Sydney Harbour Bridge at night

28 May 2006

Mmmm pretty. Result of a random excursion last night.

Two Weeks From Twenty

27 May 2006

So far as the album Lights and Sounds goes, this song is pretty different.

Jimmy wasn’t really popular
He had a couple of friends back home
And sooner or later they’re all getting out so he had to join up alone
He was dreaming of the Ivy League since he was only three feet tall
And get the hell out of jersey and then he would never look back at all

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
They’re gonna miss him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy never had a reason to stay
Cos all the factories shut down
All he had was a line for his name
So he could sign away his right to be proud
He tried to kiss her on the way out the door,
She just put her little hand on his face
I don’t understand why you’re leaving, she said
But I hope your gonna ask me to wait

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His lady missed him, he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame

Jimmy’s mother went to Capitol Hill
So she could fill her heart up with joy
Maybe shake a few hands while she’s there and tell them thank you sir for taking my boy.

And then your heroes say
That miles away
We lost another one that we sent with a gun
His momma missed him he was two weeks from twenty and there’s still no shame
From the man to blame
No there’s still no shame
And we’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame
We’re all to blame

Maybe the lyrics of every track are this politicized, and it’s just that the elocution in this track makes the message more accessible, but I’d hazard not. I don’t normally listen to song lyrics, mostly because music is rarely an object-of-attention for me (that is, anything more than appealing noise in the background to aid other tasks), but for some reason this stood out.

I’ve heard Yellowcard dismissed as emo crap… is there such thing as political emo crap? I suppose that’d aptly characterise the apparent inclination of most politically active (i.e. not apathetic/indifferent) uni students: perpetually frustrated and looking to hurt someone (quoth the banner, “The next cut: Howard’s neck”). Well, that seems to be the case at Sydney, anyway. ;-)

Anyway… enough of that. I liked the song even if it’s a bit US-parochial (i.e. one guy two weeks from twenty is more valuable than [blank] foreigners) … and yeah, I know this artistic sentiment isn’t isolated to recent conflict or even just the US, and yeah, I know it’s a valid objection. If you haven’t heard it yet it’s worth listening to at some point.

Momentary dyslexia

27 May 2006

I just read “file” as “life”.

TACKLES Newspaper Hockey

26 May 2006

Awesome fun. (And kinda cool photos too, I thought :P)

CSS closure

26 May 2006

It’s been so long since I’ve actually “finished” a stylesheet on a real site (not some tiny two-page thing or an application) that I don’t remember how to let go. I keep looking around for the little things I’ve missed (they’ll always be there), but there’s increasing amounts of nothing. I’ve got to say that it’s fun to do having taken a break (not intentionally, just played out that way because other stuff was going on) for a couple of months… though I’m a little more jaded about having to use abs pos and floats everywhere, etc., this time around.

I think it’s coz I haven’t done my own designs for quite a while (and am hence contending with table-thought). I need to get my hand in again.

This time it’ll probably be back to a darker base. Cyclic, I tell you! I was actually thinking of something like Ellen’s blog has (only with blue and some colour and less random stuff and without annoying IE-proprietary coloured black-on-black scroll bars!) but was researching some JavaScript stuff today and came across some dark blogs and wow did my eyes like that. Probably because between a white design and a white-base code window on two monitors I effectively spent at least 8 hours today staring at panels of light… but I’m actually now starting to see the benefits of dark-based high-contrast designs.

I’m probably just going blind, but statistically that places my preferences closer to those of most of the web, so designers that like tiny type can suck my text-zooming browser. Whilst I make your pretty pixel-perfect designs look horrible as they scale.

I don’t want elastic designs, I want designs that don’t give a crap what you do to them. That, if you explode them into lots of little pieces, aren’t overlapping themselves and flow just fine. I kinda feel like I’m still trying to justify this present design (which, if I haven’t said this before, actually had its origins as a print stylesheet… it’s called “SC ClearPrint” for that reason), but if I am I hope to equally be justifying the next. Hoping for something equally functional but slightly prettier.

Whilst talking about styles, handheld styles are actually overrated if you’ve got a single-column layout. Even if you don’t, good handheld/mobile browsers mostly overcome the worst of the web. Semantic markup is actually quite important, having said that, because it reduces code-bloat by so much. When you’ve got minimal amounts of memory and a relatively slow processor, that kinda stuff matters irrespective of bandwidth.

(Aside: it amuses me to note that, with the exception of disk space, my PDA is more powerful than the first computer we owned — purchased in 1996(/5?), with a P-133/32MB/4GB/1MB gfx)

Yeah. Sufficiently off-topic to end this here methinks.