Month: March 2006

Check out the hilariously awesome prank played on a USC basketball player by University of California-Berkeley. This takes heckling to a whole new level, but I must salute the effort put into organizing this…

As you probably (hopefully) noticed, I’ve redesigned the layout for DrikoLand. One impetus for change is the recent 1,000,000th hit on my ‘80s Site (woo hoo!), which is spurring me on to revamp a lot of that site (still working on that; more news soon, I hope). However, the blog has also become a little stagnant, I think, so I’m finally implementing some of the ideas I’ve been jotting down for a while now.

I’ve tried to keep the main elements of the site the same, like the overall color scheme and the logo. I may yet change some more, but this is it for now. Here’s a summmary of most of the changes, and some rationales for them if you’re interested. If not, skip on down to the end…

• The most obvious change is a move (back) to two columns from three, with a fixed width. I decided on a fixed width of 800 pixels so that the site should look pretty much the same to anyone with a screen width of 800 pixels or more, which is about 95% of you, according to my site stats. This allows me to better visualize the addition of large images in posts, as I now know exactly how things will look to everyone. Although I will point out that M$ Internet Explorer still doesn’t render some things like it should, which caused me to tear my hear out over several spacing issues that worked perfectly in Firefox.
• With the switch to two columns, I deleted and reordered several of the elements in the previous two sidebars.
• Two search boxes in the right sidebar are now a single search box that just searches the DrikoLand blog, versus the WWW or the entire driko.org domain. I never used the Technorati search box, and the new Google Blog Search is at least as good. I may want to add back a means to search the entire site, though.
• I got rid of the “Useful Links” section that was in the left sidebar altogether. Although nostalgic in that those pages still retained design elements from the mid- to late-’90s, they were rife with broken links and I don’t think anyone really visited them. I plan on slowly adding working links from those pages and from my extensive personal bookmarks into del.icio.us, so the categories in the right sidebar will probably grow as I add those in. That will allow you (and me) to access all of my bookmarks (and post links) from any location, which will be kind of nice, I think.
• I moved the navigation bar up top to below the logo, as I think it helps the logo stand out more. I debated getting rid of the navigation bar altogether, but since I find myself using it, I decided to keep it around.
• I changed some formatting, like making blockquotes surrounded by a shaded box so they stand out better. There are some minor font changes that shouldn’t be all that evident except that I cleaned up the underlying CSS.

The next step will be to move away from a table-based layout to one that utilizes CSS, which will make future changes much easier and will also help me to standardize formatting across the entire site. One step at a time, though…

Please let me know what you think! If you actually used something that I got rid of, let me know and I’ll see if it can be reincorporated. If you have any other suggestions for additions or changes, I’d appreciate them as well.

Must Love Jaws is another funny movie remix, this time editing up a trailer for Jaws that makes it out to be a sentimental love story between man and shark. Check out the video in the embedded player below:

Groupr allows you to easily see new photos in all of the different flickr groups you belong to.

The Knockoff Project collects and displays “album cover spoofs, goofs, tributes, send-ups, near-misses and coincidences.”

T’bone’s SWU has a lot of interesting Star Wars trivia and media content, including a bunch of cut scene videos from all six episodes.

Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, among other things, wrote an interesting essay back in 2002 entitled Why Grammar is the First Casualty of War that was recently posted on Common Dreams. Here’s an excerpt:

What really alarms me about [W]’s “war on terrorism” is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It’s rather like bombing murder.
…
Saying “We will destroy terrorism” is about as meaningful as saying: “We shall annihilate mockery.”

Although the essay is tongue-in-cheek, it is only partially so, as underneath the satirical humor there is a definite message to be pondered…

Former game show host Peter Tomarken died on Monday when a plane carrying him and his wife crashed off the California coast. Best known as host of the ‘80s game show Press Your Luck, Tomarken also hosted several other game shows and had roles in a few TV shows and movies.

When you watch the three-ball juggling act of Chris Bliss (Google Video), you might think it’s pretty cool. However, if you check out Jason Garfield performing the same act with five balls, satirically using the same music and audience reactions, then you’ll realize he has good reason to “diss Bliss.”

Check out Cerado’s Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz, in which you look at a list of names and have to choose whether it represents a “Web 2.0” application or a Star Wars character. I got 41 out of 43, which is cool and a bit sad at the same time…