This Is Why I Use FlashBlock

I wrote in detail about the sins of Flash in a previous post.

You can learn more about the FlashBlock extension here.

Today, I chanced upon the website for The Inn at False Creek hotel in Vancouver, BC.  Check out the three pics below.

The first is how the website appears with FlashBlock on, with seven instances of Flash (or other blocked items) showing.  Wow, that's a lot.  What sorts of nifty stuff could they be putting on this page?

The second is how it looks with the Flash items loaded.  Wow, that is nifty! Text! They are using it to load up styled text, with an overhead for loading and launching whatever technology seven times on the page.  They could have embedded graphics with alt text, or other mechanisms, but they chose this.

And for comparison the third image is how the page looks on an iPad.  Wow is that bad.  The only thing I really regret about Apple’s refusal to deal with Flash on the iPad is things like this which show lousy programming practices in action.

 

The Anti-Jackson

I had an organization board meeting on Wednesday night, and in the dark, my right-hand riding glove went AWOL and we couldn’t find it after the meeting.  So I had to ride the short bit home with just my left glove.  No big deal.

On Thursday, I went back by the meeting location and saw that someone had found my glove and set it on a brick retaining wall.  Of course, it had rained over night, so the glove was wet and maybe dirty from wherever it had fallen the night before.  So getting home, I added it to a load of laundry, and since I was doing such, added my super lightweight secondary gloves and my Turtle Fur neck wrap; they could all use an occasional wash.

Thursday night came and a committee meeting… and oh crud, all three gloves and the neck wrap was in the washing machine, not yet in the dryer.  Well, in a pinch, get a garden glove!

But, um…

• Somewhere along the line, I lost one glove from each of two pairs of garden gloves, and it was the right-hand glove missing.
• The more recent pair of garden gloves, when I got them back from the store, they had bound two matching gloves into the package instead of a pair… two left-hand gloves!

So now I had my choice of five different gloves to wear to ride to the meeting, all of them left-hand gloves.  As noted, I felt like an anti-Michael Jackson: white guy with one black glove on the opposite hand.
 

Dream Journal: January 22, 2012

Okay, Moses, interpret this sucker!

I took off on my hang glider from the Marin headlands, across the water, parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge.  As I sailed across the water, I saw thrashing in the water below, a shark feeding frenzy.  At first I thought they were megalodons, but then I realized that they were black on top and white on the bottom, black scorpion sharks.

After I landed in the Presidio, I finished off my pint glass of beer and set it on the grass.  Looking into the water of the bay near the shore, I saw a severed arm moving along the bottom, almost like it was crawling by its fingers.  The arm had been in the water a long time; I could tell by what was either algae on it or bits of flesh peeling off.

I went and got the park police, but the arm was gone when we got back.  They quizzed me at length about it, especially interested in what type of sleeve was on the arm.  (It had a dark band at the wrist, so I thought maybe it was a sailor shirt.)  They sent divers into the bay looking for it, but they couldn’t find it.  But they did find the severed head of an albino alligator, which they showed me on a turkey platter, sitting on top of a ring of lettuce greens.

Megalodons are giant prehistoric sharks, long extinct.  There is no such thing as a “black scorpion shark”.

I guess I slept in a weird position with my arm crooked up, and it fell (ahem) asleep.
 

Limerick

There was a drag queen named Melinda
Whose favorite singer was Carlisle (Belinda)
But as a Go Go
She did a no no
And sang something from the Pretendas

 

Motorcycle Poetry — “November”

November

The pavement, streaked
Blood red and brown
Shards and moist bits scattered about

Cars drive through
Unseen, uncaring
Grinding to a paste
Smearing across the roadway

Nothing identifiable remain
Only streaks and smears
Waiting for a November rain to wash it away
Waiting for it to happen again

Some leaves have yet to fall

[“Motorcycle poetry”: imagery that comes to me and percolates into poetry while I am riding.]
 

Movie Review — Cars

Quick Reaction

Cars was useless.

More Details

For starters, I don’t like NASCAR (or other car racing).  And mind you, this isn’t in isolation: I went with a date to a car race one time; I don’t think we went out again after that.  90-minute drive to get there, and another hour to get into the racegrounds and park (and an hour to get out again later).  Then lots of cars going by a few at a time, and expensive concessions.  What was the point?  Not even any crashes.

(There’s a theory that says there are two types of sports.  In one, you go to see someone doing something impressive — track & field, for example.  In the other, you go to see someone get hurt — football.  Car racing: in person, you often can’t see the whole picture of the race, just a couple hundred yards of the track, so frankly, you’re there in hopes of seeing a nasty crash.)

(Baseball doesn’t seem to fit into either category.  Maybe it’s not really a sport?  And Ice Dancing falls in both categories.  <grin>)

Beyond that, with Cars in particular, I found the character designs to be ugly.  And while I expect a simplified story in animated films, since they are largely aimed at kids, I typically expect enough non-kid content in a Pixar film to make adults not feel the film was a waste of their time.  I didn’t get that in Cars: shallow characterization, predictable plot, and a “message” throughline so worn that it could get a blowout on any curve.

Say Something Nice

Beautiful work on the landscapes.  Can I get a short film just of them?
 

Movie Review — Clerks

Quick Reaction

Clerks was crap.

More Details

After disliking Mallrats so much, what did I expect, watching an even earlier Kevin Smith film?  Glutton for punishment, I guess.

Neither Dante nor Randal present as well-formed characters.  Randal’s dialogue, in particular, never comes across as realistic; not just being delivered like a swiftly memorized, passionless monologue but apparently written in the same way.

I still have Chasing Amy and Dogma in my Netflix queue.  They are newer films, so Smith’s skills should be better, right?  They can't get worse, can they?  Can they?

Say Something Nice

I watched this in 5-10 minute chunks over the course of a month.  (That it took me a month to finish it says something.)  I have no problem doing that with most any movie; I have read comic books for thirty years, and they present a 22-page chunk of story once a month, unfolding over 4, 6, 12 months, so doing a movie that way over days or weeks is not much different.  Clerks itself is very “chunked”, even with segment titles throughout, so it works even that much better viewed in pieces than most films will.