onfocus

I might be interested in the Olympics if I could get an alternative view of them. I'd love to see some of the athletes keeping a daily weblog; describing the events from their unique perspective and posting pictures. While I was flipping channels the other night, I saw that some of the people marching in the Parade of Participating Nations had camcorders. They should be posting that footage on the web.

But the IOC has strict rules about who can say what. It's against the IOC rules for an athlete to write anything about the games while they're happening. Only NBC can decide how people will view the event. And it's a sappy, painful view.

If I was NBC, I'd capture the personality of the Olympics by distributing camcorders to as many participating people possible and let them film whatever they want. I'm sure it wouldn't be professional, but I'd rather watch personal, amateur footage instead of those over-produced packages. And the athletes should interview each other.

I'm sure the Olympics are a real event...not just a TV event. And it's the event without scripts that would be emotional.

A walk around the neighborhood...

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I failed. I tried to make the transition from goatee guy to beard guy and failed. It's not a challenge to be accepted lightly. I stayed on target for almost a month; the crucial ammount of time it takes for a beard to go from scraggly to luxuriously full. I was just on the edge of complete beard success, when I realized that becoming a beard guy involves much more than growing facial hair.

Guys with beards are generally more happy and more cuddly than goatee guys...like big teddy bears. (It's a commonly held myth that beards are scratchy. Once past the itchy stage a beard is pretty soft.) Santa Claus is the archetypical beard guy. Goatee guys generally aren't boisterously happy. They're shifty and have something to hide. Movie villains have goatees. The Devil has a goatee. You can see why I wanted to make the change.

It's not that I'm shifty, have anything to hide, am a villain, or an evil-doer, it's simply that I couldn't make the move to jolly. I'd like to be jolly. I think we all would. But it's just not me. And I couldn't wear the beard knowing that inside I didn't meet all of the criteria for being bearded. (Plus, skp had taken to calling me beardo around the house...which got old.)

So in that sense, I failed. But as I stood over the sink full of freshly shaved facial hair this morning I wasn't too sad. I knew I made the right decision.

Interesting reading: American Advertising Goes to War at AdAge.com. [via sotd] Speaking of Spin of the Day, John Stauber, a founder of the Center for Media & Democracy is on a book tour. He'll be at bookstores in the Bay Area this month pushing Trust Us - We're Experts! I hope to hear him speak...he's doing important work.

The White-House-Superbowl-3.5-Million-Dollar-Murdoch-Bail-Out-Drug-Commercial-Extravaganza aired and the only good to come out of it will be some insightful comments at Metafilter. The money could have been spent on harm reduction programs.

Thanks to some encouraging words, I whipped up a Windows98 version of snapGallery. At least, it worked on the Windows98 machine I tested it on.

More fuzzy economics from the White House, according to the Washington Post: "The White House spent nearly $3.5 million to buy two anti-terrorism commercials during Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast on Fox, according to a network source."

I'm not sure how handing a check for $3.5 million to Rupert Murdoch is helping our country during a recession. Besides, there is a system in place for airing these types of messages. They're called Public Service Announcements. (Here's a good description and history of PSAs.) Buying some of the most expensive air time for a 60 second political message is a terrible misuse of tax dollars.

More scripting madness. It's snapGallery!

adding a title/caption to an image with snapGallery

This script is a quick way to create a web picture gallery. (Here's an example created with the script.) Screenshots and more info here.

Now there are no more excuses for not posting those photos.

Mena also posted pictures of today's Bay Area blizzard. Those lucky Petaluma school kids got a snow day.

If you don't like the sentence "The quick brown fox...", you can open the script with a text editor and scroll down to the third section titled "set some variables". Then change the sentence to whatever you like and save. Maybe, "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." more.

The Short Font Story

I made this font browser thing that shows all of your installed fonts (along with a sentence in the face) on a web page. (screenshot) If you're on Windows 2000 or XP and you want a quick look at your fonts, check it out:

Font Browser
(right-click, "Save Target As...", then double click the icon.)

The Long Font Story

The other day I needed to choose a font and I couldn't find a good way to browse all of the fonts on my system at once. I could only look at them one at a time with Microsoft's Font Viewer. That was time consuming, but it worked. (I know there are probably programs out there to help me out, but what I want to do is very simple and I shouldn't need to install a big program just to browse fonts.) I decided WSH (Windows Scripting Host) could be my answer.

Windows has this fine scripting API, but they don't make it simple to use. The standard FileSystem object and the standard Registry functions were no help in reading font names so I delved into the world of WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation). It's a dark murky land where commands are cryptic and documentation is lacking. It did the trick, though. And along the way I learned that I can check the temperature of my processor and manually fire up the fan. And other neat tricks.

The Font Disclaimer

There's nothing out of the ordinary happening in the script, but it's always a good idea to take a look at the source before you run it. I tried to note what each function does in the code.