Author: Peter

Comics quiz

I was a little surprised to score 9/10 on CBC.ca’s recent comics-to-film quiz, missing only the question on Constantine (which I didn’t see, nor did I even realize it was an adaptation).

I’ve seen nine of the twenty-five films (not all comic-based) that are mentioned in the quiz. The majority of those nine are definitely below my watch-again threshold, and I’ve no interest in a first viewing of many of the others. Of those I would see a second time, only two are comic-based, and one of those I own. (No, it isn’t Barb Wire… but it does have some similar elements.)

Music now… er, then

I saw the Musical Age of Majority at Paul Gorbould’s blog and thought, hey, what the heck. For those not familiar with it:

  1. Go to http://www.popculturemadness.com/ [actually, go to the music page]
  2. Pick the year you turned 18
  3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
  4. Write something about how the song affected you
  5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

Feel free to skip the last step (as Paul and his source did).

As I look over the Milli Vanilli-New Kids on the Block-Guns N Roses wasteland that was popular music in 1989, though, I find it hard to identify a large number of the songs, and even some of the acts. (Teddy Riley Featuring Guy? Johnny Kemp?) Of the tunes I do recognize, there aren’t five I feel particularly attached to—I own copies of only two of the CDs on which any of the songs appear. And although I’ve come to know (and sometimes even like) some of the songs since the year I turned 18, that’s not what this particular meme is about.

It’s not like I wasn’t listening to popular music in 1989, it’s just that none of it is represented there. So I’ve got to pass on this one. Perhaps some of you others out there will have better luck.

A tale of two…

Lawrence, Kansas is the sixth-largest city in Kansas, with a population of approximately 80,000. It is located about 66km west of Kansas City, Missouri, population approximately 445,000.

London, Ontario is the sixth-largest city in Ontario, with a population of approximately 350,000. It is located about 100km southwest of the metropolitan area of Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge, population approximately 450,000.

LJWorld.com and Lawrence.com are the primary websites maintained by the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper (part of The World Company, an organization of about 600 people).

LFPress.ca is the primary website maintained by the London Free Press newspaper (part of 7000-employee Sun Media, itself a subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., one of Canada’s largest media companies with over 47,000 employees).

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’, y’know?

Moo!

A while back I heard (from either Mike or one of the 200-odd blogs I read) about custom printing company MOO. Never really had any reason to take advantage of their service until today, when I realized their mini-cards would be perfect for an event I’m planning. And so far I’m impressed!

About two hours ago I started designing the series of cards using my local photo archive. I started with eight different photos, scaled, cropped, and resized to my little heart’s delight, then narrowed the selection to five favourites… and as of half an hour ago they’ve been ordered. Almost everything went as smooth as silk: the only glitch was that the templates they provide are at a different resolution than what the website says, but they’ve both got the same aspect ratio so everything worked out. $DEITY willing and the creeks don’t rise, they should be here within a couple of weeks… which’ll be just in time.

напитком

As I opined to a (very patient) young woman tonight, I’ve often wondered why there’s never been an equivalent version of The Right Stuff for the Russian space program. In a lot of ways it was the more interesting half of the race: as well as all of their firsts, there’s controversy, romance and intrigue, the threat of war, and action, specifically the amazing fact that cosmonauts ejected from their capsules after re-entry and parachuted to the ground.

Upon reflection, though, I can think of two reasons it hasn’t been done: secrecy, in that (as I understand it) most of the Russian records from that time remain confidential; and pride, mainly from Hollywood, which wouldn’t want to risk appearing anti-American by showing an enemy state (even a former one) in a positive light. Then again, I know NASA has had a presence at Star City for some time now, and we’ve recently seen the release of Letters from Iwo Jima, a movie that wouldn’t have been greenlit five years ago let alone twenty-five, so perhaps there’s some hope after all.

Stretchy background images

For a project I’m working on I want to have full-width background images regardless of the size of the browser window. Ideally I’d use CSS3’s background-size property, but no browsers support it yet, even experimentally. This forum post experimental page shows how to hardcode what I want into a page, but it requires a bunch of extra markup that I’m not prepared to add. So instead I’ve written up a nasty little JavaScript that sorta kinda emulates its behaviour. The gist of the script is that it moves the <body> of a document into a <div> named fake-body and sets its background transparent, wraps that in a <div> named fake-scroller and sets its background transparent, then adds another <div> named fake-background that wraps an <img> containing the original body’s background-image. The script works in Firefox and Safari, and would in Opera if I did browser detection—it needs a weird little hack that I don’t quite understand—but I’m pretty much at a loss for finding a way to make it work in any version of IE; I’d hoped making it work would just be a matter of finding the right style object and using IE7‘s document.recalc() method. If anyone out there on the LazyWeb has any ideas—or improvements in general—please chime in!