What I found out, not reading feeds at all, however, was that I’ve actually missed nearly nothing. Everything that’s important bubbled to the surface despite, and most of those “important” things wasn’t news, but rather stuff that affected people in my life.

In fact, I’d rather have Fever for Twitter than for RSS.

Imagine knowing that the upcoming WordPress Community Summit is super-important because four of the blogs in your reader are reporting on it, and you didn’t have to read all four posts to find out!

That said, I am in the fortunate situation where I get my fix of WordPress news on a daily basis through work

I thought working with WordPress without Twitter would be near impossible.

I use Twitter very little, but I would say I work more *around* WordPress.

I have not seen this extended version of Alien 3! Is it a director’s cut or something? Is it worth watching?

It’s part of the terribly named Alien Quadrilogy box, and the full title is “Alien 3 Assembly Cut” or “Extended Workprint” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_3#Special_Edition_DVD_.26_Blu-ray). For the box set, each of the directors were approached to make a special edition version of their movies. That’s what made Ridley trim Alien and insert the cocoon seen and call it a Directors Cut. Cameron filmed an introduction to his existing special edition, and there’s also an even longer and worse version of Alien 4. The original versions are also included.

David Fincher declined participating because he hated the experience working on Alien 3. So instead, the producers took a previous workprint version of Alien and some of Finchers notes iirc, and cut a new extended version of Alien 3. While it’s still not a magnificent movie, it makes a lot more sense than the theatrical release. For example, a whole subplot of the con who releases the alien was restored, explaining that this con actually worships the alien as a god (which sort of explains his motivation). The burial scene is also way more somber, and the scene at the end as well, where in the extended version the alien doesn’t burst out of the chest as Ripley jumps into the lava. It really adds to the scene I think.

Also, the second trailer for Prometheus and the David viral video were outstanding. I actually think that David video got me more excited than any of the trailers or other promotional material… it was exceptionally well done and very creepy. “Well that explains it and the 8.2′s always were a bit twitchy.” Can’t. Wait.

Before:
$attachments = get_children( array(‘post_parent’ => $id, ‘post_status’ => ‘inherit’, ‘post_type’ => ‘attachment’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ‘image’, ‘order’ => $order, ‘orderby’ => $orderby );

After:
$attachments = get_children( array(‘post_parent’ => $id, ‘post_status’ => ‘inherit’, ‘post_type’ => ‘attachment’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ‘image’, ‘order’ => $order, ‘orderby’ => $orderby, ‘exclude’ => get_post_thumbnail_id()) );

cu werner

No one uses pages on the Mac, so using iCloud to save documents is useless.

Apparently their original justification was internationalisation — words with varying lengths across languages were too tricky to fit into a single interface. I’m not sure I’d agree it was a worthwhile trade-off, although I’m sure it saves them (a tiny amount of) money on designers!

But the usability of the new interface really puzzles me. It breaks so many rules of usability — no consistency (buttons appear, disappear, and move around), nesting scrollbars, etc, I find it hard to believe that it works better empirically. (I’d also be eager to see data on that.)

I get the feeling that the whole re-design was driven by marketers with an irrepressible urge to re-brand, rather than any particular need to improve what was a highly effective UI. Oh, that and they had to try to ram Google Plus down everyone’s throats since it wasn’t doing too well on its own.

It’s an interesting test case, actually — can a modern tech company, which is obliged by its shareholders to perpetually grow, maintain a perfectly functional product without feature creep? Past examples (e.g. MS Word) suggest not.

Putting the buttons on top would eliminate this particular problem (an auto-hide feature would be nice too…) And my tablet, the ThinkPad Tablet, actually has hardware buttons so I don’t need the capacitive buttons at all. I know if I could root my tablet I could hide them. But I’m not rooting any time soon, and google shouldn’t want me to root to overcome their design problem here.

Is there any way around this short of rooting?

One suggestion I had was that drawing app developers could put an “upside-down mode” in their apps. Launch the app in landscape mode, invert the tablet with the bottom (and any hardware buttons) at the top, lock the screen orientation in this upside-down mode, rotate the tablet back correctly so that everything on screen s now upside-down, including the capacitive buttons, then click the “invert app” button. Now your app is all OK and there are no buttons at the bottom to accidentally brush against.

Aliens is a great movie, and agree that the shorter version is better. It’s just not as good as Alien, in my mind.

Finally, I enjoyed Alien 3, and if we’re talking continuity this is where it gets tricky. Presumably you could argue that Lance Henricksen could be an old version of Pearce. So aging exists. Let’s then say that the Bishop android was created in the likeness of old Weyland. Now at the ending of Alien 3, if I remember correctly (and it’s likely I don’t), supposedly-Weyland tries to convince Ripley to not jump in to the lava. He gets hit, white blood spurts out, and we see he’s actually the android. Except, in the extended work print cut, red blood spurts out, so it really is Weyland. And since that movie takes place in the distant future, either Weyland spends a lot of time in cryosleep, or there’s a continuity issue.

Also, let’s ignore any Alien vs. Predator films.

Either way, I’m cool with Guy Pearce as Weyland and any other changes to the canon that Scott wants to make. The series needs a solid reboot or its dead. I wonder if Weyland will actually be in Prometheus? He doesn’t appear in any of the trailers and footage I’ve seen so far.

I like the idea of optional continuity. A lot of folks get really hung up on anything changing in a beloved series. I’m usually one of em… I watched that Weyland-Yutani video and the first thing that came to mind, despite me being a fan of Guy Pearce was… where’s Lance Henriksen!? I also bitched in Alien 3 when the pulse rifle didn’t sound the same as it did in Aliens, so, yeah I’m a bit anal when it comes to the Alien universe. Regardless, I’m willing to let my obsession with continuity slide in honor of this nice bit of fan service. Thanks Mr. Scott!

I’ve got a keen, but wary eye on Prometheus. All of my favorite childhood sci-fi films have seen their franchises flushed down the toilet in recent years. Alien/Aliens produced the underrated Alien 3, but then the abysmal Alien Resurrection and Aliens vs Predator fiascoes followed. Predator spawned the decent Predator 2, then became Predators and well, yeah, that franchise is obviously done. And to think how pumped I was to hear that Robert Rodriguez might have a hand in it! What a disappointment. I don’t think I need to even mention Terminator Salvation (or Terminator 3 for that matter) as that was quite possibly one of the biggest, most disappointing pieces of shit I’ve ever seen committed to film. Don’t ask me how someone could fuck up the Terminator future wars, but they somehow managed to. None of those sequels came even remotely close to recapturing the magic of the originals. So, yeah, I’ve got my fingers crossed, but am prepared for disappointment.

The point is, you can disregard 2, 3 and 4 if you like. You can even disregard all 4 Alien movies and pretend this is a different Peter Weyland.

After all, all the characters are new.

And that’s why I like this type of pseudo-reboot. You pick your own continuity

If you get an php “Headers already sent” error, try to delete the line breakers at the end of the file, after the last “?>” so the “>” is the last character in the file, if this don’t work, try to reduce the number of line breaks, since unneeded white spaces, mostly outside php tags are the main source of this error.

.ie .carousel-controls a{
float:none;
}

I ended up preferring Setting profiles though, for its simplicity. You can do less, but it’s easier to set up, easier to tweak, and I really didn’t need any more. Plus, I found Locale slightly annoying that pretty much every feature was separated into a plugin, which I had to buy separately.

As a rule of thumb, I try to avoid iTunes as much as possible, and since the iPad has thankfully untethered quite a bit since iOS 5, the only use-case I have left for iTunes is backup.

Currenlty the iPad in my wifes possesion is tethered to her old and janky Macbook. It would be really convenient if I could back up the iPad to her brand new iMac.

Why can’t I? No seriously?

Can you re-download purchased iTunes U stuff and podcasts like apps?

Re: the Chrome button, I’ve seen that — I check out the Canary build once in a while to see what’s new. I don’t think that’s as big a deal — and I suppose that’s the thing about icons vs. text — if it’s a button you’ll use ALL THE TIME, you’d learn what it did even if the new tab button was a minus.

It’s more iffy in cases like “Report Spam”, which I use more oftne than I like in Gmail, yet when I use it I stutter.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=98264

I’m completely confident in clicking the trash-can though.

Same with the delete button as I’m always fearful that I’ll mark as spam some debug emails which will bite me later when I wonder where newer ones come through..

I much prefer text+icon.

Including the raw js doesn’t do anything and I am way to busy to debug this atm.

Cheers

I tried deleting and re installing the plugin with the same result. Is there a DB table I need to delete before re installing the plugin?

The site is http://www.hensteinscustomcabinets.com/

Thanks for any help

Thanks for the tip on the jetpack notifications thing – I haven’t used that before so will give it a go.

I totally didn’t pick up on that.

Person :”I don’t believe in pills.”
Me: (giving quizzical look) “Really? I assure you they exist.”

The graphic at the top is actually a cubist version of a flying tree I made a while back.

When can we launch this theme on WP.com?

Fonts of the lifeline of any design. I used to disagree, but after mucking around with a few this year, I’m a complete font convert. What good is a design if you can’t read it? And, with so many easy tools out there (Typekit and Google Web Fonts to name a few), there’s hardly an excuse to settle for a basic font.

I’m also running TwentyEleven on my photoblog (in a dark configuration). And I used some of it as a base for this one. Can you tell that I’m a fan?

It’s also remarkable what a good font can to for you.

I’m really partial to dark themes lately, as I just made a similar change myself. It’s nothing as cool as this redesign, but I think I’m just getting tired of bright websites.

I was obviously not a fan of some of his ideology, but I had a profound respect for his eloquence, passion and tenacity. Any person’s legacy is the people they inspired, touched and lifted up. It seems Hitch’s legacy is alive and well.