Fickr Rich Edit [screenshot]: Add limited rich editing capabilities to Flickr, in comments and groups. Very limited, as flickr only allows certain HTML elements in these inputs. And I’m done with greasemonkeying for today.

The Google, Yahoo, and Flickr user persistance things have all been updated again. Now it’s possible to input another user ID without editing the script or turning off Greasemonkey. The example usage would be if you had a guest at your computer.

The next thing that’s going to be requested is to have the setup not involve editing the scripts directly, and it is possible, but… Well there is no ‘but’ really. I’m just lazy. But I’ll get around to it.

User scripts roundup. Three new ones, lots of changes to old ones. First the new and semi-new:

• googLogin.user.js [screenshot] - Google user persistance thing, by request. Useful for households with several google/gmail accounts, provides a select box for multiple user id’s, just like yhooLogin.

• flickrLogin.user.js [screenshot] - Flickr user persistance thing, which I should have thought of a long time ago, in a household with five Flickr users residing or visiting regularly.
• FlickrMail.user.js [screenshot] - FlickrMail from user icon, adds a link to FlickrMail a user to the the little mouseover-popup on their user icon.

Updates:

• yhoologin.user.js - Yahoo user persistance thing: return of the revenge of the attack of the ugly hack: it now works with Yahoo! Mail. I also added a simple timesaving thing which has been incorporated into all the similar new scripts. Selecting a user id from the dropdown will now put the focus back to the password field. All those saved clicks add up. I’m just doing my part in the fight against entropy, postponing the heat death of the universe.
• flickrPhotoPageEnhancer.user.js - Flickr photo page enhancer has also been updated, as detailed here. Some pretty important changes were made, so you should intall the newest version.

(Greasemonkey? See all of my userscripts.)

I’m trying out Picasa. Compare the above, which resulted from pushing two buttons in Picasa (and then a third to email it to Flickr), with what I did with my meagre knowledge of photoshop.

Puerile, I know. Inspired by Undeclared NUTS in COCK, I found these images,
and here we are. I fully intend to have this printed on a t-shirt at
some point, if I can get something a little higher quality than cafepress. Considering that t-shirts are the easiest way to make money on the web and all, I think I may be on to something.

Someone from my ex-job called me today. She asked if I could come in to sign some final paperwork. Anyone that knows me well, knows that in the next five seconds quite a few options as to a response went through my head, and that not once did I consider actually meeting that request. Finally, I told her to have them sent to my house and I’ll have someone look at them, and then I hung up on her. I won’t, but I want them to waste the stamp. It wasn’t the most professional thing to do, I know, but at this point, there’s no way I’m getting a reference out of them, anyway. And gods, It felt good.

I rewrote Fabricio Zuardi’s Flickr Photo Page Enhancer Greasemonkey script to work with the new flash-free flickr for all you fun-loving firefox-using flickrites. I made some additional enhancements as well. Get my new version here.

Also, the Yahoo Login userscript? It apparently has never worked for Yahoo Mail. I can’t figure out why, exactly, as it works with all the other yahoo sites I tested, but fixing this is on my list. What blows my mind is that not one of the hundreds of people who have installed, or at least accessed the script bothered to drop a note and tell me! *smite*

So I got fired today, and I also can’t figure out regular expressions in PHP. Oddly, right now I’m more pissed off about the latter. I think that’s just a function of me being me, though. And no, I really don’t want to talk about it, because I’m sick of talking about it, but nowhere near as sick as I’ll soon be of trying to find a job in economically-benighted Charleston, South Carolina. Fuck.

I finally got around to getting hosting for my domain. I went with nearlyfreespeech.net, which so far has completely lived up to their almost-unbelievable claims. I’ve been understandably busy playing with all of the cool stuff I now have access to.

I flirted with both Movable Type and Wordpress (I will not even consider anything Slash-inspired, <shudder>), but I don’t have any major gripes with Blogger right now, and they are the easiest service to move from, should I want to in the future. Laziness played a large part as well, I wasn’t about to try to convert my one Blogger template into multiple templates for every possible type of page.

Instead, I devoted the effort I would have spent on template-crafting to PHP and Magpie. It’s been a while since I worked with PHP, and I had forgotten how fun it is. I’d also forgotten how little I actually know about PHP. But Magpie is an absolute dream to work with. The documentation is copious, if a little scattered (hint: google is your friend when working with Magpie), and I was able to use it to do several things I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

Click around a little bit, and you’ll notice a lot of things that work cooler than they used to. Post pages and archive pages, especially. The linkblog has been seperated from the rest of the content again, and is now entirely del.icio.us driven. In general, though, everthing has been rewritten from the ground up, but with an eye towards it all looking more or less the same. As always, gripes from pepole with wierd browser/platform combinations I’m not able to test for are welcomed and encouraged.

Undocumented feature of the new flash-based Flickr Badges: you can get a badge of just your favorite photos. First off, get the code for a standard Flickr badge of your photos. In the first block of javascript, look for the variable zgi_url, which should look something like this: http://www.flickr.com/apps/badge/badge_iframe.gne?some-variable=blah&zg_person_id=11349677%40N00 To the end of this, add &zg_favorites=1 Paste this into your page, and you get something like the badge in this post.

I’ve long thought that the American movie theatre industry is marked for death (or changes so drastic as to be indistinguishable from death), mainly because of the stupid things they’re doing to offset declining ticket sales. The road to recovery is not to charge more for everything and force people to sit through more and more commercials. Somehow that fairly obvious fact has managed to escape most everybody, save the consumers, who are staying away in droves.

All of this is why I reacted to news about 2929 with glee&#8212even despite the involvement of Mark Cuban. If you haven’t heard, the basic premise is to release a movie to theatres, DVD and pay-per-view at the same time. Simple idea, profound consequences. This way the studio/filmmaker only pays for one marketing blitz, and the consumer is free to decide how they want to see the movie. Which is completely brilliant. And I don’t just say this because I haven’t been to a movie theatre in over three years and would like to see them die because I have a general hate-on for companies that openly disrespect their consumers.

The most important, bestest thing about this is that, should it become common practice, the cost of getting a movie to the consumer will go down. Movies are on the verge of being democratized by the ready availability of high-quality tools (though it’s not quite there yet), and the prohibitive investment required to actually make money off of a movie is increasingly a major stumbling block for a lot of artists.

With the potential downfall of the current distribution model, a film could skip the theatres and still be taken seriously and get eyeballs. A film only available on DVD, pressed by the director in his basement, could be reviewed in publications of high standing right next to the latest from the major studios. And more importantly, it could reviewed in publications of low standing, you know, the ones that most of America actually reads. It could even share shelf space at Blockbuster, which is a bad example because Blockbuster isn’t long for this world either, but you get what I mean.

Admittedly, this is all conjecture, based upon my own wishful thinking. But I do see a major hurdle ahead for this ‘distribution revolution.’ The theatres themselves have whittled away any clout they once had, but if the studios recognize this as a threat, expect trouble. They could either band together and attempt to legislate their business model back into viability, or take advantage of their existing infrastructure to get a head start in the new scheme of things. As there have already been far too many recent examples, I think they’ll go for the former. Movie lovers will continue to be royally screwed if this happens, and that would suck.

“Orson Scott Card hates Star Trek.” That was my first reaction when I read the linked story. Upon more reflection, I can understand where he’s coming from, though. If I was an author whose moderate success has come entirely from flogging the corpse of a young adult novel I wrote decades ago, I might feel somewhat peeved at the inexplicable success of Star Trek too.

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy Card’s novels, even those outside of the Ender series, but I never claimed to have great taste in entertainment. I also enjoy Trek in several of its incarnations. As I said, I never claimed to have great taste.

But something about the article just chaps my ass. Maybe it’s the casual dismissal of what’s basically a whole sub-genre of Sci-fi, that has kept possibly tens of thousands of people employed over the last few decades, and entertained even more. Of hundreds of hours of filmed entertainment (of varying quality, to be sure, but a lot of it was great, and some of it sublime). Of millions of fans who found something in Trek that so resonated with them that they found they couldn’t get enough. Of people who were willing to give up their time, effort and money to keep a not-so-great TV series on the air, for fear that if it was canceled, it might mean no more Trek ever.

Or maybe it’s all of those things. But the article paints Card as a callous asshole, and that’s unbecoming of a Christian. And I’ll shut up now.

Apologies in advance to RSS readers, who will be seeing some strange things in their reader of choice, but I’ve decided to change the way I handle the linkblog. Feedburner is a great way to combine RSS feeds, and del.icio.us is a great links manager with or without the social aspects, but I’d rather have one blog and one feed (and one ring to rule them all…). Everything should be more or less the same for the reader, it just means more work for me, with the payoff of having all my content in one place. I don’t know why that should matter, but for some reason it just feels better.

Updated yhooLogin.user.js to do a few things in a less-stupid way, and fix some bugs.

More extensive are the changes to bloggerDate.user.js, but they are (mostly) cosmetic, changing the UI a little bit to make use of the space created by removing all those select-boxes (updated screenshot).

Anyone who’s ever kept a journal for an extended period of time has had the sensation. Today, thanks to archive.org, I was confronted with my 17-year-old self. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing that no matter how loud you scream, you’ll never bridge the gap between then and now, and save yourself the trouble, the pain. I try to be grateful for the wisdom I have gained and the love I have shared, but all I can do is imagine myself 5 or 10 years hence, similarly screaming into the void. That’s dreary. I know. But it’s all I know. Frustration, failure and disappointment.

What makes it worse is that I can only imagine the protective, paternal feeling I have toward myself at 17 would, could I somehow arrange a chat with that person, be only met with revulsion at what I have become, and not become.

I seem to have retained my ability to torture a sentence, however.