Valhalla Island

Warning: May contain spoilers.

I first heard about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a few months ago when the graphic novel illustrated by Kevin Cornell was published. I ordered it without knowing the story, I just love Cornell’s work. It’s a retelling of a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald — a strange tale of a child born as an old man in the 1920s who aged backwards. I was looking forward to seeing it at the movies, it had a lot of potential. The movie is one of the best, if not the best, I’ve ever seen. Continue reading →

Three years ago I wrote about my first overwhelmingly positive impressions of university. How my thoughts have changed. Turns out that the only positive thing to come out of my stay at Griffith was Canadian student exchange for what equated to no expense — time nor money. So positive was the experience that even though the other two and a half years were mediocre, as a whole it was worthwhile. Almost exactly a year after returning from overseas I still get very nostalgic thinking about Canada. Now I have a Bachelor of Multimedia. Continue reading →

It might be fair to say that Delicious Library is the most celebrated, modern Mac application. It’s received multiple Apple Design Awards, four and a half mice from Macworld, a Macworld Eddy, an Innovator’s award from O’Reilly and gets positive reviews all over the place. It’s lauded as an application that takes great advantage of and appropriately uses the features of OS X. It’s a library application for cataloguing your things — CDs, DVDs, books, etc., something that definitely appeals to me. All signs point to Delicious Library and I falling in love. I finally thoroughly tried it and I don’t like it at all. Continue reading →

John Gruber in response to Jamis Buck on Capistrano’s lack of support for Windows:

Something has to give. In this case (and among other things), it’s Windows. Microsoft may be an 800lb gorilla, but it’s not my gorilla, and it’s not in my room. If you need to appease the gorilla, that is (with all due respect) not my problem.

I couldn’t agree more with both. Although Internet Explorer percentages are much higher on Valhalla Island (~38%) I don’t think I’ve ever seen VI in IE and I don’t care. For my own sites my process is the same as Gruber’s: Continue reading →

There’s a reason programming languages don’t use natural language — it’s verbose, ambiguous and imprecise. Often, even with our advanced human brains tuned to understand language, it’s difficult to understand what another person is trying to tell you. One of the joys of programming (as with maths) is having that barrier removed, you learn the language and while you’re telling the compiler or interpreter what to do there is right and there is wrong, nothing else. Then (depending on the language) right is clear, concise, unambiguous and easy to use. For these reasons, I do not understand Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Continue reading →

Top n lists are the tool of lazy bloggers that get paid by the post. There are topics where the lists can be useful, when I’m looking for a lot of something. Top 10 desktop wallpaper websites, top 10 movie posters, top 10 iPhone games, etc., can all be good, looking at them all is something I might do. They’re still lazy, lack any original thought or effort but at least they can be useful. Then there’s another kind, the kind that offers 100 options for something I need only once. They’re prime for editorial and filtering yet they contain none, they simply list what exists, the same way Google search results would. Continue reading →

It’s been over a year and a half since I recommended podcasts and those in that short list barely exist anymore. Podcasting feels like it’s coming into its prime. Well past its awkward first steps, it’s highly accessible (for podcasters and listeners), popular and a lot of shows are really finding their groove. But I still find it difficult to find new and interesting progams. So here’s what I’ve been listening to and enjoying recently. Continue reading →

Generally there are two types of files: those for editing and those for reading. When a file doesn’t need to be or shouldn’t be edited, a file type for reading and reading alone should be used. If a file does need to be edited then a type for editing should be used in the most interoperable format feasible. Continue reading →