I finally got around to adding the old blooper reel from the Gremlin movie, which you can find here. The main reason I never added it before is because it's no picnic adding videos to your site and making sure they're compatible, reliable, etc. Just slapping a video on a page is no problem, but there's a reason YouTube coverts and posts your video for you: it's a big enough hassle that most people wouldn't bother. Especially little Mandy and Chad Q. Teenybopper, who make up probably 80% of YouTube's posts and have no web savvy skills beyond uploading of pictures of passed out friends on Myspace.

And speaking of YouTube, the web standard is now of course to use FLV, or Flash's video format. So it was quite an undertaking to make sure I knew how to properly use/convert/embed FLV, but it was made much much easier by this guy here. This programmer offers a free Flash-built web player for users to control your videos with, as well as a wizard to generate the code for embedding the video with tons of options I didn't even touch. Needless to say, I wouldn't have been able to make the jump to FLV without this site.

I have been changing tons of stuff around the site lately, all fairly minor, but each change presents it's own challenge. I've actually enjoyed all the problems I've run into so far, mainly because I have yet to find one I couldn't solve. This has just further made me hope I get that job doing the WV Encyclopedia website since I'm one of those weirdos who enjoys this light web stuff.

A change of note is the new interface I created for viewing my comic. The old one just didn't fit in with the rest of the site, and seemed too clunky.

The Watchmen Movie Blog isn't updated too often but when they do update they don't jerk you around. They just recently posted some storyboard images to show off how faithful to the comic panels they're trying to be. I still have hope for this movie, partly because I want to have hope for it and partly because I haven't heard anything yet that would make me think they're doing a bad job. Though I guess they did abandon the "comic within a comic" for the main film and are just going to put it on the DVD. Maybe that's for the better? I don't know. But it does seem they're heading in the right direction. I mean one of the previously attached screenwriters wanted to update it to modern times. I can only imagine how awful that would have been. I think that just would have been a gateway to the mindset of "Well, we changed the time, so we can change ____ detail too."

So I'm eagerly awaiting this movie, but ultimately I do agree with Alan Moore that it didn't need to be taken from its native medium of comics. I think for me and lots of other fans of the book, this is going to be a "Okay, lets how close you got it" experience.

The movie blog is here.

This looks really interesting, a movie about Mac users. And what's even better is that it doesn't seem to be shying away from pointing out how absolutely insane and pretentious Mac users can be.

Once again, for the record, I don't really hate Macs and I don't really hate the people who use them. That would be silly, just like the people in this video. What rubs me the wrong way about Macs is how people perceive them, and tend to act when they have them. Macs can do the same things as all other computers, no better, no worse. But They've gotten this reputation of being better equipped for art and design purposes just because they're trendy. A $1 watch tells time just as well as $500 watch, so there's only one reason why you buy the $500 one: to say "look what I have."

Sorry, I know this seems goofy, but when silly trends like this actually interfere with your ability to proceed normally in your chosen field it tends to aggravate you. I'm just glad I'm proficient in both Macs and PCs.

After years of having the green door at the front of the site I finally added a new intro. It struck me today how easy it would be to do a parody of this particular beloved network intro in Flash.

And if you don't know what the intro is from, I weep for your childhood. :)

This is one of those things that everybody needs to see. This is a real campaign ad.

I've been working on the site some. Not changing too much of the look yet except for the front page, just doing some updates here and there. I've started a new blog so that I can actually have it integrated into my page as opposed to the I-frame I was using which was horribly tacky and terrible for functionality. I looked into having a Wordpress.org blog (not wordpress. com, there's a difference, aren't you cool enough to know that?) but my god was that ever complicated. "Simple 5-minute installation" my foot. I mean I'm no web guru, I know enough to get by, but if you know enough web programming to be able to get one of those things working it seems like you wouldn't need the service in the first place. What I've learned is to be wary of any service that comes with literally 100's of pages of documentation (every "read this before you get started" page had its own "read this before you get started" page.)

My ultimate goal for this project was to combine my website blog with my Facebook notes, since people actually read Facebook notes (and Facebook is just a much better networking tool than individual blogs) but sadly I don't think this is going to happen. It is possible, surprisingly, but only through use of Wordpress and some plugins.

So for now this will have to do. I guess I'll just link to this blog from Facebook and see how that goes. I just hate that no one will be notified when comments are made, etc, all that cool functionality that actually pushes people over the line to be active in online communication.