A sampling of automated movie ideas from The Official Movie Plot Generator:
‘Jesus’ ‘goes on an LSD-induced psychedelic adventure’ ‘and in the process, learns the true meaning of Christmas’.
‘A cop who doesn’t play by the rules’ ‘competes in gritty inner-city basketball games’ ‘in the feel-good comedy of the year’.
‘A crackhead’ ‘coaches a hapless little-league baseball team’ ‘while juggling work, parenthood, and finding personal fullfillment’.
Microsoft added an interesting post to their IE 7 blog the other day, but between the lines it worries me a little that they aren’t doing enough for their next release. They sound like they’re concentrating on “bugs,” but I think they have much bigger problems they need to solve. Here’s what the web developer community needs most from IE 7:
1.) We need IE 6 (and really IE 5.5 as well) to be IE 7. The most important part of Microsoft rolling out a new browser is to get as many computers as humanly possible to upgrade to its features. All computers that get security updates that are currently using IE 5 or 5.5 or 6 should be upgraded to IE 7. If Microsoft wants to get on developers’ good sides, they’ll upgrade everyone to a new browser instead of further splicing the browser market. We have to develop for the most reasonably low common denominator, and if that’s still IE 5.5, it’s still IE 5.5. The worst thing they could do is only release IE 7 for Longhorn users. If, in 2008, the browser market share is 30% IE7, 30% IE6, 30% Firefox, 5% Safari, and still something like 5% IE 5.5 and less, we’re not much better off.
2.) We need support for CSS 2.1. There are so many things that we could do with CSS that we can’t do right now because only people using Firefox can benefit from them. Most importantly, all of the selectors need to work. The “:hover” pseudoclass is supposed to work on any element, not just links, and it would save a ton of javascript hassle if we could use that. The “:before” and “:after” pseudoclasses could let us put any HTML around elements, making all the crazy methods for adding rounded corners and dropshadows completely unnecessary. The sibling selector (”div + div”) would let us use plain markup to put dividing lines between all the elements in a list without having an extra dividing line at the bottom. The list goes on…
Right now we all have to hack into our own HTML code just to make our pages work in IE. Help us clean up the cruft of the internet, Microsoft.
What IE 7 Should do:
IE 7 should do a whole lot more than that. If it releases in 2006, it probably won’t see another feature update until 2010. That means that what it should really do is leapfrog everyone else and let Mozilla and Safari work to catch up. They should take the parts of CSS 3 that are done and implement them, and take the parts of CSS3 that aren’t done yet, finish them, and implement them. If they want to have some bragging rights, they should build in some features that Firefox doesn’t have instead of just playing catch-up themselves. Then when Firefox builds the same features, everyone will be better off.
Tonight I saw a commercial for Windows XP. Plain, vanilla, popup-infested, virus-friendly, 3 year-old Windows XP. It was a bunch of people saying “Start Something” in foreign languages and/or thick english accents, I wasn’t sure which.
This Seattle P-I article says the ad is part of an “enormous” (Adweek says $100 million) advertising campaign that will run for 15 months, and it explains that if the “negative feelings” surrounding Windows XP continue through the launch of Longhorn that it could be a “disaster.”
But isn’t this a better commercial for Apple’s Tiger upgrade they’re releasing on April 29th? “Wow, Microsoft is advertising for Windows XP, which they haven’t changed in over 3 years. They must really be worried about Apple.” Who needs the Windows taskbar, anyway? All I need is a bunch of Firefox tabs.
Nobody chooses Windows. It’s like buying a car, but in a world where most car companies only make cars that come in white. You can get your car in red instead if you know how to paint it yourself (Linux), but the engine fails if you even think about another color. There’s only one little manufacturer that makes cars in blue, and boy do those people look happy. The white ones seem to get car-jacked way more often…
Today I upgraded the Recent Links sidebar on my page. I was using a custom Wordpress plugin, but the RSS was shaky and only got updated when I added a full post. So I switched to using Furl to keep track of my links. It’s not perfect (it stores copies of the pages I save and it has ratings, both of which I don’t need), but having more features than I need can’t hurt. You can see all my Furl Recent Links here.
The main reason I switched is because I also switched to FeedBurner for my XML feed. (The feed is at http://darrendelaye.com/feed and redirects to FeedBurner.)
And FeedBurner splices in my Furl feed with my site feed. Everything from this site is now on one feed. If that didn’t make sense, don’t worry about it (but if you’re trying to figure out a good way to read the new posts on websites you like, I recommend Bloglines).
Party Shuffle in iTunes is great. I pull out my laptop on the bus, plug in my headphones, and Party Shuffle my way to work. From an interaction standpoint, Party Shuffle is like hiring a DJ who has to do whatever you tell him to do. This is how it works:
As if that wasn’t enough, if you happen to go spelunking through your music library and find a song you want, you can choose to “Play Next in Party Shuffle” or “Add to Party Shuffle.” Apparently, there’s even some way that you can have multiple people adding and deleting songs at the same time listening over a network. But that’s like having more than one person fighting over the list of CDs the DJ has (but on the other hand, don’t worry, he’s got enough copies to go around).
The benefit to me is that I don’t have to choose songs from my list of several thousand. Instead, I only have to pick one out of the 6 or 7 that I scan, or pick 4 or 5 out of the next 10. When I pick songs from the library, I usually start with an artist that I have a lot of songs from and listen to a bunch, ignoring the artists that I only have one song from because they take longer to search through and recognize, but with Party Shuffle I get an even mix.
Whose job was it to design Party Shuffle?
I just saw a commercial for a new House of Wax movie coming out on May 6th, and it’s the first horror movie in a long time that I actually want to go see because I think I’d be completely scared. Check out the trailer to see what I mean.
On a picture from the website: “Did you know that 2 out of 3 people claim to have an unsettling feeling while in a wax museum? They report that the life-like qualities of the figures is creepy, almost as if the figures themselves are alive…”
Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray seem perfect for a horror movie. And Paris Hilton seems perfect for dying in the first 15 minutes of a horror movie. So it’s got my vote, but something tells me Jaime won’t want to see it.
