Synecdoche, New York

Guess we must be living in a cave because the first I heard that Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed a new film was when I saw the trailer for it at the beginning of another DVD a few nights ago. How did that happen? Did it go straight to DVD? Our favorite oscar winning writer (2005 original screenplay, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) does a movie that flies under our radar? Turns out it had only limited theatrical release and apparently limited marketing as well. Guess that’s how it goes when you don’t live in NYC anymore.  :(

The movie was another of Kaufman’s amazing works of genius in our opinion. Being a fan of surrealism, we loved that the movie takes place in a dream-reality. Here is the trailer…

Links

synecdocheny.com

Image Gallery Revamped

The image gallery has been revamped to fit into the new iframe structure of our version 3 site. To check it out, click on the “Archives” link, then “image” link in the sidebar nav.

The animations utilize the Javascript Motion Tween classes written by Philippe Maegerman from Brussels, Belgium. Thanks, Pim!

Links

jstween.blogspot.com

Some Good WordPress Hacks

Impact sent us a link to this article about some useful WordPress hacks:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/15/10-exceptional-wordpress-hacks/

The ninth entry, “Highlight Searched Text In Search Results” is a tiny code snippet god-send if you are regular expression illiterate like us:

<?php
$content = nl2br ( strip_tags ( get_the_content ( __( 'more…' ) ) ) );
$keys = explode ( " ", $s );
$content = preg_replace ( "/(" . implode ( "|", $keys ) . ")/iu",

'<strong class="search-excerpt">\0</strong>',
$content);

?>

Works like a champ!

There is also another helpful trick in this article. Up at number four, “Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog”. This one is an .htaccess modification to keep visitors from seeing your site while you are making updates…

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123\.123\.123\.123
RewriteRule $ /maintenance.html [R=302,L]

Replace the IP Address with yours and you’ll be able to see your pages but everyone else will get redirected to the maintenance.html page. Brilliant!

Cormorants in the Back Yard

Standing on the back patio, waiting for the sun to come out. Hopefully the overcast will burn off in a couple hours and I’ll be able to ride to the beach today. What are those swimming birds that hang out on the pilings with the pelicans? They do not really dive for fish from the air the same way the pelicans do. They swim around and disappear underwater for minutes at a time. They perch on the decaying pilings and spread their wings and push out their chests like they just won something important. Oh no, wait…. they are drying their wings off. Let’s run some Google searches and some Wikipedia look-ups and discover that they are double-crested cormorants…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diRJJL8EISo

The cormorant has been used for centuries for fishing. Trained cormorants hang out with the fisherman and his boat and do their thing, swimming for fish. There is a snare tied around the cormorants’ necks that keep them from swallowing the big fish. It can eat all the little fish it wants but when it gets a big fish stuck in it’s throat, it comes to the fisherman to take the fish out.

comorant_fishing-cn_painting



Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Cormorant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormorant_fishing

Callback Format for FuseKit

clip.slideTo ( x_value, y_value, duration, easing, delay, callback );

Where callback is structure as follows:

clip.slideTo ( […], { scope:this, func:”function_name”, args:argvalue } );

To send multiple args values, send as an array

MixBlendr

A new Java-based application for mixing audio tracks right in your web browser has just launched. MixBlendr is open source and available for download to use on your own website. Right now they have a contest running until April 9, 2009 for best mix of the tracks they posted on their site.

Check it out: mixblendr.com

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents evenutally die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck