This weekend I returned to Oregon from my cross-country, family-visiting Thanksgiving journey. I had a great time catching up with family and old friends. It was also the first Thanksgiving since my senior year of high school (1996) that I was present for dinner with my mom and siblings. That was nice. I guess I’ll have to wait to break out the “Lazy man’s Thanksgiving dinner for two” until Christmastime this year.

In addition to the many links I have posted via Twitter lately, below are a few more items I’ve liked (or found interesting) since late October.

Alan Moore, art and design

• Alan Moore to write libretto for Gorillaz duo
• The first issue of Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic zine is out
• Nice: All About Comic Sans – History, Examples and Best Practices
• Norism: Commercialism by Nori Sato
• Cool pencil art: Jennifer Maestre Sculpture
• The World’s Greatest TreeHouse

Creepy animals and science

• Beautiful and Terrifying Creatures From The Edge Of Light (also see: Bloodybelly Comb Jelly)
• BPA is in everything: Tests Find Wide Range of Bisphenol A in Canned Soups, Juice, and More

Bohemian Rhapsody

• The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody
• Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody Played by Old Computer Equipment

More music

• Crazy animated music video: “Mani Malaikat” by Arrington de Dionyso
• Ah, the memories: Epic moment in Music Festival history @ Sasquatch 2009. A couple started having sex on the hill during The Decemberists’ awesome set. This song is “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid.” This was on Saturday, May 23 at The Gorge Amphitheatre, WA (also see my Sasquatch! 2009 review)
• A nice history: Know Your Meme: Auto-Tune. Worth mentioning: KRS-One’s anti-Auto-Tune anthem “Robot” is quite tasty
  

The Prisoner replica jacket

My friend Warren made a Prisoner jacket for himself for Halloween this year. He took a navy blue blazer and sewed some white piping (white bias) around the edges. Looked pretty good, but it’s still tempting to buy an Official Prisoner Replica Jacket, to be used for all future interviews, weddings and funerals.

Keanu Reeves is immortal

I found this amusing: Keanu Reeves is immortal.

DIY automated sentry gun

I would like to reiterate something I posted to Twitter a few weeks ago: I require a sentry gun to monitor the kitchen counters with a water pistol, accompanied by audio of Cartman yelling, “No Kitty! Bad Kitty!” This article was the inspiration for the idea: “This DIY Automated Sentry Gun Looks Terrifyingly Easy To Build.” That, plus living with housecats.

Web development

I will finish up here with some useful links to JavaScript/AJAX accordion scripts: 10 Javascript Accordion Scripts (various JavaScript libraries) and Rico Accordion Example (Prototype-based).

PlayersFrom.com

Ever wanted to know what players from your favorite college, home state or country are currently active on professional sports teams in the United States?

At Players From, you can keep track of professional athletes from your favorite college team, home state and home country.

Examples: Oregon State University, the state of Iowa and the country of Brazil.

You can also browse categorized mascots for all colleges, such as occupations, cats, bears, invertebrates and many more.

Other features include current MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL rosters, which have been linked back to ESPN and CBS Sports profile pages. Be sure to check out the growing Interesting Lists & Reports for random, useless and bizarre stats.

All Players From data tables are completely sortable, so can view your favorite pro players, teams and mascots however you prefer. If you think this site is useful, please share it with your friends and fellow sports fans! More features are coming soon.

Players From is one of several new software development efforts that will be placed under the umbrella of Agile Android in the coming months.

OnlineLabs.in

A related educational research project, also launched recently, is OnlineLabs.in. This site aims to serve as a comprehensive, encyclopedic reference about online labs in a variety of subjects, particularly virtual laboratory simulations for science education. We categorize useful listings for online lab simulations, virtual science experiments and free educational software.

OnlineLabs.in currently features resources in Chemistry, Physics and Biology to help learners identify free and commercial virtual science labs. We also offer online educational resources and information about simulations and free software in Anatomy, Geology, Astronomy, Design and Math.

• Using JavaScript to Search For and Highlight Text on a Web Page
• Find In Page Script
• Drop down/ Overlapping Content script
• Animated Collapsible DIV v2.4
• DD Drop Down Panel

This is another consistently useful JavaScript reference: JavaScript Kit > JavaScript Reference.

I found this quote from a Wikipedia article funny: “PL/LOLCODE, a project headed by Josh Tolley, makes LOLCODE available as a server-side programming language inside PostgreSQL.” This has been around for a few years now? How did I miss it? Can has?

I will be heading to Seattle this weekend and attending Bumbershoot 2009 on Monday. Excited to see Metric, Mirah, Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, Say Hi, The Cave Singers, Anomie Belle and so on.

Check out this year’s Bumbershoot schedule. I rather like the interactive event calendar service they’re using, called SCHED*. It uses the jQuery JavaScript library.

Follow me on Twitter for a few real-time Bumbershoot updates from the Seattle Center this Labor Day weekend.

Also, do you know how many people are in space right now?

Here are some useful articles and handy resources for web developers:

• “Create your own private Twitter site using WordPress“
• “Automate Your Home Using ioBridge and Twitter“
• jQuery Week Calendar, inspired by Google Calendar
• “List of Really Useful Tools for CSS Developers“
• “HTML 4 Considered Harmful“
• URI/URL escaping chart

Social media

This is interesting: “Social Media’s Effect on Learning.”

Maybe we shouldn’t quite finish digging the grave for MySpace: “MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards.” Now under new management!

Technology

From New Scientist: “Innovation: Award-winning product design of 2009.” Products include a tastable cookbook and the Haptic Reader (which makes non-Braille books accessible to the blind).

The age of artificially intelligent, conscious machines is coming: “Smart machines: What’s the worst that could happen?”

But this is already terrifyingly here: “Britain To Put CCTV Cameras Inside Private Homes.”

All of this kind of leads into: “Mayan End-Of-The-World Prediction Spurs Debate.”

Entertainment

On YouTube: VintageTVCommercials is an online resource for public domain TV commercials of the 1950s through the 1980s. The NimporteQui.com channel has some pretty funny videos. And cyriak’s channel has some interesting animation.

You can also watch episodes of  “Dr. Tran” at YouTube. It’s quite a good cartoon.

I like Monkeybicycle, a literary journal and website.

David Rees vs. Jamba Juice

David Rees, creator of the Get Your War On webcomic, is not happy: “No Justice, Part II: Boycott Jamba Juice!” I like some of the comments to the Boing Boing article: “Jamba Juice accused of stealing ‘Get Your War On’ artist’s work“:

• RyanH: “people are upset with Jamba Juice for being no-talent classless dicks. Not due to any belief that they have done something illegal.”
• Anonymous: “The only way this could have have been a lazier steal – is if they had called it ‘Get your juice on’. . .”

Funny. And also lame.

I’ll leave you with this: “Water Soluble Bikini Is One Cruel Prank.”

Flickr and Creative Commons images

Earlier today on Twitter I also noted that I am trying to deal with social media overload. I should probably evaluate how I use Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, FriendFeed, etc. What I really want is to manage them all more easily with my OpenID.

I add new photos to my Flickr profile on a daily basis now, as part of my “365 Days” photo project.

In related news, I found this cool photo set on Flickr: New York 1940’s.

Here’s a handy new Google Image Search feature: “Find Creative Commons images with Image Search.”

Web fonts and typography

It would be great if better typography was available for the Web, but IE doesn’t support @font-face. Cufón and FontJazz seem nice. I’m not a big fan of sIFR or FLIR, though I understand why they were developed originally. I’m not sure about the licensing and distribution model of Typekit. Only foundries that agree to a web-only font linking license will have hosted fonts supplied via the Typekit CDN.

This is a nice overview of four methods: “Font-ificating: Delivering Web-Native Fonts.” For more information on Cufón see this article: “Use Whatever Font You Please On WordPress.” For many fonts you can download, see broble.com Font Sharing.

AJAX web development

These sites and articles have come in handy for me during the past few months, for a few different AJAX-enabled sites I’ve built:

• jQuery UI
• AjaxDaddy
• “37+ Great Ajax, CSS Tab-Based Interfaces” at Noupe.com
• “50+ Nice Clean CSS Tab-Based Navigation Scripts” at Hongkiat.com
• “10 Javascript Ajax Tabs” at TutorialBlog.org
• Ajax Tabs Content Script at DynamicDrive.com

Here are some pages I found useful during some Internet Explorer-related AJAX fury last month:

• “IE and ‘Operation Aborted’” from Clientcide
• “Attaching JavaScript functions to the Window OnLoad event” from Thought Bytes blog
• innerHTML Property from MSDN
  

Eudora, Penelope extension and Thunderbird

April 8, 2009 is still the most recent release date of Eudora 8 (8.0.0b6) and Penelope (0.5a3). The Penelope extension works with Thunderbird 3.0b1 or higher. To sum things up: Three years later, Eudora 8 is still in beta. It is currently based on the Thunderbird 3.0b2 source code and comes packaged with an alpha version of the Penelope extension (which gives it that “Eudora” feel). Compelling. At this rate we may never have a final version of Eudora 8.

Oregon Country Fair

I will be attending the Oregon Country Fair near Veneta on Sunday. One highlight should be The Nowhere Band performing The Beatles’ White Album in its entirety for the 40th anniversary celebration. The Oregon Country Fair got its start in July 1969, a month before a little event called Woodstock happened in New York.

I’ll post some amusing and random pop culture links tomorrow.

Earlier today I realized that I launched my first website 12 years ago today. I started this blog seven years ago. Time flies.

Google Wave, Microsoft Bing and HTML 5

In late May, I read whole bunch of articles about Google Wave. Here’s one: “Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?” You can see Google Wave in this video: Google Wave: Live collaborative editing. Here’s another resource: Google Wave: A Complete Guide.

So what about the new search engine Microsoft Bing? Here are two articles: “Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo: Feature Smackdown” and “Bing Off to a Good Start: Takes #2 Spot Ahead of Yahoo.”

Will Google Wave consume everything? Well, it can eat Twitter: “Twave: Google Wave + Twitter.”

The Google I/O Keynote Day 1 video was interesting. Yes, the new features of HTML 5 and drawing with tags are cool. See the Canvas tutorial. Turns out that IE is still the bane of web developers’ existences. Go figure. I am very curious about the in-browser 3D graphics and JavaScript demonstrated in the keynote. And won’t the <video> tag to match the <img> tag be nice? Time to get video out of “plugin prison.” The W3C Geolocation API will be great when it’s widely supported as well. Can we actually get standardization across all browsers?

In addition to using the canvas tag in production websites someday (once IE is dead?), I am looking forward to playing with Typekit this summer. Learn more: “Web Fonts Get Real with Typekit.”

Other technology/paranoia

Here are two interesting articles, for Big Brother and hacker enthusiasts: “Britain’s CCTV Network to Track, Log All Car Journeys” and “The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit.”

Amusements

Funny or Die tweeted about the new “Tonight Show” set design on June 4: “Conan’s new set backdrop looks just like Super Mario Bros! http://imgur.com/hGEY5.gif” Nice! I love it.

I know the point of science isn’t for amusement, but here we have glowing monkeys in the name of science: “Japanese Scientists Create Green Glowing Monkeys.”

I’ll end this post with another goofy blog I found (there are many like this): Happiest People Ever!