sealed plastic bag with a claim ticket, and she joined me where I was waiting, past the gate, and we walked into the theatre together.
To add further insult to the debacle at the gate, near the exits at stage right and left were two uniformed security guards at each door, all four with video cameras scanning the crowd and making themselves very conspicuous.
This was not just a bit of pre-show MPAA theatre, they stood there for the entirety of the movie, red LED’s glowing, scanning the crowd to remind us that we were under close surviellence [sic] and our actions were being recorded.