Space Ninja Blog

Got an AdSense account? Then you might want to take advantage of Google’s new plan to pay you $1 every time someone downloads Firefox from a link on your site. This could be pretty cool, and might help push Firefox past the early-adopter slump it’s experiencing. For more information, check out Explorer Destroyer and Kill Bill’s Browser.

Yes! The guys who were working on the Sam & Max sequel formed their own company and aquired the rights to make new games! It’s actually by the same company that’s making the Bone game, so I’ve got high hopes!

1. “Stuck in the Middle With You,” Stealers Wheel - Reservoir Dogs
   Annie hates it when I play this song. How can anyone who saw this movie not think of a cop tied to a chair getting his ear cut off when this song plays? It helps that the lyrics are oddly appropriate.
2. “Where is My Mind,” Pixies - Fight Club
   I’m sure this doesn’t qualify for people who had listened to any Pixies songs before Fight Club, but that was the first time for me, so “Where is My Mind” is forever branded with the images of Jack and Marla watching office buildings collapse.
3. “Golgatha Tenement Blues,” Machines of Loving Grace - The Crow
   Really, anything on the first soundtrack qualifies, but especially this track, since it was early enough in the CD that I heard it all the time, but it was by a band I’m not very familiar with, so I don’t know any of their work outside of the context. I always picture Brandon Lee running along rooftops to this song.
4. “Halcyon & On & On,” Orbital - Hackers
   I had probably heard the song once or twice before I saw Hackers, but it was used to perfection in that movie, during the flyover of the digital city. To this day, I can’t hear this song without getting a desire to open up a terminal window and start dorking around on a Unix system.
5. “Dry The Rain,” The Beta Band - High Fidelity
   “I will now sell five copies of The Three E.P.s by the Beta Band.” And they played the finale to the song, and everyone in the store is nodding their heads. Annie and I both love this song, and playing it gives me the feeling that I’m in a warm friendly neighborhood music store.

Ground Rules
What I’m talking about here is songs that you can’t hear without thinking of the movie that you first heard the song in. In your head, the scene from the movie and the song are permanently linked, for better or worse. The obvious example is “Also Spake Zarathustra” from 2001. There are some exceptions, however. No Musicals: Songs used in musicals like The Blues Brothers or Evita are exempt because it’s not clever usage of a well-chosen song by the director to nail the scene, it a scene written around the song. No Songs Written For The Movie: Obviously, if the song was written specifically for the movie, like “The Crying Game,” it’s exempt. And lastly, No Theme Songs: You can’t say that the “Theme From Mortal Kombat” always makes you think of Mortal Kombat - it was designed to do so. Now, let’s make this an audience participation sport! Everyone leave a comment with your top five!

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Work is continuing on the new design for the blog. I’ve moved on from thumbnailing to making mockups in Photoshop. I had a few false starts, and entertained a few odd ideas at first, but I soon got my focus back and worked hard at producing the mockup based on the final thumbnail I chose. Oddly, while my thumbnail was very helpful at getting sizes and layout down, I hadn’t put much thought into uses of color, beyond that I wanted to use more color than normal. In the end, my color choice was dictated by the photo in my header graphic, and I’m planning on setting it up so that I can easily slap up a new header graphic and adjust the colors on the rest of the design to match, which would let me do special designs or seasonal colors if I wanted to.

I also found myself debating about what size to make the design. I spent quite awhile looking at other blogs, evaluating whether or not I liked how their design filled the browser window. What I discovered is that while it’s quite trendy right now to design for 1024px screens and set the design up to cut off gracefully on an 800px screen (or not), I don’t think it’ll work for me. It’s great for guys like A List Apart, who have an abundance of content that all needs to fit on the front page, but my personal site doesn’t really need that. I would prefer that the design follow function in this case, so I’m sticking to 750px width. That’s actually a step up from the current design, but I’ve already used this width on Sean’s blog, and I like the extra breathing room it gives, especially in the sidebar.

I’m pushing myself right now to finish the design in time to submit my site for round 3 of admissions to the 9rules network. It will definitely be a big task to get everything done in time, especially since this weekend Annie and I are watching our friends’ kids so they can go on a date. Wish me luck!

Even the Vatican thinks that intelligent design is dumb.

“The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator”.

This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to “understand things better”.