SuperWonderBang

This blog has officially moved back to http://aezell.wordpress.com. I just got tired of fiddling with all the Wordpress updates. It’s easier to let them do it for me. 

The new 4-up effects in Leopard’s PhotoBooth kept me up tonight.

Happy Times

Not-so-Happy Times

One of my favorite bands, Modern Skirts,  finally released this great video for their song “Pasadena.” I can’t wait to see them again.

This is made with a cool little web app that a friend wrote for the place we used to work.

Lip Service by Fylmz.com

This made me guffaw like a cretin. Yes, I am 8 years old.

I bought a new shirt a few weeks ago made by Columbia and it is sized very poorly. It was a “Lewisville Twill” and I bought a size larger than I normally buy because I knew I wanted to wear it over a T-shirt. So, I picked up a 4X (yes, I am a huge bastard).

Apparently, someone at Columbia who creates the bigger sized clothes has no concept of proportions. The shirt is appropriately bigger around, but it still seems to be like an XL in the shoulders and the sleeves. Not to mention that the tails of the shirt are so short that I can barely tuck the shirt in. The sleeves fit really tight around my arms and are about 5 inches too short. It’s just ridiculous.

What they seem to have done is taken a XXL shirt and just made the stomach part bigger, but left the same length and sleeves on it. I have a big belly, but I am also tall and have long arms. I am a big person, not just a fat person. I wear a size 56 sportcoat, so my chest is really big around as well. Imagine a college football lineman who’s about 30 pounds overweight. That’s my size.

Columbia seems to think that someone who buys a 4x shirt is 5′8″ tall and weighs 400 pounds. I don’t think I’ll ever buy from them again.

I know I should have tried it on first before removing the tags, but the other shirts I bought from other companies fit fine and I know my size. I didn’t expect for Columbia stuff which is, other than sizing, very high quality stuff to be fitted so poorly.

I’ve sent them an email despite the fact that their customer service contact form is a disaster. We’ll see what they say.

Technorati Tags: columbia clothes, clothing, fat bastard, big and tall

As promised, I updated the theme to use Dean Robinson’s Redoable. I hope to make some customizations, at least to the header, over the next week or so. I’ll be adding some plugins for additional functionality as well.

For now, no more Javascript errors. Yeah!

Yes, I know there are a couple of Javascript errors which occur when you visit my site. It seems to be coming from the Script.aculo.us stuff that the K2 template uses. I’ve posted on the forums over there and no one seems to have any answers.

So, when I stop being lazy, I will update to a new theme, Redoable, to solve those issues as well as give me the chance to add some features and just refresh the look. I haven’t done it yet, because I’ve simply been lazy.

Have patience.

When I was a child, my father was a traveling salesman. He would travel to all these small towns all over south Georgia and north Florida. In the summers, he would take me with him. We would be gone for a week at a time, sharing hotel rooms, sharing the adventures of the road, and sharing the delicious food at all the tiny out of the way BBQ restaurants.

The other thing we did was play harmonica and sing songs. Not with the radio, but just from our own recollection. Well, really my Dad’s recollection. One of my favorite songs that we sang back then was Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (see video below). Something about the distilled despair and sadness in the song resonated with me.

So, I’m very excited to say the I get to see the inimitable Gordon Lightfoot at TPAC tonight. My buddy Dave is going to be there and so is Kim. My wife is going, too. I’m thinking I might tear up a bit when he starts into Edmund Fitzgerald.

Once again, 37signals peers down from their ivory tower and tells us all how we should be doing something. Do they sell software or ego?

This time, Ryan (last name here) decides that he hates lightboxes. Apparently, his eyes are so sensitive that he gets a strobe light effect from just viewing some screenshots. What else would we expect from someone whose applications are perfect in every way.

I could stomach this righteousness if his blog post gave any inkling of solving the problem of displaying screenshots in an attractive way. It doesn’t. He just complains and, I suppose, keeps the secret magic to himself. Instead, we are to infer that a long page which we scroll through to see screenshots is better.

Snark aside, I see benefits to both approaches. If the lightbox is done well, as in it has gallery functions to move through a set of pictures, it has merit. The long scrolling page can be done well as long as there are some good visual cues to separate image and its accompanying text from the next set of image/text.

However, just declaring from the heavens that lightboxes are evil just smacks of the same old 37signals papal decree.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, lightbox, screenshots, pope