The air conditioner for the back office is busted and it ain't getting fixed.

I feel kind of bad about it, partially because I'm in the back office but mostly because I'm on the outs with management w.r.t. the air conditioning situation (e:zobar,68) [woops].

So today I went out and got a 6-pack of icy-cold Sam Adams for the back office. [It is important to know that the back office and the front office are separate enough that we may as well be in separate buildings.] Later on, the assistant music editor came back to chat about our upcoming citywide battle-of-the-bands thing (e:zobar,79) . Of course I offered him a bottle, and of course he accepted. I did not expect that, after the meeting, he would come back with two 6-packs of icy cold beer of his own for the office. Now Video and Editorial are in on it, and nothing is getting done.

Now we've got AirTunes set up in the back office and one of the front office people is djing for us. I got a link to Bar Stool Racing and we got videos of dudes taking on four other dudes and winning and the whole place has just gone to hell. This is kind of a crappy company to work for, but where else could you get away with this much fucking around?

Wally is my hero. Perhaps that's a bad thing.

- Z

On the one hand, what a weirdo.
On the other hand, can you blame him?



- Z

First things first: (e:libertad,79) got me thinking about the environment, sort of - so my new user sound is '(Nothing But) Flowers' by the Talking Heads gather:0052634001152745342

I'm a little cheesed off about work- I got the last three articles dumped on my desk at 5:30 this evening, a half hour after I was supposed to have already been at my mom's house to tend to her dog. One of them was supposed to be a web exclusive that we were going to promote on the cover, but it's in the paper this week. Is it just me, or does something cease to be a web exclusive once you run it through the press? Ohhh.... just the video is exclusive to the web, because that's a special thing. Wouldn't it be more impressive if we did run the video in the paper? Pick the most important 54 frames and print them in the corner of every page so you can flip through them real fast?

The moral of the story is: the dog pooped all over the floor.

- Z

_______________
ps. The video is kind of blah, but it's worth it just to see Antoine Thompson try to say that he supports gay marriage without actually saying that he supports gay marriage. Also, props to Sam Hoyt for showing up and going on-record, though his argument that gay marriage would be good for Buffalo's economy is, like, really weird.

Dear sir or madam:

My name is [Eric]. I'm the features editor at City Newspaper in Rochester. We're currently preparing to completely overhaul our website, giving it both a redesign and massive content upgrade. I was looking at [your] website and was impressed by some of the features. I was wondering, does your paper create the site in-house, or do you contract with a web provider/designer?

If you could back to me on this at your earliest convenience I would greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,
[Eric]

- Z

I hate the way that photo sharing sites are laid out. I have a big screen, I want to see a big motherfuckin' picture - not acres of whitespace. 500x375 is not high-resolution, Yahoo*. If I had a small screen, I'd still want to see a big motherfuckin' picture and the caption and not have to scroll all over the screen to see it, Photobucket. You should also enable random-access navigation from the photo display page, not just from the thumbnails page, Apple.

But now it seems that Editorial now wants to run a picture page with a significant online component. So I talk a lot of trash but now it's my turn to step up and show y'all how it's done.

This is how it's done:

Notice how the thumbnails page scales with the size of your screen. Big screen, lots of thumbnails; small screen, fewer thumbnails. I do not try to jam five thumbnails across in a table because that would not work for many people. Notice how the photo takes up as much of the screen as you will give it. You cannot assume that people will have large screens, nor should you assume that people will have small screens. This design does not seriously break down until below 800x600. All the thumbnails are displayed on the left side of the screen, so you do not have to return to the thumbnails page to explore our photos. The title, photographer, and caption are clearly visible onscreen at all times. Most of the graphical elements are grayscale against a black background so that the photograph really pops. We do not have any dancing bears labeled with every state of the union offering you great mortgage rates. Every photograph has a unique and descriptive URL. It offers a photofeed/photocast compatible RSS feed [which will be better promoted]. The buttons at the bottom of the screen do not do anything, giving our users the opportunity to wonder what the Hell is going on [because it isn't done yet].

<geeky>
I put together this design in Firefox in one day. It took me another full day to get it to look the same in IE as it does in Firefox and Safari. Now I understand why photo sites are not laid out this way.

For starters, no browser will scale images to 'the largest size possible while still maintaining aspect ratio.' This seems like an oversight to me. As a consequence, the large photo is wrapped in a very small Flash stub that loads the image and scales it appropriately.

But more importantly, if you want a box to go from the top of the screen to the bottom, IE will not let you do

[box]#thumbs {
    bottom: 128px;
    overflow: auto;
    position: absolute;
    right: 0;
    top: 0;
    width: 256px;
}[/box]

because it is wack-ass and does not understand that top:/bottom: is a valid substitute for top:/height: and thus totally ignores the bottom: [and also, coincidentally, throws away the overflow: as well]. Thankfully, its wack-ass CSS engine will let you specify a Javascript expression for the value of a CSS attribute:

[box]#thumbs {
    bottom: 128px;
    height: expression('' + (document.body.clientHeight - 128) + 'px');
    overflow: auto;
    position: absolute;
    right: 0;
    top: 0;
    width: 256px;
}[/box]

What the fuck is that?! Now- I have to admit that there is some perverse part of my id that expression() appeals to, but that doesn't mean that I should have had to use it.
</geeky>

At any rate- my humble contribution to online photo sharing.

- Z

_______________

• Yes, (e:ajay) - Flickr has some very cool features. I like the one where you can draw a box around the dude's johnson and totally make juvenile comments about it. If I ever took photos I would put them on Flickr just so I could do that. No I am not joking.

If i'd known eminent design had custom ramin i'd have gone there more often.

So you're hanging out at the mall with your friends, and you see a tornado coming. Quick! What do you do?

No! You do not get your phone out and point it at the tornado! What is wrong with you?!

::DOWNLOAD MEDIA::

- Z

who checks out other peoples' groceries in the checkout line and thinks completely baseless snarky and judgmental thoughts about their diet?

- Z

So I saw An Inconvenient Truth yesterday and it freaked my shit right out. I am not in the proper mental state to have to deal with tornadoes in Cheektowaga. You can't just spring that shit on somebody. By the time I got home I was convinced these are the End Times and it'll be two months before we're living on rooftops and killing each other over rat meat. Bad juju.

This week I got meeting'd to death. I'm not sure whether I am glad that everyone has taken a sudden interest in the website, or chagrined. Either way, we're going to have a new home page starting next issue and some interesting ideas coming down the pipe shortly.

One very cool thing we want to do is take our regular interview-with-local-bands piece and turn it into an Epic Cyber Battle of the Bands. We run two bands in the paper every week, side by side, and there is an Ultimate Popularity Contest of Ultimate Destiny every week on the website, where you can listen and vote. After eight weeks [sixteen bands, eight winners] we match up the winners for the next four weeks. The last four bands standing play a show, and the winner gets ... I dunno, but it's something big.

Another idea that's a little further down the road is we want to put together some sort of participatory video website. [I think I may have mentioned this before; (e:mike) you should pay attention.] On the one side of the balance, we have traditional commercial television, where the station produces and controls all the content and all the shows suck. On the other side of the balance, we have YouTube and Public Access where the content comes directly from the public and all the shows suck. We want to split the difference - solicit pilot episodes from the public, try to separate the interesting and novel from the ho-hum, and contract a short, renewable series from the better producers. We want to find interesting people on the fringe and give them a forum for their work. I think this could be very cool.

- Z

I have spent the last week surrounded by romantic beginnings and endings. My buddy Tom got married last night [congrats to both of them]. His parents had divorced not too long ago due to some long-standing and deep-seated weirdness which I have neither the understanding nor the inclination to discuss. His mom had a blast last night and said at the rehearsal dinner that she feels that she's gotten a new lease on life following the split.

At last week's conference, two of my coworkers hooked up. Both had been in fairly long-term relationships and both had moved in with their significant others within the last couple months. The fallout was immediate and painful; by Friday, life in the office had not yet settled down, but there was an unspoken but very present understanding that one way or another, things work out.

Given my surroundings over the last week, it would be difficult not to be introspective. (e:dragonlady7) has nailed her 95 theses on marriage to the door of the blogosphere , in which she has managed to write 1400 words of gospel truth while still completely missing the point*, which has little to do with contracts and lawyers and the importance or unimportance of the institution of marriage.

The point is, sometimes you've got to jump. You may not want to, and you may not know whether you have it in you. Maybe you'll land on your feet, maybe someone will catch you, maybe you'll land flat on your face, and maybe someone will pick you up - but sometimes there's no time to think about that until you're already taking that big swan-dive into the unknown. Close your eyes and feel the wind in your hair. Stick to your wits and trust your judgment. This is the right thing to do. Open your eyes and see the opportunities that stretch before you. This is life, and life is good.

- Z

_______________

• I realize I'm going to get castrated for that, but it's true.

ps. New journal music: 'All the Umbrellas in London' from '69 Love Songs' by Magnetic Fields. gather:0755606001151100722