eafarris.com

How To Create a Notebook Design with CSS

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:17:49 -0500

How To Create a Notebook Design with CSS:

Sweet notebook design in CSS

Good Guy Apple: Son purchased a refurb MBP, gets a courtesy phone call just to check that everything's fine with it.

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:10:54 -0500

Good Guy Apple: Son purchased a refurb MBP, gets a courtesy phone call just to check that everything's fine with it.

The next front in the war. This one is different — the school may not be doing anything unlawful....

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:34:32 -0500

The next front in the war. This one is different — the school may not be doing anything unlawful. It is a case of the minority standing up and being met with resistance.

Lenoir City High School won’t publish atheist student’s editorial on religion in schools

LENOIR CITY — Krystal Myers is an honors student, captain of the swim team and editor of her high school newspaper.

from Plus Public Activity Feed for eric Farris http://bit.ly/yU0o3g

Playing around with CyanogenMod9 (Android Ice Cream Sandwich) on my Nook Color.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:55:17 -0500

Playing around with CyanogenMod9 (Android Ice Cream Sandwich) on my Nook Color.

"All of my life I’d heard from other guys that if you wanted to have a relationship with a..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:17:26 -0500

“All of my life I’d heard from other guys that if you wanted to have a relationship with a woman, you had to take your time, you had to lay the groundwork. And I always thought the purpose of all that groundwork was to convince someone to have sex with you. Not at all. People need very little motivation to have sex. You lay all that groundwork so that someone, someday, will sit with you in the emergency room.”

- Stephen Tobolowsky, The Tobolowsky Files, Ep 54, “The Long Road to Somewhere Else”

S04E05 - The Son

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:44:03 -0500

My family and I have been going through Friday Night Lights courtesy of Netflix Instant Streaming, and I have been loving almost every minute. Season two was very uneven, but even it I have mostly enjoyed. I heard about this series a few years ago, mostly when the buzz came about this particular episode, S04E05, The Son, when it originally aired on NBC. One of the few FNL episodes that warrants its own wikipedia article.

Friday Night Lights is a lot of things. It’s a good television drama, orbiting around sports, but it’s the acting and filmmaking that draws me in, even more so than the stories. [ASIDE: if you’ve been hesitant to watch FNL because “it’s about football,” it’s not. It’s about football the way Sports Night was about their sports show-within-a-show. It’s there, sometimes it’s prominent, but it’s not what the show’s about.] The filmmaking is unique, or at least novel, in that scenes are typically one-take, using hand-held cameras, and with a minimum of scripting. Actors were given plot points, and particular lines of dialog to hit, but the performances we see on screen are largely improvisational. This gives the characters a life way outside of what lines the writers are putting in the actors’ mouths. These actors are actually playing the characters, not acting out a script. From this, we get characters more human, perhaps, than any other TV show. (It’s probably more real than many ‘reality’ shows.)

So, in our journey through the lives of the folks in Dillon, TX, last night we came to The Son. Much has been made of Zach Gilford’s performance in this episode, and I admit Matt’s my favorite character in the whole series (the spoilers that I’ve read that he’s leaving soon make me sad). I’ve enjoyed his performances as Matt, every time he gets an upper hand life beats him down again, and how this endless series of setbacks wear on the character has been so evident in Gilford’s every move, every lip twitch, every eye movement, has been magnificent to watch. He has become Matt Saracen, and that’s a very interesting and fulfilling thing to see. This episode was a command performance.

I can only quote from Alan Sepinwall, who wrote at the time:

The physicality of his performance throughout this episode is exceptional: the catch in Matt’s voice when he says the words “delivers pizza” while describing his life to date; his snot-filled, jittery demeanor outside the Taylor house; and, especially, the complete abject horror in his eyes (and the way his throat seems to flare out with his eyes) as he stares at his father’s wrecked corpse inside the coffin. In that moment, I was there, you know? Just incredible work, and whatever reservations I had about the writers keeping Gilford around this year were entirely dispelled by this knockout episode.

I also felt the writing was superb on this episode. Many things were left out of this episode, that I was glad not to see. One big one, which Sepinwall also writes about, is when Coach walks Matt back home after his breakdown at the Taylor’s. We expect to see, we want to hear, we want to be moved by, one of Coach Taylor’s epic speeches. He’s teaching these kids about life, not just football, even after they’ve graduated, so here’s a fantastic opportunity. But, no, we don’t get that. We get two grown men walking together, one a mentally clobbered mess of a 19 year old, the other a hardened veteran of too many of these moments, trying to both be there and be invisible. As they’re walking away from the camera, Eric is very late to put his arm around Matt. And silence. Couldn’t have been done better.

There’s a lot I could say about the other story lines, about how much Tim has grown up, for example, evident in his relationship with Becky, about Lyla being at the funeral, about how much I wanted to at least see Smash at the funeral, etc. But this is TV at its very finest.

There’s a discussion going on in my head about this being the best TV series I’ve ever watched. It’s certainly very close.

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Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:36:17 -0500

RT @jessicaahlquist: Tsk, tsk. How rude. http://t.co/oCakN53d

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:10:29 -0500

RT @jessicaahlquist: Tsk, tsk. How rude. http://t.co/oCakN53d

RT @DJGrothe: This excruciating kidney stone starting last night is God's way of keeping me atheist. What a bad design of the human body.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:10:16 -0500

RT @DJGrothe: This excruciating kidney stone starting last night is God's way of keeping me atheist. What a bad design of the human body.

Can't be there, but thinking of @georgehrab and the boys for tonight's #21812. Have a great show, Geo. Looking forward to the DVD release.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:10:32 -0500

Can't be there, but thinking of @georgehrab and the boys for tonight's #21812. Have a great show, Geo. Looking forward to the DVD release.

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Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:53:19 -0500

Is FreeFileSync Better Sync Software Than Microsoft SyncToy? [Windows]

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:24:52 -0500

Is FreeFileSync Better Sync Software Than Microsoft SyncToy? [Windows]

RT @sorkinese: You know, your indignation would be a lot more interesting to me if it weren’t quite so covered in crap.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:10:44 -0500

RT @sorkinese: You know, your indignation would be a lot more interesting to me if it weren’t quite so covered in crap.

R Filter

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:39:23 -0500

R Filter:

Code colorizing for R

But for desktop-computer-as-appliance people (and there's a lot of them), Gatekeeper is a good idea.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:25:42 -0500

But for desktop-computer-as-appliance people (and there's a lot of them), Gatekeeper is a good idea.

I like the idea of Gatekeeper in Mac OS X, but not excited that the removal of one radio button would mean I'd have to jailbreak my Mac.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:10:42 -0500

I like the idea of Gatekeeper in Mac OS X, but not excited that the removal of one radio button would mean I'd have to jailbreak my Mac.

Things It Might Be Fun/Useful to Try the Universal (*) Selector On

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:09:56 -0500

Things It Might Be Fun/Useful to Try the Universal (*) Selector On

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Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:59:15 -0500

Walter Issacson's "Steve Jobs"

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:32:00 -0500

Walter Issacson's "Steve Jobs":

It’s been a long time coming, but worth the wait: John Gruber’s take on Walter Issacson’s tragically awful biography of Steve Jobs.

It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about something; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career.

Maybe we can now stop talking about what a bad biography it is. If this book is all you know about Mr. Jobs, you didn’t know Steve at all.

Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.

Dusty in here or something.

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:36:57 -0500

Dusty in here or something.