Forest for the Trees
This drawing was made while looking out the window at my parents’ cabin in Northern Arizona, using Autodesk SketchbookPro for the iPad. It’s a fun program to use; they just need to make it easier to save files while you’re working on them. I’ve had a couple of times (including on this drawing) where the drawing was almost finished, then somehow I got out of SketchbookPro and all the latest work was never saved. I also have an annoying habit of getting into the section where you can rotate or move the drawing, then it ends up getting saved that way. Cool program, needs some fine tuning.
Ten Years a Scrubbling Fool
A milestone: this week marks the tenth anniversary that I’ve been doing this weblog. It’s hard to believe a whole decade has passed since setting up a Blogger account so I could have a more dynamic element on my little site — complete with impenetrable web address containing a tilde (the scrubbles.net domain name would come a few months later). Although as of summer 2000 I had already been doing a monthly music review site (coded by hand!), this new venture opened up a completely new world. Before, the web felt one dimensional; after, it was a veritable lovefest of sharing, discussing, giving and receiving. All these years later, it still astonishes me that anyone would be interested in my ramblings on whatever crappy movie/book/album comes my way.
So, here’s to ten years of the bl*g! To celebrate, here are some links to other bloggers’ tenth birthday posts:
- Jason Kottke: Kottke.org is ten years old today (March 2008)
- Brad Graham: The BradLands at 10 (May 2008)
- Anil Dash: Ten Years! (July 2009)
- Gael Fashingbauer Cooper: PCJM Turns 10! (August 2009)
- Kevin C. Murphy: Ghost in the Machine: The First Ten Years (November 2009)
- Cory Doctorow: 10 Years of Boing Boing (January 2010)
- Meggan: Quiddity is now 10! (February 2010)
Related: Eight Years of Scrubbles.net (highlights reel); Seven Years of Unpigeonholable Tomfoolery (a look at the Scrubbles logos from 2000-07).
Living with the iPad
About a month ago, Christopher came to me with a surprise announcement: he was ordering a new Apple iPad. He was thinking about getting something similar to replace our old Dell laptop computer as a simple internet connection for us while going on long trips. As the Apple person in the family, I was delighted with this development — it certainly was going to get more use from me than that crappy Dell.
Now, I’m no early adopter when it comes to new technology, but the iPad really epitomizes what I’d want from a techno-gadget. When the iPhone first came out, I thought “this would be nice without the phone.” Then Apple released the iPod Touch, and I thought “this would be great if it was bigger, so you could read e-books and browse the internet.” Voilà, the iPad! The first generation iPad isn’t perfect; it’s still a bit bulky and the screen could use a few more square inches. However, even after a few weeks I can tell it will be a useful part of our household. We’ve already had a few times while watching a movie when C. will whip out the thing to check on an actor in the Internet Movie Database, a move that would have been not worth the extra work using the laptop.
The first thing I noticed on the iPad is how intuitive the interface is. You move around with the brush of a finger, like on the iPhone but more natural. Typing is accomplished with a small pop-up keyboard. Sure, typing with one hand takes getting used to, but I was able to adapt to it startlingly fast.
The first thing we did was to synched it up to my Mac’s iTunes. I downloaded several free apps, including some news feeds from NPR, the BBC and USA Today. While one could access all three via Safari, I kind of enjoy having them in their own uncluttered state. Browsing on Safari is nice, but the type is a bit too small and I had more than one instance of accidentally tapping the wrong link. As for the controversial lack of Flash, I’ve barely noticed it. Strangely enough, the best app I’ve seen has been MultiPong, a beautifully rendered simple pong game. Speaking of simplicity, there’s also a virtual koi pond app that Christopher immediately gravitated to. I bought SketchBook Pro, which packs an impressive array of features into a measly $7.99 app. At this point I’m just fooling around with it, somewhat frustrated at how I keep accidentally using my fingers to resize my sketches (hmm).
I’ve also explored e-books a little bit with Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle app. First off, I think it’s totally cool that Amazon even has a Kindle iPad app. With it, you can see books in color and set the type at a comfortable size, even having pages displayed in brown on sepia (my favorite). I downloaded a cheap copy of Treasure Island with nice color illustrations by N.C. Wyeth; hopefully it’s a sign of things to come that more illustrated ebooks will come along. Although I haven’t explored Apple’s reader, I can already tell that the Kindle has an edge for being able to bookmark pages (if iBooks have bookmarks, I haven’t seen it (note: iBooks does have a bookmark, I now see)). One enormous downside of both is that the type is completely forced justified and not ragged right like in most paper books (remember those?). The font choices aren’t too thrilling, either. Hopefully future updates will remedy that.
Perhaps the most ringing endorsement I have for the iPad is that writing about it here makes me want to fire the thing up and explore more — off I go!
My First Modem
I recently came across a true artifact of its time while cleaning out the garage. This Hayes Accura 1140 modem was purchased after I moved into my first apartment in 1994. Armed with it, a Macintosh IIci, and a new America Online membership, I was ready to blaze the Information Superhighway — at 56K per second! Listen, I even had my place equipped with a separate phone line to enable websurfing and talking on the phone simultaneously (considering my pathetic social life at the time, not really necessary). I’m also not afraid to admit that the AOL membership was mostly used to find dates and look at porn. This was back when it took 15-20 minutes to download one photo, mind you. Thank our lucky stars that the internet has grown up since then, and so have I.
Dig this early AOL commercial from 1995. “A friend of mine told me ‘Try America Online.’ I said ‘Why? I’ve got a computer.’” That line always seemed so bizarre to me, even back then. What, were they selling to complete idiots?
Weekly Mishmash: April 11-17
Cradle Will Rock (1999). Tim Robbins’ chaotic yet timely film chronicles the staging of the most notorious play produced by the WPA in the 1930s, Marc Blitzstein’s union-friendly musical Cradle Will Rock. We saw this in the theater when it was originally released and it still holds up. It’s interesting to revisit it during this quasi-Depression time and note how familiar the anti-socialist hysteria portrayed here is. I don’t think this is a perfect film; it’s too wide-ranging in scope and Robbins succumbs all too often to the “keep the camera moving” bug that also afflicted Stephen Fry when he did Bright Young Things. Some scenes are excellently staged and acted, while others are done in an offhand, parodic manner which makes me wonder how historically accurate everything is. Among the huge cast, the only true villains are Bill Murray’s cracked vaudevillian and the uppity case worker played by Joan Cusack. Generally I liked the cast, except perhaps Susan Sarandon hamming it up as a flamboyant Italian diplomat. My favorite was Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan, the headstrong manager of the WPA’s theatre division. She completely rocks, and has a beautiful speaking voice to boot (I kept thinking she’d be so much better than Oprah at narrating the nature documentary series Life).
Hollywood and Vine (1945). Another offering in our “cheapie public domain comedies of yore” series! Hollywood and Vine was another cruddy yet genial and fast-paced production from P.R.C. In it, aspiring actress Wanda McKay meets screenwriter James Ellison on her way to Hollywood. She brushes the amorous gent off, but eventually relents when the two end up rooming in the same apartment complex. The pair also become parents to a talented mutt (Daisy, best known as the family pup from the Blondie movies) who becomes a canine movie star. Yep, this movie doesn’t make a lick of sense, and the best celebrity cameo they could come up with was the fake Russian prince who ran Hollywood eatery Romanoff’s. McKay and Ellison are both unbelievably bland actors with zero screen presence, but at least we have the reliable Franklin Pangborn on hand as a soda jerk. Typical of this film’s flights of fancy is the scene where Ellison persuades McKay’s character from dismissive to “I’m giving it all up to marry you and have lotsa babies” in thirty seconds flat.
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977). I know I must have seen this movie when it originally came out, but even so this compilation of the first three Disney Winnie the Pooh shorts is so awash in lyrical, pastel-colored charm that one can’t help but feel a nostalgic pang with it. These films date from 1966-74, the last gasp of classic old guard Disney animation. The stories are silly, leisurely paced and Disneyfied to a fault, but I love the way they incorporated the A. A. Milne book itself into the action, such as when a rush of water washes the words off the page. This DVD included a bonus Pooh short from 1983, which was as plodding and charmless as the trio in this film were magical. It just goes to prove that when they had it, they really had it.
Michael Clayton (2007). I had to chuckle when I read the Netflix reviews on this complaining that it was too talky and boring. Fact is, this was an excellent legal thriller with an absorbing story played by a cast at the top of their game (including Tilda Swinton, somewhat Jodie Fosterish as a dangerously ambitious careerist). The hard to please Christopher actually ranks this and Departures as the two best movies we’ve seen this year.
Word Jong Party. We’re not huge gamers around here, unless you count the pre-Facebook edition of Scrabble. We do, however, enjoy some of the less threatening stuff on the Wii — such as the farming sim Harvest Moon: Tree Of Tranquility. In that game, the most harmful thing you can do is piss somebody off by gifting them with a stinky hunk of algae fished out of the ocean. Lately we’ve been enjoying Word Jong Party, which is basically maj-jongg played with lettered tiles. You advance through the game by making words, the longer the better. Completely harmless and fun, and a bit easy for us Scrabble vets, but the graphics are cute and each day brings a brand new puzzle to enjoy.
Those Are People Who Died, Died
I was in the middle of reading about the fascinating people profiled in the annual Lives They Lived issue of the New York Times Magazine when I heard shocking news about the passing of another fascinating person. One that I knew, actually: Brad Graham of Bradlands.com. It appears that he died in his sleep of natural causes on December 31st, at the young age of 41. Yeah, I don’t believe it, either.
Brad was one of the earliest bloggers I knew of, and pretty much the kingpin of the (small) community of gay bloggers around in the early ’00s. Back then it was such a thrill to be writing on the net, and having someone else noticing what you were doing was an even bigger thrill — especially when that someone was as friendly and witty as Brad. His August 3, 2001 post, using the first Scrubbles redesign to explore childhood fear of Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, was typical Brad. We weren’t close friends or anything, but his warmth and humor was something I treasured over the years (we even briefly bonded over the ’70s kiddie-com Big John, Little John on twitter last year). I’ll miss you, Brad.
Twitter and Facebook
Twitter and Facebook. What’s your opinion? I proudly avoided both sites for a long time — Twitter for being dumb and trendy, Facebook for being home to smarmy real estate agents and lawyers. Now, however, I can’t get enough of either of them. If I want to share a short link or observation with the world, I’m much more likely to do it via Twitter or Facebook. If that thought or link needs a longish explanation to go with it, the story will get posted here.
I know a few people who post identically to both Twitter and Facebook, but I actually use both sites for different means. Twitter is an extension of my “blog” persona. I use it to (try and be) witty, make nonsensical observations, and share my love of goofy pop culture of the past. Facebook is for the “real life” me, a way to stay in contact with flesh-and-blood folks I know or once knew. I first joined it when some non-online friends of ours suggested joining to play games of Scrabble. I also have a guilty tendency for completing all those stupid Facebook quizzes and polls. I’ve notice something over time, though — the longer I’ve been on both sites, the more these distinct personae are merging. Many blogging friends are also Facebook contacts, and I’m sure the “real life” family and friends in my life will eventually find out about Scrubbles.net. Thoughts, anyone?
A Redesigned Scrubbles.net
Hey there — notice something different? I’ve redesigned Scrubbles.net. This is the first true sitewide retooling in five years. Although I still have some kinks to work out, I’m happy with the swanky retro-computer look we’ve got going here.
This redesigning process began about a year ago, actually, in search of a good Wordpress theme. I’ve noticed that many of the popular and nicer looking WP themes have one element that works, and a whole bunch of other elements that don’t work. Either the typography is fabulous and the layout is lousy, or the sidebar is beautifully designed but the rest of it uses terrible colors. It’s always something. I was about at the end of my rope before coming across a gorgeous and subtle theme called Vanilla Cart. Top to bottom, I love it. For the logo fonts, I went with Eurostile condensed and Gala (which cost a lot, but it’s absolutely perfect — sometimes one has to spend money for perfection). I also brought back this weblog’s original tagline, which hasn’t been seen here since about 2002. There’s even a new cartoon portrait of yours truly on the sidebar.
Although I currently have about 80% of the redesign in place, there are a couple of issues with the CSS that I’m sending out a plea for help on. Specifically:
- I have a kickass repeating background for the redesign, similar to the one on my Twitter profile — but I can’t get it to work. I’ve tried everything on this theme’s CSS stylesheet, but the only changes result in a pure white background. Any CSS experts out there who can help?
- This theme also has an option for you to use your own logo — but when I tried it, the logo was positioned down at the white space above the blog entries. I want it positioned above the “Home” and “About Me” tabs (which is where the blog name and description are normally positioned if one does not use a graphic logo). How can I move it up to its proper place without screwing everything up?
We Are Married, Too
From Christopher: “I want to let you know about a new blog I have started called We Are Married Too over on blogspot. It is intended to be a showcase for lesbian and gay couples around the world who have been legally married.”
The first entry is on our July 3, 2008 union. Awww. Wanna contribute? Contact Christopher at wearemarriedtoo (at) yahoo.com.
Twitter Bird
Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenico analyzes why Oprah Winfrey and Twitter might not be such a good match. I gotta admit that I’m really taking to Twitter. I enjoy reading the 71 people I follow there (which really isn’t that many, all things considered), and I often post a “tweet” once or twice a day. If I think of something short and pithy, my first impulse is to post a simple Twitter tweet rather than do a long weblog entry. It’s a fun diversion, but it doesn’t replace blogging for me.
It’s interesting to note the Twitter users who, unprovoked, chose to follow me. Some are bloggers that I follow, or ex-bloggers who fell off my radar. Others are perfectly random people. Often I’ll get a fellow designer or illustrator that I never heard of before (similar to Flickr). Sometimes I’ll follow a famous person, and be thrilled when they follow me back. Then I’ll check their profile and find that they’re following 17,000 other Twitterers — oh well.
Steve and Jayne and 8K of RAM
Andy Baio of Waxy.org shares a curio from the past — Computability, in which Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows explain the concept of home computing to the layman of 1984. I think I deserve some kind of award for listening to all 35:45 of Steve and Jayne bantering over modems and monitors. The accompanying hour-long video remains to be seen, however. Hmmm, wonder where I can view episodes of their old PBS show, the one where they played famous historical figures?
Comp DOA
Two nights ago, I had a little computer situation. The screen on my six year-old iMac went black, just like that.
Granted, it wasn’t completely black. I could still see a very faint impression of windows on a desktop. With some research, we found out that the bulb on the Mac’s LED screen burnt out. The rest of the computer was okay, but since the monitor is attached we had to find a way of fixing it. Turns out this problem is fairly common, but the methods of fixing it are neither easy nor cheap. While trying to figure out how to proceed, I set out to save as much data on as many writeable DVDs as I could. This involved shining a halogen lamp directly at the screen and trying hard not to lose the cursor in the murk on the screen.
Since the old iMac was getting to be a painfully slow dinosaur anyhow, we decided to truck out to Best Buy and get one of the new iMacs. These things are huge. The smallest, 20″ model just barely fits in the hole on my computer desk. To insert disks in the side, I have to drag the thing out of its cubbyhole. That aside, it’s a gorgeous and speedy machine and I’m so glad to have it. No longer will I have to endure the “rainbow pinwheel of death” just to load a web page or something. In the meantime I have to go through the laborious process of reinstalling software, fonts and (the worst part) configuring my email. I haven’t even started on rebuilding my iTunes music library. It’s going to be a long weekend.
Library Club President
I don’t think I’ve giggled so hard as while browsing through Flickr’s Yearbook Yourself photo pool. On another note, I’m impressed with how the mall marketing aspect of Yearbook Yourself is integrated with the site (meaning it’s not nearly as obnoxious as it could’ve been). You can swap genders, too! Here’s how I would look as a Class of ‘54 girl with two-day stubble:
Big Fat Link Log 3
We’re nearing the end August. Do you know what that means? Sticky thighs and melting ice cream? Yeah, that — and it’s also time for an update to the annual list of the weblogs I’ve been reading. It just keeps growing and growing, which is another reason why I prefer to keep this thing on a single entry as opposed to taking up lots of room on a sidebar. The starred new additions are not exactly new (even for me), but they are some of the weblogs that have caught my eye over the past year or so. To them and all the other hard-working bloggers on this list, thank you.
2719 Hyperion | * A Child Of Atom | A Joshua Tree In Every Pot | A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago | A Sampler of Things | ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog | A.V. Club Blogs | * The Avant Garde Retard | Awful Plastic Surgery | Back of the Cereal Box | Bibi’s Box | The Blackwing Diaries | Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine | Boing Boing | Bob Sassone | Book Covers Blog | * The Book Design Review | Booksteve’s Library | * Boom Pop! | Bostworld | Bradlands Must See HTTP:// | Brand New | Branded in the ’80s | Cardhouse | Cartoon Brew | * Cartoon Curio | * Cinebeats | * clydefro | Coudal Partners | Crack Skull Bob | Davelandblog | Design Observer | Designing Magazines | * Discover A World Of Sounds | The Disney Blog | Disney History | Drawn! | Dynagirl | * e=mcbrennan | Ephemera | * Evan Dorkin | Eye of the Goof | Fanboy.com | * Fawny.org | Fimoculous | Folded Space | Friday Fishwrap | Gatotchy’s Blog | Ghost In The Machine | GlenMullaly.com – The BLOG!!! | gmtPlus9 | * Grain Edit | greg.org | Hacking NetFlix | Hit or Miss | The Hits Just Keep on Comin’ | i like | In Black And White | * Ironic Sans | Irregular Orbit | Jinjur | Just Ask Christopher | * Kevin Kidney | Kottke.org | Lady Bunny Blog | Lileks The Bleat | Little Yellow Different | Lots of Co. | Malls of America | * Mark Simonson | Martin Klasch | Mimi Smartypants | mod*mom | * My So-Called Strife | Neato Coolville | News From Me | * Nintendo Wii Fanboy | The Other Andrew | Other Stream | Passport to Dreams Old & New | Patrick’s Journal | PCL LinkDump | Pop Culture Gadabout | Pop Culture Junk Mail | * Pop Culture Petri Dish | Posterwire | Push. Click. Touch. | Quiddity | * Randomopolis | RaShOmoN | Re-Imagineering | Robot Action Boy | Robot Johnny | * Secret Fun Blog | Self-Styled Siren | Snarky Malarkey | Something Old, Nothing New | Sore Eyes | Swapatorium | * swissmiss | * tikiranch | things magazine | This Justin | Thrilling Days of Yesteryear | Tim Lucas Video WatchBlog | The Tin Man | Tiny Pineapple | Today’s Inspiration | Tom the Dog’s You Know What I Like? | Turbanhead.com | TV Guidance | * Ultra Swank | Ultrasparky | UnBeige | Veer: The Skinny | Vince Keenan | Ward-O-Matic | waxy.org | Web Goddess | WFMU’s Beware of the Blog | Wiley Wiggins | * The World Of Kane | x-entertainment.com | * Your Souvenir Guide
Twittering Our Lives Away
I’m on Twitter now. I know. This seems like one of those trendy social networking sites that everybody flocks to, then abandons after a year or two — but it’s actually pretty fun. Since I don’t own a mobile, I’ll end up using it to post little observational bits that are too short to make it as a Scrubbles entry. Thanks to Bob for the heads-up.
