Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

This photo was taken this evening in the west parking garage of the Mall of America, near the Best Buy entrance.

Any guesses on which sign came first? I don’t know myself, but I have a hunch it’s the one on the left. The rounded corners and use of Helvetica suggest the work of a trained designer; the shortcut copycat approach of the sign on the right — sharp corners and Arial, seems characteristic.

I’m pretty sure the No Smoking sign would precede the Authorized Parking Only sign chronologically for logical reasons as well: the concern about misplaced smoking existed long before the concern about misplaced parking at MOA, the latter only becoming a serious issue within the last five years as both IKEA and light rail transit have considerably increased non-mall traffic to the area.

As titillating as apocalypse stories may be, I’ve never really believed that the world is going to end on the winter solstice in 2012, as “predicted” by the Mayan calendar. I don’t think they really predicted the end of the world; that’s just as far in the future as they bothered to calculate. Any culture that couldn’t anticipate needing to account for four-digit years a mere 30-odd years in advance should surely understand that kind of shortsightedness.

And so we have this grand new CGI-fest of an apocalyptic vision, 2012. Frankly the biggest surprise to me is that John Cusack would have anything to do with such a piece of overblown shite as this, but I suppose he’s an “A-lister” now, so it’s part of his pact with the devil.

Anyway… this movie looks like a grand spectacle, with a dreadful story. As usual with movies that are grand spectacles. Never mind that it’s set off on the wrong foot from the very beginning of the trailer — the Mayans were not the world’s first civilization. It’s not about making sense; it’s about setting up whatever minimal pretense is necessary to justify the image of an aircraft carrier smashing into the White House on the world’s biggest tsunami. But I think the best moment of the trailer is the highly symbolic shot of the crack spreading across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right between the fingers of God and Adam. How come no Hollywood blockbuster writer ever thought of that before?!

Fonts.

In particular, ever since I saw the documentary Helvetica, I’ve been observing instances of the use of Arial — that abomination of a Helvetica knockoff Microsoft foisted upon the world by being too cheap to license Helvetica for Windows — on public signage. In days gone by, the default, almost ubiquitous, font on all sorts of public signs was Helvetica. But in the modern PC era, these signs often use Arial, the readily available not-quite-lookalike, instead.

But this pay machine is something else entirely. It displays a schizophrenic mix of Arial and Helvetica.

The most readily distinguishable difference between Arial and Helvetica, as I’ve noted before, is the capital R. So this pay machine immediately caught my attention with the giant “PAY HERE” sign at its top, immediately recognizable as Arial. I also noticed that the taped-on “ATTENTION” sign (which frustratingly informed me that the credit card function was not working) was in Arial as well.

Next I noticed the pasted-on Dymo labels below the change slot, which were printed in Helvetica.

The instructions printed on the machine, presumably by the manufacturer, are in Helvetica, albeit an ugly, artificially compressed version. So it would appear that the “PAY HERE” sign was a Minneapolis add-on and not part of the original unit.

Update: It looks like Austin itself was hit too, judging by this slideshow.

1. You assume the iPhone already has copy-paste, and are surprised to learn it’s just been added as part of the new iPhone 3.0 software, released today.
2. You think everything Apple makes is overhyped and under-featured, and the prior lack of copy-paste is a perfect example of that.
3. Huh?

But for those of us who do have an iPhone, it’s been a long time coming, and now we can experience it. To understand the philosophy at Apple, and why this feature was previously unavailable, you need to realize that Apple thinks big, and “big picture.” They want the iPhone to be a success for the long haul, and they want to transform the very nature of the smartphone. Deny Apple’s impact if you like, but I think it’s hard to argue that they haven’t done exactly what they set out to do. The iPhone isn’t intended to do everything, and, if you want to tinker with the system, you already know Apple products are not necessarily for you. But what the iPhone does, and does well, is provide a consistent, polished, and intuitive interface, and it uses that interface to deliver a “game-changing” experience.

With that in mind, we can begin to understand why Apple hesitated to offer copy-paste. The iPhone completely breaks from traditional user interfaces in a number of key ways. And if that new interface is going to be a success, it demands a radical rethinking of how certain things work. There simply is no straightforward way of adapting a mouse-centered activity like copy-paste to the touch screen interface. So Apple decided to take their time to get it right.

Did they? I think so. Let’s take a look at how it works.

In the first image, we see the article I was reading — an RSS feed from Brand New, displayed on the Google Reader website in Mobile Safari.

One cool feature the iPhone interface has always had — but that you may not know about — is the magnifying glass. When you’re typing, you can touch and hold your finger on any spot in the text to bring up the magnifying glass, which makes it possible — and easy — to place the cursor in a particular location. Now the magnifying glass appears in text you’re reading as well. As you move it around, it highlights individual words.

When you release your finger on a particular word in the text, the magnifying glass disappears and is replaced with the copy block. Note the blue dots in the upper left and lower right corners. These are your drag points.

When you start dragging, the magnifying “strip” (as I’ll call it) appears, allowing you the same character-level precision as the cursor in the magnifying glass when editing text. Let go, and the copy button reappears. Just tap that button to add the highlighted text to the clipboard.

To paste the text (for example, into an email), you use the same touch-and-hold technique to bring up the magnifying glass. When you release, a new set of buttons (like the copy button) appear, allowing you to select, select all, or paste. Tap paste, and your copied text appears.

Overall, it’s pretty good. I’m not the most imaginative when it comes to things like this, so I would never have envisioned this solution, nor can I immediately think of ways to improve it. It feels perhaps a bit clunkier than I would like — and appears to still be a bit buggy; when I tried to recreate the process I had gone through taking these screenshots, I found the magnifying glass stubbornly refused to appear.

Assuming the problems I had getting copy-paste to work were a fluke (maybe a restart is in order), I would give Apple an A- for this implementation. If it is in fact buggy and not quite ready for prime time, I’d drop that to a B+. Still, if I had to come up with a solution for this problem myself, it would be worthy of an F-.

(Yes, I know there’s no such thing as an F-. You don’t need to point that out.)

Hunch is a site to help you make decisions. Naturally the first question I tried out with it was one of Gruber’s suggestions: Should I buy an Apple iPhone or a Palm Pre?

It became pretty clear to me as I answered the dispassionate, objective questions, what the answer was going to be. And I was right:

However, the reality is that I own an iPhone, and have scarcely even considered looking at a Pre, even for the sake of simple curiosity. So while the questions Hunch asked seemed dispassionate and objective, and let’s for the moment assume that they are, the experience leads me to a few questions of my own:

1. Who wrote the questions? And how did they verify the accuracy of their answers?
2. What criteria led them to choose the questions they did? Were there any other suitable questions that were omitted? Do the questions asked reasonably cover the scope of factors that may go into the decision?
3. How are the questions weighted? Assuming they are not weighted at all, should they be? And should the weight of the questions be left to the user, rather than the author?

These are just a few of the many questions not answered by the Hunch experience.

I’m not at all suggesting that the site is a bad idea, or that it’s necessarily poorly implemented. This is just some food for thought on the merits of taking someone else’s advice when making a personal decision. It also reminds us to be wary of fully placing our trust in the All-Powerful Oz Internet. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

For years I’ve referred to my rambling blog on a scattered assortment of topics as “Blather,” which seemed (and still is) a perfectly suitable name. However, in recent months I’ve branched out and created two new, completely separate, and much more conceptually focused blogs: 52 Coffees and Hall of Prog.

In light of this development, it seemed appropriate that I should come up with a name that gives my original, primary blog a stronger identity. The name I have chosen, as mentioned above, is “Underdog of Perfection.”

So, what does “Underdog of Perfection” mean? I’m not totally sure myself. But I’m a recovering perfectionist (yes, it’s like an addiction), and I almost always root for the underdog, so it all just seemed to fit. The blog has a new subtitle as well: “A blog on technology and geek culture by room34.” And so the transition from the all-too-common meatspace moniker of Scott Anderson to my self-applied online pseudonym room34 is complete.

Future posts on this blog will mostly cover the same territory I’ve been pacing around in for the past seven years: technology (with an emphasis on Apple), video games (with an emphasis on Atari and Nintendo), ’80s nostalgia, and a liberal sprinkling of… uh… liberal politics. Enjoy!

And just for what it’s worth, I’ve stolen this image the right way: I downloaded it and am serving it from my own site.

I know a bit about bandwidth theft myself, as more than once someone has decided to link directly to either the image, the audio, or both, from my Christmas with Chewbacca page. I’ve since taken actions to prevent direct linking to content from my site, and I encourage other site owners to do the same.

(Credit where credit is due: the trail of the above image led from here to here to here via here.)

Update: After a bit of research, it seems to me that this may be a hoax or an old meme that’s been circulating for years, or both. But regardless, there obviously are people who think this way, even if they may not be so brazen as to threaten legal action, because bandwidth theft is a pretty common occurrence.

That suspicion was heightened tonight as I perused the DVDs at Target. To any average person, this cover design may fall somewhere between inexplicably weird and just generally poor. But to me, and to many other 30-somethings like me, it grabs you by the eyeballs and drags you over to pick it up. So authentic! Did they carry it over on the ba– oh holy crap, they did! Fake ’80s video game screenshot and all!

Yes, the package design for the Venture Bros. Season 3 DVD set is a faithful — no, absolutely dead on — reference to the classic package designs of late ’70s/early ’80s box designs for games from the Atari 2600. Or, to speak more accurately to the time period of the designs, the Atari Video Computer System. The solid, garish box color; the font; the overall layout; the watercolor collage art. It’s all vintage ’70s, vintage Atari, 100% perfect. They even faithfully reproduced (graphically, not physically) the fact that the boxes were always already smashed when you bought them at the store.

If you’re not familiar with those box designs, here are a few reference points for you (from AtariAge):

(And yes, since you’re wondering, I did go out of my way to pick six of the lamest Atari games I could think of.)

But I’ve found a solution. There is, of course, one more way to access Facebook: the “standard” mobile version that gets served up to the mobile browsers in more feeble cellphones than the iPhone. Turns out you can access the mobile site from an iPhone, and it offers a lot of features that the iPhone-optimized site lacks. I suspect Facebook has abandoned further development on the iPhone-optimized site given that they’re also developing a full-fledged iPhone app, but since the app sucks, it’s a lose-lose situation for iPhone users.

As I said, you can access the regular mobile version from your iPhone, but if you just go to its main URL — http://m.facebook.com — from an iPhone, it automatically redirects you to http://iphone.facebook.com. So you have to trick it, which isn’t hard. Here’s the magic URL you’ll want to bookmark in Mobile Safari (and maybe on your computer as well):

Enjoy.

These are usually interesting (if for no other reason than simply what events the Google team deems worthy of their recognition), and sometimes quite artistic. But today’s Google Doodle is probably my favorite yet.

You see, today is the 25th anniversary of Tetris, one of the most iconic video games of all time.

And here’s the doodle:

From there the story becomes a bit more conventional but no less engaging, with a wonderful balance of humor, action and suspense. It’s a story wonderfully told, wonderfully acted, and artfully animated.

When it first became apparent in the mid-’90s that hand-drawn animated feature films were on the brink of extinction, I was dubious that computer animation could ever become as artistic as the best classic animation. I feel like Pixar reached that point with Finding Nemo, surpassed it with The Incredibles, (truly incredible), and finally became an art itself with Ratatouille. I thought the opening third of WALL-E maintained that level, although once the doughy humans appeared my enthusiasm waned. But I am pleased to say that Up has picked up where Ratatouille left off. The sight of thousands of brightly colored helium balloons billowing up from Carl’s house was a dazzling moment, and that was just the beginning.

Yes, I think Up is a success in just about every way. But the thing that has stuck with me most through the rest of the day is the impression Dug the dog made on me. He’s a wonderfully endearing, delightfully comic (without being cheesy or corny) character. Here’s a clip of our heroes first meeting him.

So, of course, I need to subject you to it.

OK. I just watched the whole thing now, and the 60-second version shown here is actually slightly funny with the voice over. But the 30-second version they actually show on TV all the time around here is all of the scary and ugly stuff with the funny removed, and is just a half minute of suck.

But then again, so is the new Palm Pre, coming out this weekend. For instance, here’s one thing it excels at that the iPhone could never do.

Source: Gizmodo (via Daring Fireball, of course)

Green Day was good — and judging by their body language with Conan, Tom Hanks, Andy Richter, and whoever else was milling about on stage at the end of the show, they seem like they’re genuinely nice and courteous guys, which always surprises me about rock musicians — but this was now the third late-night program I’ve seen them perform this song on, and I already own the album, so it’s kind of enough already.

The highlight of the show, for me, was the “Twitter Tracker” sketch, where absurdly “extreme” (pardon me, “X-TREEEEM!!!!!”) voice overs and equally ridiculous motion graphics combined to try, and fail, to make utterly banal “celebrity tweets” seem exciting. A monster truck show, Twitter is not.

Sidedown Audio is a Chicago-based boutique record label that is the brainchild of the inimitable Joshua Wentz. I’ve gotten to know Josh since we “met” during the 2008 RPM Challenge, and I’m continually impressed with his talent, creativity and ambition.

The Sidedown Audio Bite Size EP series is a monthly set of 3-track EPs by independent musicians, with cover art by Josh, available for a limited time as $2 digital downloads. He’s got some great musicians contributing to the project and I’m pleased to be among them!

Burnt Snow was recorded in April and May 2009. The first track, “Imperfect Storm,” is a symphonic prog-style, 7-minute epic with sweeping guitar melodies and plenty of Mellotron. “It Isn’t What It Is” is a lighthearted funky jam with traces of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and some crazy synths. “At the End of the Day (Is the Night)” is a piece of Summers and Fripp-inspired minimalist electronica, with interlocking guitar lines and intriguing synth washes.

The EP is available exclusively from Sidedown Audio now through September. For two dollars you get all three tracks, a 3-page PDF booklet, and a few surprises. Check it out!

With that in mind, I have started a new blog: Hall of Prog: A Curated Exhibit of Progressive Rock on YouTube. The idea is simple: there are tons of videos of obscure 1970s progressive rock bands on YouTube. All you have to do is search for them. But you have to know what to search for. That’s where I come in.

The plan is to post a link a day (or more) to interesting progressive rock performances available on YouTube, with a small side dish of my own commentary. Though not usually known for brevity (a trait I share with most prog rockers), I will keep my writing to a minimum, and let the music speak (ad infinitum) for itself.

Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to be more standards-compliant. Ya-freakin’-hoo. (No relation to Yahoo!) I don’t especially care, and I’d like to think the best way IE8 could become standards-compliant is to not exist in the first place. But, it’s here, and when Windows 7 arrives later this year, we (the web designers and developers of the world) will have to get used to it.

I do have Windows 7 RC running in a virtual machine on my MacBook, so I can test IE8. But waiting for several minutes for it to log in (for some reason), I came to the decision that maybe it’s not worth testing in: maybe it’s best to just take advantage of its “IE7 Compatibility Mode” to not need to test in it. It’s not like IE8 being standards-compliant (yet, somehow, still not rendering pages like Firefox and Safari) is really going to save me any time, because I’ll still need to test in IE7 (and, God help me, IE6) for years to come. Why add a third Bizarro-world Microsoft browser to the mix?

Internet Explorer 8, brought to you by people who don't see anything wrong with this image.

So I googled ie8 ie7 compatibility mode and found a helpful, if slightly douchey, blog post from a Microsoft “developer evangelist.” Of course, his blog renders completely f’ed up in Firefox, and even if it didn’t it would probably still be displaying the hideous matted-to-white-transparent-GIF-on-a-dark-background you see here.

Nonetheless, he did still give me the code snippet I need. Stick this in the header of all of your pages (which, hopefully, means editing just one file, riiiight?), cross your fingers, bow your head in the direction of Redmond and, if all goes well, you won’t have to think about IE8 (ever?) again.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

I’m going to try it out now.

Perhaps I went out on a limb when I referred to this blog post as douchey. Never mind the fact that the guy is a “developer evangelist” for Microsoft, which is enough in itself. The two d-bag moments for me were: 1) the opening couple of sentences: “As you all know, the Internet Explorer team has been working hard to make IE8 the most standards compliant browser around. Unfortunately, not all web sites confirm [sic] to these standards today.” In other words, Microsoft has undertaken a noble effort to build something perfect and wonderful, but all you apathetic and/or malevolent web designers out there are conspiring to destroy it. And 2) “Lastly, for those of you running Apache instead of IIS (shame on you!)…” Yes, shame on you for using the most popular and stable web server software in the world. Actually, yes, shame on you for running Apache on a Windows server. You’re an even bigger douche than he is.

Update: Adding this meta tag to a client site I’m currently working on didn’t seem to have any effect on IE8, but that may be because I had manually clicked the compatibility mode button in a previous session, turning it off. (So, in other words, I am positing that if the user has manually turned off compatibility mode, it will stay off even if the page tries to activate it.) Turning compatibility mode on manually did work — the rendering issues I saw with IE8 in its normal mode went away.

Now, the thing that concerns me about all of this is that my page should be pretty damn well standards-compliant: the doctype is XHTML 1.1, which is very unforgiving, and I’ve validated it. The page looks fine in Firefox and Safari. It’s possible that the source of the problem is my IE-specific CSS file, that is fixing IE7 problems that don’t exist in IE8 (and thereby introducing new problems there). The next step would be modifying the conditional comments so that IE8 doesn’t load the IE-specific CSS, and checking whether that solves the problems. The culprit may also be IE7.js, which I viewed as a lifesaver when I started using it about a year ago, but increasingly seems to be of little to no benefit.

Update: After watching it for about the 20th time, I finally caught this exchange: when the leprechaun puts the pot of gold on the table and the server says “Do you have anything smaller?” the unicorn says “He’s like already tiny!” I’m usually laughing too much by that point to be able to make out what he says.

I’m not extremely well-traveled, but I have been to Canada, Australia, and several countries in Europe — pre-Euro. So I’ve seen a reasonable assortment of international currency and ours is by far the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, and frankly, boring-as-hell. So much more could be done with our currency, in terms not only of creativity but of incorporating new high-tech means (or some not-so-new, since Australia’s been integrating clear plastic in its currency since at least when I visited there in 1995) of confounding counterfeiters.

Alas, the redesigns we’ve seen in the past 15 years or so have been conservative, timid, and way too reluctant to break with the past. But Richard Smith’s Dollar ReDe$ign Project hopes to change that… or at least to allow us to fantasize about a world where American currency is cool-looking.

I agree with Ministry of Type that the following designs, by Michael Tyznik, are among the best, and they’re something that I could actually see some country using on its currency. Too bad it probably won’t be ours. (Not that American presidents and landmarks would make sense on another country’s bills, but you get my point.)

Upon closer examination, I also like how the designer has eliminated the $1 bill, replaced it with a $200 denomination, and bumped each president (or statesman) up a notch (Washington on the $5, Lincoln on the $10, etc.)… with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who, in deference to P. Diddy, must remain associated with the $100 bill.

Grant leapfrogs from the $50 to the $200. Wait… he’s on the $50 now, right? I don’t see a lot of currency these days, and rarely anything larger than what’s dispensed by an ATM. Oh, and I see Hamilton has been replaced by Jefferson for the new $20. A debatable decision, but at least it’s not Aaron Burr.

There’s also a nice civics lesson, in the form of the Bill of Rights, written on the backs of the notes.

Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.

Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.

The thing that scares me most is that even after last year’s Wall Street collapse, there are probably still plenty of New Yorkers (though probably not so many who actually live in the Bronx, where the Yankees call home) who can easily afford these tickets. Personally, I’d take the mini-vacation and use the extra $2,200 I saved to buy a 55-inch flat panel to watch the other 160 games. But I guess the Yankees have to pay those 8-figure player salaries somehow. I just figured the $10 hot dogs and $15 MGDs would do it. (I’m just guessing at those prices — they’re probably more.)

This makes me a bit nervous as I anticipate the 2010 Twins season at Target Field. Sure, there’s no way in hell the Twins will be able to justify those kinds of ticket prices, but I fear the days of my beloved $8 “cheap seats” are numbered.

So it should be no surprise that I went to see it on opening night, and I was not disappointed. The reviews are consistently superlative, and I agree. As someone who’s been a lifelong fan, albeit a somewhat tepid one, one who has approached the films in the series (my God, is this really the eleventh one?) with a degree of caution and/or passive disinterest (I’m not even sure I’ve seen all of the later ones), I know the characters well. I know the clichés and conventions (though I’ve never been to a convention — that’s not what I’m talking about). I know the difference between “Trekkie” and “Trekker” though I would not describe myself as either.

And then there’s the director, J.J. Abrams. I’ve heard good things about him, but believe it or not I’ve never watched a single episode of one of his TV shows, nor have I seen any of his movies. I’m not even sure what movies he’s done. Cloverfield, right? Anything else? (Yes, I know I could just check IMDb, but I’m trying to make a point.)

In short, while by all outward appearances I should be a hardcore fanboy for this, I’m not so much, really. And with that said, I can tell you I thoroughly enjoyed this movie (well, except maybe for the last few minutes), and that I think it will be equally appealing to both the serious Star Trek fan (Trekker, if you please) and to the summer blockbuster action-adventure watcher looking for a little over two hours of genuine quality entertainment. Perhaps the only people this movie will not appeal to are hardcore sci-fi aficionados who do not already like Star Trek. Though set in the future, and drenched in stunning futuristic visual effects, the movie is fairly light on the “sci.”

What it’s not light on, though, is intense action, an engaging story, great acting, and a near-perfect balance of plot, adventure and humor. It manages to be simultaneously reverent and irreverent towards the original series, in a way that reminds us that Gene Roddenberry’s ’60s version was both smart and silly, clever and clichéd, boldly original and drinking-game-worthy predictable.

Minor spoiler alert: if you want to be totally surprised when you see it, stop reading here.

The casting is first-rate. The actors have managed to evoke their original counterparts while simultaneously fully inhabiting the characters and making them their own. Chris Pine, in particular, is excellent as James T. Kirk. He’s probably doomed never to be as memorable or iconic as William Shatner, but he’s a lot more believable as the brash, reckless, brilliant, defiant soon-to-be captain of the USS Enterprise. I was less impressed with Zachary Quinto’s take on Spock, but that’s perhaps a bit unfair: in the context of this story, Spock is supposed to be somewhat abrasive and unlikable. The scene stealers, though, are definitely Karl Urban as McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty. I am hoping for some sequels if for no other reason than to see more of these two.

I could go on for pages about the details of the story, but I’ll let you see it for yourself. Suffice to say, time travel and alternate realities are involved, and I think that particular plot device was handled in a completely novel way. All of the requisite Star Trek tropes are here: Bones saying “Dammit, I’m a doctor not a…”; Scotty saying “I’m givin’ ‘er all she can take!”; Chekov’s ridiculously over-the-top accent; and of course, the two most essential elements of Star Trek: Kirk making out with a green-skinned woman, and an anonymous “red shirt” dying on an away mission.

A true Trekker wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well it’s interesting to see that there seems to be a correlation between political viewpoint and web browser usage. As (almost) always, this comes from Daring Fireball. We’re looking at the decidedly non-traditional campaign blog of Kansas Democrat Sean Tevis. His campaign did a survey that, among other things, discovered that users of outdated browsers like Internet Explorer 6, AOL, “Don’t Know” and “No Internet” preferred, strongly, his Republican opponent, while users of Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari preferred Tevis. Interestingly, IE 7/8 users slightly favored Tevis.

It would be interesting to see the raw numbers, rather than just percent deviation, to get a sense of the relative proportions of the electorate who fell into each category, especially considering that Tevis apparently lost, by a small margin.

It’s also interesting to look at the strength of each group’s leanings. Those who most strongly favored the Republican candidate were the AOL users and non-Internet users, a.k.a. the Luddites. Chrome users (all on Windows) were the strongest Tevis supporters, followed by Safari (presumably all or nearly all Mac) users. Firefox users were slightly weaker supporters of Tevis. This makes sense to me in that I suspect there’s a high correlation between “average” Mac users (who almost all use Safari, just like most “average” Windows users run IE) and Democratic leanings, whereas users of Firefox (and of open source software in general) are as likely (or moreso) to be libertarian as liberal. Opera… well… I don’t know. Contrarians?

That IE 7/8 users slightly favored Tevis is most interesting to me. IE 7/8 represent by far the largest percentage of the Internet-using population. And the country as a whole moved slightly in the Democrats’ direction in the 2008 election. But Kansas is far more conservative than the US populace as a whole; combine that with the “No Internet” crowd, and a small margin of victory in favor of the Republican candidate makes sense.

P.S. Sean Tevis for President 2016.

I also just wanted to see how well embedding videos from Hulu works.

I wish these video sites would start including wmode="transparent" in their embed code so I wouldn’t have to type it every time. (It needs to be there for the video to go behind my navigation bar when you scroll the page.)