fine whine

I shot this footage yesterday. If the player below isn't working, click this link to see it. It's not long - around eleven seconds.

For over three years the front page of my website has been relatively unchanged (take a look), and to be honest, it looked more like 2002 than 2004.

Until today. Today I finally switched over to a new design, and completely new underlying programming, that I began working on back in March. I'd intended it to be an April 1st prank (the working title was 417), a past-the-trend Web2.0 redesign, but April 1st came and went and I was nowhere near being able to flip the switch.

Well, now I've flipped it.

It's still not 100% complete - I really wanted to build my own photo gallery, and intend to do so still, but the two boxes of thumbnails on the front page are actually the result of a fair amount of coding, and more than a few tools for fetching the images from Flickr and showing them. A complete list of the tools I used and am using is beyond the scope of this post, but the number of them that I tried and didn't use would be four or five times as long.

I still have a long way to go with bringing all of the old stuff to match the new, but given what I'd done with those pages sometime between 2004 and now it won't really be that big of a deal to update them all together.

One thing I'd really like to highlight, though, is the code directory. Right now there's only one page there, the monkeymaker, but I think that my fellow Columbus residents* may find it to be useful. Launching that has been something I've meant to do for quite some time, but I never got around to writing up that post.

For that matter I'd been meaning to do the rest of these updates back in August when I discovered that my web hosting had changed, breaking almost all of what I'd coded, down to how I'd referenced filenames. I made enough of a nuisance with the hosting company to get some of what I needed fixed (Not bad considering how little money they'll ever make from me), but the rest of the broken stuff I needed to fix by hand.

It's been an interesting challenge - there are a lot of things that just don't work right, but coding around them has been almost fun, and certainly educational.

It's a never ending learning process, though - and if you happen to find something I still need to fix, or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Thanks in advance if you do.

* At least the ones that use both Firefox and the local library with some regularity.

Today I finished watching the fiftieth Indian* movie I've seen. It was called Tarzaan: the wonder car (imdb) and there's a very good chance you'll never watch it, so I'll tell you what it's about. Anybody not wanting the story spoiled should skip past the blockquotes below.

It's about a kid who likes cars - designing them, driving them, fixing them and putting them together. We see in the beginning scenes that his father designed cars too, creating one so advanced that the mere royalties from selling the design should have set him and his family for life. The story takes a sad turn almost immediately as the designer is cheated, and then killed, by the corrupt partners of a major car-maker who intend to bury the innovative design forever. Nothing stays buried forever, though, and we find that our protagonist discovers the car his father was killed driving, and decides to rebuild it. He's got a few factors in his favor - he's got the determination that comes from being teased by the popular kids, a girlfriend who supports him whole-heartedly, a job as a mechanic with a boss who's willing to pay him to work on his pet projects on company time, and he's a mechanical wizard.

After a long montage he's almost finished with the rebuilt car, which looks nothing at all like it did before. The only piece he couldn't find or fix was the fuel pump, but overnight the existing one supernaturally fixes itself... spooky. The next day he drives it to school and it becomes the object of envy for all the students, especially the ones who bullied him. Later that night, while he sleeps, the car, apparently driving itself, tracks them down, and beats them up in a pretty humiliating fashion. They of course do not know that he's not at the wheel, and begin treating him considerably better from then on (after recuperating from their injuries, of course).

Faring less well are the partners who killed his dad - one by one they are hunted down by the car which can not only drive itself, but also can completely repair itself too. The last one turns out to be the father of our protagonist's fiancee, and the climactic battle on land and sea (the car can fly, submerge in water, and float) reveals the driving force to be the spirit of his father. He walks off into the light, and the car never drives itself again.

The father, it should be mentioned, christened his car "Tarzan" as a child, and the name stuck over the years as he hung a figurine of Tarzan (from Disney's animated version, oddly enough) from the rear view mirror.

Some might call it a rip-off of Christine, or perhaps The Wraith, but it's those things and so much more. It could well be the strangest Bollywood movie I've seen so far, but it's by far not the worst. Now that I've seen a good number of them, I think I can pretty well say that.

By now you may be wondering why I've done this. Early this year I happened to watch a horrible Hindi movie entitled Dhund (imdb), though the title "The Fog" figured prominently on the cover. I'd not found many promising movies to borrow from the library that day, and happened to stumble across this one in the foreign languages section.

It was the worst movie I'd watched in a long time, no matter what the language. I was surprised that fog only figured into a scene and a song (I'd heard Bollywood movies included songs and dance, sometimes jarringly, throughout the film) and the plot was much closer to any of the I (still) know what you did last summer films. Except that it was much, much worse.

As a connoisseur of bad films, though, I saw some potential and began to do some research. Namely I talked to any Indian people I could find about the films they liked. The consensus was unanimous - it was an awful movie. I then watched one better - Dus - and started off on a long list of other, much better, Bollywood and Hindi movies.

So now I've seen fifty of them, including one I watched without any subtitles (borrowed VCD), and another that had been dubbed into German (pirate download). Now that one may be a contender for the worst one I'd seen, more conceptually than anything, as it was a remake (in name only) of Fight club, I kid you not.

But that's enough for now. I've got both versions of Don to watch - that's at least six hours of film. Maybe I'll write about them too.

* It's probably safe to call them 'Bollywood' movies, though I might argue against that on one or two.

My favorite online T-shirt shop* Threadless is having another $10 sale, until Tuesday. Surprisingly few shirts have sold out this week (the sale began Monday).

I'm not sure if I'll pick up any this time around, but I can certainly agree with this one:

Stupid Raisins, Stay Out Of My Cookies.

* I suppose I should mention the links in this post will credit me some small amount if you buy shirts. Which I think you should - they're cool, and comfortable as well.

Despite having joined a fair number of the social networking sites*, I don't really do much on them other than upload a photo or two, identify some "favorite" music and movies, and connect with one or two people (often the same one or two on every site) and then I let my profile languish, logging in very occasionally to check the notifications that don't show up in my email.

The flavor of the month this month is Facebook (see my profile) and I must admit, it's a pretty clean, usable site that blows Myspace (see my profile) out of the water for ease of use, visual appearance, and third-party expandibility.

It's no wonder there has already been a mass migration from the latter to the former.

One of the applications Facebook supports comes from movie rating site Flixster which I had already joined some time ago, played with, and hadn't returned-the interface is slow, rating movies en masse is not simple, and not enough people used it at the time. I connected to a new Flixster account (see it here) and started rating movies again**.

Tired of that, I clicked over to the "never ending quiz" which had drawn Rebecca in, several months ago. It's worse than I remember. More than half of the questions concern Nicole Kidman and Moulin Rouge or Alan Rickman and the Harry Potter films, none of which I've yet seen. Other questions are poorly written, with no capitalization, poor grammar, and misspellings galore.

But what bothered me the most was the True/False questions. Without a single exception every one was always "true".

The questions, I should point out, are all user-submitted, and there are quite possibly millions of them. I'm basing that "every one" statement there on the thirty or so that I encountered so far.

So I started writing my own True/False questions, and (unsurprisingly), making them False. It's a much bigger challenge, fabricating believable movie trivia, than it is to merely copy an item from the Internet Movie Database's extensive trivia archive.

So far I've written eight of these questions (and seven other multiple choice questions) and I'm proud to say that the quiz-takers (who number more than a thousand as of today) have only been correct at most a third of the time. You can see the complete list of questions I've written here. I admit I bookmarked the link and have checked it a few times just to see how I'm doing, and the numbers amuse me.

One example? As of right now, only nineteen of 1,133 people guessed that I'd made this up: "While filming Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey performed weekly comedy shows in Los Angeles, in character, as Andy Kaufman."

As a kid I greatly enjoyed the game Balderdash, though I didn't get many chances to play it.

Anyway, to the quiz. As my questions began appearing for the other people (they're supposedly random) and I kept answering others, I began to see other new questions that were also false, though none (I say this humbly) as convincing as mine.

Now I can play the quiz and know that some of the True/False questions may actually require some thought after all. Frankly, though, I think I'm enjoying writing them more than answering the other ones.

* I'd link the complete list, but based on what I saw from upscoop and pipl, I can't even remember all of the ones I've joined. A halfway-comprehensive list can be found on my about page.

** I was a bit inconsistent - apparently I'm only 84% compatible with myself.

It's about four in the morning, and I just work up from the first nightmare I've had in quite some time.

Except that it wasn't really that scary - more like a bad foreign horror movie. Here's what I can remember of it.

The earliest part I can remember begins with me in the room I grew up in, in my parents' house. The dream seemingly took place sometime recently, though I did not get a good look at the rest of the room to know if it was before or after they remodeled it, the reason being that I was looking in the mirror on the back of the door.

Suddenly I noticed that I wasn't alone in the room - in the mirror I saw a small boy, probably somewhere between seven and ten years old. He was not a particularly scary looking kid, but what was a bit odd was that I as I glanced to my left in surprise I found he wasn't there next to me, though, glancing back, he was still there in the mirror, just standing around not looking particularly menacing or frightening, as the spooky children in movies tend to do. He was just hanging out, I guess, and didn't seem to respond at all when I started yelling.

One of my sisters was also in the house. She too could see the kid in the mirror, but before I could gauge her reaction things started to get a little stranger. For one thing, the kid now appeared to be in the room with us (though I could no longer see the mirror). For another, so was Kelsey Grammer.

Kelsey* was in the hallway, standing next to a bed's footboard that was leaning up against another door, and the kid was sitting atop the footboard with his head just about even with Kelsey's, at least as I saw it. Kelsey claimed he could not see the boy, though he was being evasive about it. I finally got him to clearly answer by asking an outrageously specific question, something like "If I said there are only two people in this hallway, would that be true?" or some such. The boy also was confusing, mentioning something about possibly being some future or past form of myself or descendant of mine, possibly as some sort of veiled threat.

Further conversation in the hall was cut short by one of those transition-less scene changes that are a signature of (my) dreams. Now Kelsey and I were in my parents' living room, and I was looking at the screen of my digital camera.

The nightmare wasn't over - the room I saw in the LCD was not the room I saw when I looked up. The room around me had the usual complement of furniture, pictures on the wall, and a piano, but in the screen I was room with empty bookshelves against the walls. Stranger still was the girl, who, again, wasn't in the room. Int he screen she seemed to be doing some sort of martial arts-esque dance routine, which, considering she looked to be a year or two younger than the boy. Kelsey, nearly forgotten by now, naturally did not see the girl.

Thinking back to it, there's no way for me to know that he wasn't just lying. In the dream I seemed convinced he was telling the truth, but really, all I had was his word that he couldn't see them too.

The dream ended just as the girl in the camera noticed me, and started moving toward me. I awoke, and immediately recognized that it was a dream, that my slight fright was completely irrational, and that I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep this morning. That said, it took me at least twenty minutes to be able to get up because I didn't want to catch a glimpse of the doorway, on the off chance that I would see a small child silhouetted there.

As I'd said... irrational.

* There's a slight chance it was in fact Kelsey's best-known fictional character Frasier Crane in my dream - I almost couldn't decide. Snippets of the conversation I can remember bring to mind psychiatric jargon and mind-bending nonsense, and Crane was a doctor, after all, but I could well have been sarcastically baiting Kelsey. I'd like to think this was the case, but I guess I'll never know.