Author: tim

Rambling Man

I came across this strange essay by Rivers Cuomo of the rock band Weezer. While I admire his attempts to become a better person, the essay he wrote about it is just weird.

Case in point:

“My goal was to purge myself of all weakness so that I could write “perfect” songs as reliably as a machine.”

He then goes on to describe the response to the 2 albums that came out of this period in his life:

“Many fans also criticized the music. They heard both Maladroit and The Green Album as being “mechanical” and “emotionless”. I tried to evaluate the criticism objectively but I had a difficult time.”

Um, Rivers, you tried to write songs “as reliably as a machine” and then wonder why people perceive your music as emotionless?

Odd.

Oh yeah, make sure you check out his cover of The Star Spangled Banner.

Validate Me

I’ve been trying really hard to resist talking politics on this site, so I thought I’d steer clear of hard issues a bit and just talk about something I know about. I just did a little research on the design and technical merits of George W Bush and John Kerry’s respective Web sites.

Take a look at the 2 screen shots below:

John Kerry

George Bush

Kerry’s site has a calm and easygoing vibe about it. Not too much cluttter, the various areas of the site are clearly laid out and there is simple top navigation. I particularly like the “Take Action” box in the upper right. It has very clear instructions and is prominently displayed. The web site’s iconography is very friendly (although a little too close to Windows XP’s icon set) and helps contribute to the easygoing and friendly vibe. The site makes me feel “calm”, for lack of a better word.

Now, look at George’s site. What a cluttered mess. It looks like a bomb went off in a web design shop. Let’s just throw everything on the page! It’s strange that the first image I saw when going to Bush’s site is a big picture of Kerry. I also can spot 9 instances of the word “Kerry” on the page, and that’s only above the fold. To be fair, this is the day after the DNC Convention, so I’m sure Bush wants to quickly defuse any momentum they’re getting, but please. I thought Bush’s people were the one’s saying that Kerry is focusing too much on bashing Bush and not enough on espousing his own views. I guess they’re not practicing what they preach.

But, back to the design. Where am I supposed to look? What’s the page’s flow? Literally everything on the page screams for you to look at it. And what’s the deal with those tabs across the top of the page (Economy, Compassion, etc)? Those are the tiniest tabs I’ve seen in some time. They’re just shoved in between the header graphic and the rest of the page. It really shows how important these issues are to Bush (in comparison to, say, bashing Kerry). It reminds me of the time I was driving in Atlanta with my sister and we passed that huge church right off 75 near Paces Ferry Rd. You know, the really really big, enormous one that requires the 5 story parking deck? Anyway, my sister pointed out that the cross on top of this huge structure was about 6 feet tall — really tiny in comparison to the rest of the structure. My sister looked at it and said, “kinda shows you how much all of this has to do with God, huh?”

I should note the similarities between the left navigation of each site. It’s interesting how Bush’s says “Stay Informed” while Kerry’s says “Get Informed”. I don’t know which site came up with the navigation links first, so I don’t know who ripped off who. But, it’s clear that they’ve been checking out the competition. And the fact that both sites have an official blog just blows my mind.

Next, I went to take a look under the hood. Both sites utilize tables for the structure of the page. I really wasn’t expecting table-less CSS design, but it would have been cool. Oh well. I didn’t poke too much more into the code because frankly, it’s boring to do that, but I will say that Bush’s tables are the most overly complicated (right off the bat it’s nesting tables 3 deep) and I counted 36 font tags (to Kerry’s one) on the page. Kerry definitely wins in the utilization of CSS.

The real test came when I ran both pages through the w3c validator. Of course, neither site validates. But Bush’s site is the big loser when it comes to number of errors. Here are links to the validations:

John Kerry’s Site
George W. Bush’s Site

Number of errors:

Kerry: 28
Bush: 276

So, if good web design and coding is important to you, I think it’s pretty clear who you need to vote for this November.

Viva la musica!

Last Saturday, the wife and I went out for a night of music in the ATL. Since I play in two bands and am playing music most nights of the week, I rarely go out to see bands anymore. It’s a big change from going to the 40 Watt literally every night of the week during my freshman year at UGA. I saw a lot of really great bands back then, but when you’re 19 years old and away from home for the first time, a guy standing on stage with a jaw harp could prove to be a revelatory experience.

Of course I miss those days a little, but I am not going to sacrifice sleep anymore to see bands play. As I get older and especially since I’m married, I enjoy hanging out at home in my free time instead of in a smoky club. I know it sounds like I’m slowing down in my old(er) age, but I actually listen to more music and am generally more excited about finding new music than I used to be. And with the popularity of music blogs (largehearted boy, Mystery & Misery and spookihaus are some good ones, but there are alot more) I am finding out about a ton of really cool bands these days.

Anyway, back to last weekend. After getting a late start (11pm), we headed down to the EARL to catch one of my new favorite bands, The Rosebuds, play the EARL’s 5 Year Anniversary show. The Rosebuds are a guitar/keyboards/drums 3-piece from North Carolina who put out a great album last year (buy). As we walked in to the club, they were already playing, but I don’t think we missed much. The Rosebuds were kicking out the jams and the wife had fun watching the “cute kids” up front really get into it. Watching these 20-ish-year-old guys and girls whoop it up was a welcome change from the general cooler-than-thou vibe that exists at many shows these days. They reminded us of our younger days and reminded me about how much music can affect you (more on that later). It was a great start to our evening of music.

After the Rosebuds finished, Grupo Fantasma started setting up. This 12-piece band from Austin, Texas is a sight to behold. It was no small feat to fit the whole band on the tiny EARL stage, but somehow they pulled it off. As they took the stage, the lead singer challenged us to outperform the previous night’s crowd in Huntsville, Alabama. As the crowd enjoyed a good laugh at the easy challenge, I could tell this was going to be a party band. When they started playing their latin/cuban/hip-hop infused music, the entire place exploded. Instantly the crowd became more diverse as the older people who had stayed near the back of the club came forward to dance with the cool kids. A friend said her entire family comes out to see Grupo Fantasma whenever they play. It was so cool to see moms, dads, uncles and cousins getting into this band–especially at the EARL. We stayed for about 3 songs before it was time to take a walk down to the Echo Lounge to see Sufjan Stevens.

I’ve been listening to Sufjan Stevens’ album, Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, for about 6 months now. His ode to his home state was one of the more interesting of last year’s releases. Some songs have a very layered approach that somehow avoid sounding cluttered while others are hushed, epic and breathtaking. I didn’t know what to expect for this show since it was only going to be Sufjan alone up there.

As we walked into the club, all was quiet as everyone in the room hung on Sufjan’s every word. He stood next to an easel holding a hand-drawn map of Michigan, marked with the cities and places that he sung about. He accompanied himself with guitar or banjo and sang beautifully. His stories were poignant and touching and gave you a glimpse into his songwriting process. I thought of how cool it would be to hop on a plane in New York, fly to Atlanta, and totally command a room full of strangers with your music and stories. It must feel pretty powerful.

Sufjan came out for one encore and happened to play one of my favorite songs. He told a story of his parent’s divorce and how his mom came down to visit the kids at their father’s house in Romulus. It was heartbreaking and beautiful and literally brought tears to my eyes as he sang these words:

Romulus
Once when our mother called
She had a voice of last year’s cough
We passed around the phone
Sharing the word about Oregon

When my turn came
I was ashamed

Once when we moved away
She came to Romulus for a day
Her Chevrolet broke down
We prayed it never be fixed or be found

We touched her hair

When she had her last child
Once when she had some boyfriends, some wild
She moved away quite far
Our grandpa bought us a new VCR

We watched it all night
We grew up in spite of it

We saw her once last fall
Our grandpa died in the hospital gown
She didn’t seem to care
She smoked in her room and colored her hair

I was ashamed
I was ashamed of her

Overall, I’d say it was a pretty successful night of music. We heard some indie rock, threw in some international flavor and capped it off with some introspective, emotional singer-songwriter. Not too shabby for a Saturday evening.

Oh yeah, after seeing Sufjan Stevens we went back to the EARL and got drunk. Like I said, perfect evening.

Fahrenheit 9/11

The wife and I were good little liberals and went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on opening night last Friday.

One word: go.

I won’t go into too much detail about why you should see this movie, since you can read about many different reasons all over the net. I will only say that it made me even angrier at our current administration and more determined than ever to get this clown out of his stolen office. Like the hand-made note I saw pinned to some guy’s shirt on opening night: Defeat or Impeach, Now or Later.

I’ve been thinking about how people are comparing this movie event to The Passion of the Christ and I think that it’s a pretty good analogy. Both movies have organizations mobilizing their members to get out and see them and try to convince others to do the same. Both movies are setting records. Both movies are heavily slanted to an ideological position.

But I think that there is another comparison to bring up. Remember when the Republicans impeached Clinton? Remember Ken Starr? Remember all of our money that was spent investigating a blow job? Millions of dollars were wasted on that sad debacle and the ultimate result was just that–a waste.

Well, in a way, Fahrenheit 9/11 is our own impeachment trial. There is the potential for public opinion to be swayed dramatically and the very real end result could be that Bush will not be re-elected. Moore’s movie could help us get Bush out of office without our tax dollars being spent on impeachment investigations and depleting our budget. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The movie helps our economy. Millions of dollars are being distributed through our economy and the American taxpayer doesn’t have to pay a dime. I think it’s a win/win.

Buy tickets to Fahrenheit 9/11

Register to Vote

Long Weekend

The wife and I had planned to go camping last weekend since we never (ever) go on little vacations by ourselves. We were going to pack up the dogs and head to the North Georgia mountains for a much needed break from our very hectic lives. Last Friday, as we were eating dinner, we decided it would be a good idea to check the weather. While not terrible, the forecast of scattered thunderstorms put a damper (pun intended) on our plans. The fact that our dog is very neurotic and freaks the fuck out when hearing loud noises clinched it: no camping for us.

So, there we were. Staring at a long weekend with nothing to do. We briefly entertained the idea of heading to my parent’s house in Florida, but the thought of a 12 hour round trip car ride didn’t sit well with me. What do do?

Our conversation drifted from this dilemma to talk about her jewelry business. She had been on my back recently about the lack of progress on her web site. The site consisted of a simple slide show that I had put up about a year ago. It was one of those things I had been meaning to get around to, but something always came up. Now that we had a “free” weekend, there really was no excuse. We decided right then and there that we would spend the weekend knocking out the web site and check this looming task off our (well okay, my) list.

So, after spending a quiet early Saturday afternoon, we got to work. I fired up Photoshop, we brainstormed a simple design, choose some pretty colors and discussed the navigation elements. Since we decided that anything we came up with would be better than what was currently out there, the process moved very quickly. We didn’t think about anything too long or agonize over simple details. Before we knew it, we were looking at a fairly nice looking web site design.

With the design pretty much decided on, I started to cut up the graphics and lay out the home page using HTML and CSS. Once that was up and looking halfway decent, I started to work out a simple navigation component for the photo gallery. I spent a few hours creating some tables in a MySQL database to hold the gallery info, played around with that for a little while and then headed off to bed for the night.

The next day was spent pulling out components into PHP include files and creating some logic for dynamically changing out the navigation elements depending on which page you were on. I also cropped and color corrected photos of her jewelry for the gallery and created the directory structure of the site. A previous freelance project I worked on had a simple contact form that I had written in PHP. I went and copied that code into our site and after literally about 5 minutes had a fully-functioning contact form complete with error checking and a thank you screen. All of the site content had previously been written up, so I just cut and pasted that into the pages and, voila, (semi-) instant web site!

Erin used to always ask me why I didn’t link to her web site from themuy. The answer is I never wanted to because I was ashamed of my progress on it.

Well, not anymore. Here it is: Erin May Jewelry. I think it’s pretty good for about 2.5 days of work. I haven’t done a lot of browser debugging yet, so if you find something amiss, please let me know.

One From the Vault

I’ve been listening to a live recording of a band I used to be in, Space Crime Quintet, quite a bit lately. It’s nice to be able to listen to something objectively since you’ve been away from it for a few years. And damnit if that wasn’t a pretty tight little combo. The main songwriter of SCQ, Jeff Holt, is a talented mofo. He currently plays bass in The Silent Kids and recently resurrected a former band, The Bus Drivers for at least one show (more, please). I think all of the ATLians should convince Jeff to start playing his own music out more often. It’s some damn fine stuff.

Here’s one of the songs from that live recording. If you want a copy of the performance, let me know and I’ll burn you one (as long as you pick it up from me or pay for postage).

We Thought We Saw a Flying Saucer (mp3)