Last night when we went to the fair we saw some good stuff and then some stuff that should have been…uh, left at home. Two of those things included the “mean Jesus” sculpture and a dress with “sock monkey boobs”.

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In my morning blogroll, I came across Wasp Jerky’s enlightening post about terrorism, specifically as it pertains to the issue of racial profiling.  While on one hand I could agree that profiling can help in some circumstances from a national security perspective, it could also lead to much unnecessary descrimination to those who don’t have a terroristic cell in their body.  Anyway, read his posting.  Entertaining and enlightening.

wasp jerky: This Is What A Terrorist Looks Like

Filed under: Awareness, Culture
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This evening my wife and I went to the fair and happened to catch about 20 minutes of the jam band Umphrey’s McGee. They were very cool and very good. It was like seeing Phish…maybe not entirely on the same level, but the energy of the crowd and the interaction within the band was refreshing.

Anyway, check out their website…they’ve got podcasts of their shows that you can download, like 70 meg mp3’s. Definitely worth the wait.

Filed under: Artists, Music, Websites
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I’ve been on this quest now for a good provider of customizable t-shirts and other dry goods for production and sale. Particularly, I’m looking for one with my band crash effect. Now it’s pretty much a given that most everyone knows about Cafe Press. They’re generally acceptable. Most of their merchandise is of a reasonable quality and the base price for their items is okay. But they’re not all that great if you want to have a decent profit margin.

Then there’s spreadshirt. They’ve got great looking products AND give you the ability to do vector art, which can be printed with custom colors, glow-in-the-dark print, as well as glitter-based colors. Pretty stellar…but at a cake-eater price. For 1 spaghetti tank with two colors in their glitter print will run you almost $25.00 USD as a base cost. Forget marking up the cost of your shirts to make a profit. It just isn’t going to happen when your base cost is already more than you should be spending to begin with.

So this leaves me back to Cafe Press. I’d really like to find a place that actually could do near the same for less, but I’m at a loss. Anyone else find anything out there?

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In my daily design-related blogroll, I stumbled upon this fun little gem.  It’s a concert ticket generator, that allows you to create your own fake concert tickets.  Yep…another way to kill some time.  But a creative one at least.

Yeah, so Monday is a weird day to have a show. Big deal.

Filed under: Websites
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So I’m sending an .html attachment through Outlook at work (yeah…I know…it’s Outlook). Well, I dragged the file over and must have accidentally dragged it to the body area. Next thing I know, MICROSOFT WORD opens up to edit the HTML for me.

Enter my euphemism for the day:

Editing HTML with Microsoft Word is like fixing a car with a popsicle stick. It ain’t ever gonna happen.

Filed under: Development, HTML
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It’s no new bit of information to some that I’m a web designer with the State of Minnesota, working for the Office of Enterprise Technology. Well I want to take a moment to brag about one of my latest designs that I built for a consortium of four different state agencies, which wanted to put together a portal for renewable fuel information.

I realize the governor’s supposed to ‘unveil’ this tomorrow, but to my network of friends and relatives, I thought I’d beat him to the punch and show it to you first.

Minnesota Renewable Energy Portal:
http://search.state.mn.us/renewable/

Kudos to my co-workers who also worked on this project as well, integrating the search features and doing the information research.

Chalk up another website for the portfolio.

Filed under: Websites
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Unlike the previous 9/11 centered film that was released earlier this year [United 93--The Movie], I wanted to see this film. So I took a break from some of the web work that I had and went and saw it at a digital theatre near me. I knew the film was going to evoke an emotional response out of me and that it might resurface some of the emotions I experienced nearly five years ago. So, in some respects I was relatively prepared for what to expect.

No worries, I’m not going to give any spoilers. Regardless, there are not too many to give away.

Whatever bad things the critics had to say about this film, they can be disregarded. Oliver Stone did a remarkable job portraying the stories of a number of people who were affected that day; and with creative detail. Included in the story were a dozen port authority policemen, some firemen, their families, a former marine, former paramedic and a group of policemen from Wisconsin.

The scenes, while a bit fragmented at times, were well-strung together and tugged your heart along with it as their day continued to unfold throughout the tragedy that day. I hadn’t quite expected to see some of the aspects of the story, but was glad the varying angles were told.

The cinemtography was brilliant, especially with the cramped scenes under all of the rubble. One scene in particular was quite cool, as Nicholas Cage’s character was struggling to stay awake and conscious, various parts of the screen blurred while small areas remaining in focus. It was done in such a subtle way as not to be a distraction, but to enhance the moment and what was transpiring. With regard to the “God scene”, I’m sure there are some critics out there who are up in arms about Jesus’ appearance in a near-dream-like sequence with one of the port authority characters, but I thought it was tastefully done.

All in all, I thought this was a well-done film and an important cinema contribution to our American history books. It’s important enough, that I’d say you ought to see the film for a few reasons—to remember, to see and witness 9/11 through someone else’s eyes and to reignite good and right priorities in your life. There’s something about staring down the struggle for life and death through someone else’s eyes, that has a way of helping you shift around your priorities by the straps of your heart-strings.

In parts of the film, Cage’s character recalls the fight he had with his wife about the kitchen not being finished and some other details that he recalled. The recounting of the event turned to his wondering if he loved his family enough.

It’s a great film. I cried through about an eighth of the film, but it wasn’t so difficult as to be nearly unbearable. By contrast, I felt that in some ways, the movie Titanic was a bit more unbearable to watch—there you actually saw hundreds of people dying and in desperate circumstances. But in other ways, World Trade Center was more moving. Regardless, I think that WTC is an important film to see while on the big screen. It will help level out your heart a bit and help you remember.

Filed under: Awareness, Culture, General
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It’s not totally finished and there are two applications that I need to build for it, but the Crash Effect website is live and up and running.  I’ve even got a couple t-shirts in the merch table through Cafe Press…albeit temporary until we produce our own merchandise and can sell directly.

Anyway, if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the RSS feed for the blog and enjoy.

Filed under: Artists, Awareness, General, Music, Websites, Wordpress
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Remember when the <blink> tag became a long-forgotten tag, discarded as being irrelevant and only to be resurrected on the occassional intentional abuse for humor’s sake??  Well, some scallywag is actually using blink as an text-decoration attribute in their layout….for their links.

Brace yourself…this is going to get ugly:  10dollarpayroll.com

Filed under: CSS, Websites
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