I finally got the pictures from the Halloween party I went to on Wednesday. It was a pretty low-key affair, with maybe 10 people, half of whom dressed up. I left around 11, and we pretty much watched movies and played games all night, which was fine with me, since I’d just gotten back from a business trip that afternoon.

We had a Queen Bee, a Killer Bee, two comic book characters (The Punisher, and some guy from a thing called Preacher?), a French Maid, and maybe some other people. The important thing, as always, was me:

I’m a Weighted Companion Cube, from the game Portal. As you can see, I reglected to cut arm holes in the thing, which was a very bad idea.

Anyway, the party pictures were taken by someone who did have armholes in their outfit, and posted to Picasa, which I have determined is not as good as Flickr in any way.

Why can’t I middle-click to open images in new tabs? Why is the page layout so goofy and huge, when all I want is the damn image? Why is zooming in/out an operation with only two choices? Why is it utterly impossible to see a photo by itself on the site without downloading the thing? Great, I get a little GMaps click-and-drag thing to pan around the big photos. Why don’t you just show me the whole goddamned thing?

Picasa is a pretty good example of why people need to stop holding Google up like some kind of golden god. They didn’t do distributed storage or computing - Amazon did. Picasa loses, and loses hard, to Flickr. While their maps and search are the best available, a lot of Google’s web apps are just not very good. They had a few hits early on, but they’re a search and Ad sales company at heart. Picasa proves that just because you can build an entire app with fancy Web 2.0 whatnot, it doesn’t mean that you should.

Unfortunately, it’s not every day that you see a big print media company do something smart on the web. Somehow, many of them are just too set in their ways, or scared, to see what a good online presence can do. I’m not saying every publisher needs to have a web-first mentality, but well, someday they will, and that day is getting closer. For whatever reason, either they don’t get it, or the people who do aren’t allowed to do anything about it.

The New York Times, basically the only New York paper not owned by Rupert Murdoch, gets it. I saw a link on Digg just now to their internal development blog. Which also has links to a couple of internally-developed projects, that they’re releasing as Open-Source projects. And they sent a couple of guys to OSCON.

These are all things that my company does. Well, we have a whole planet of blogs, and I think about half the office was at OSCON, but OmniTI Labs isn’t wholly different from Open at NY Times.

This is what we do, every day, but it’s nice to see a company that isn’t 100% tech-related doing these things. It probably helps that the tech department at the Times is probably bigger than Omni as a whole, too.

Keep on truckin’, New York Times. Keep on truckin’.

I showed up late to the iPod party. I figured I wouldn’t be able to use it at work, and I can play music from my computer at home, or the CD player in the car. There didn’t seem to be any real need for another expensive way to get MP3s into my head. Then my co-workers got louder, or I got less tolerant of background noise, and my CD player jammed. So a year and a half ago I bought a 2 Gb iPod Nano, which has started feeling a bit constricting of late.

So I bought Alex’s 80 Gb 5.5th generation iPod (AKA, “Video iPod”) off of him last week, because it was cheaper than buying a refurb 5th gen from Apple, and much cheaper than buying one of the new iPod classics from Apple. Once I got done peeling the screen protectors off it, because I hate my electronics and I want them to suffer, and fixing the tags on all my songs in iTunes, I threw everything on there. And then the sheer scale of this thing started to sink in.

First of all, I’m not retarded. I know that 80 gigs isn’t a whole lot of space. I routinely deal with databases that are probably bigger than that, and I’ve generated text files almost that size  before. You’d be hard-pressed to fit 10 uncompressed DVDs in 80 gigs, to say nothing of HD playback. It’s not infinite.

Which made it even a little more strange when I looked at what fits on this iPod. When Alex  gave it to me, it still had a lot of his music on it - something like 20 gigs. And some video. Like the entire series runs of The Boondocks, Harvey Birdman, Venture Brothers, and The Tick.

Add to that my entire music collection, which is about 30 gigs, and I still have 20 gigs free. Which is enough for every song Becki has, with room to spare. I could seriously back up my entire file server on it. Music, video, 5,000+ high-res photographs, the code/images for about five different web sites, and all the other random goodies on GBS.

It’s a lot of space, is what I’m saying. The fact that Apple released a 160 Gb version speaks for the relative runty-ness of my file collection.

Anyway, so far I like the thing. The screen is a lot bigger, obviously, and brighter than the Nano, it holds 40 times as much, and the battery lasts longer (though I haven’t had it long enough to know exactly how much longer).

The downside is that the UI seems to hitch for half a second sometimes, presumably because the hard drive needs to spin up. Which brings me to the other problem, which is that it has moving parts, and I have a chronic case of the dropsies. So I’m keeping the Nano around as a backup for when I break this stupid thing.

So, in the unlikely event that you’re wondering what I’ve been doing this week, allow me to drop some knowledge on you:

- Monday: Work from 10 AM to 1 AM.

- Tuesday: Work from 10 AM to 2 AM.

- Wednesday: Work from 11 AM (I overslept) to 2 AM.

- Thursday: Work from 10 AM to 3:30 AM.

- Friday: Work from 10 AM to 8 PM.

UPDATE: Saturday, 1 PM to 10 PM. Even on weekends this Monday, we were putting in 9 hour days. That’s what, about 82 hours of work this week? And I normally work 35.

I’m not going to do the math there, since I’m pretty fucking tired right now, but that’s like 75-ish hours of work this week. To the point that a few co-workers and I started thinking of the entire week as being Monday, with the occasional nap (and not even particularly long naps) when we were too tired to keep working. Thus, Eternal Monday.

The reasoning behind this, I can’t really get in to, so I’m going to be intentionally vague for my own reasons, about which I am also going to be intentionally vague. Suffice it to say, a lot of work had to get done in a short period of time, and I ended up more or less locked in a room with 8 other coders for an entire week. I should point out that, like everyone else, I volunteered for this.

Despite the somewhat grueling nature of this Monday, I actually enjoyed the whole experience. Not that I liked essentially not seeing Becki for an entire week, or missing all kinds of social engagements, but OmniTI is an amazing working environment, and I feel like I’m a lot better at Perl now than I was when I showed up on Monday. We met our deadline, I learned a few things, and it was incredibly satisfying to work on such a huge project. We knew going in that it was going to require late nights at the office, but you don’t get better by doing things that are easy. How could I say no to that?

Anyway, when we left work tonight, I pretty much decided that I was going to go home and drag my easy chair and a bottle of Gin out onto the porch, smoke one of the cigars Phil left here, and then probably go directly to bed after. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Postin dis from work. Lunch break, technically, so if the boss is reading this, please don’t fire me.

Becki and I went up to New York City this past weekend, mostly because it was our two-year-iversary but also because we’ve never actually gone on a vacation together. There’s more to post, which I’ll be doing later, but just a quick note for now, so I can get back to work on time.

It just so happened that the IFC Film Center was hosting a showing of Helvetica, a documentary about the font, that weekend. I’ve been forgetting to buy tickets to this since before it was released, so I jumped at the chance. It was a pretty interesting film, and the two main things I took away from it were a) people use Helvetica an awful lot in signage and branding, and b) design folks and typographers get really worked up about that, often in hilarious ways. Seriously, it’s far more interesting than you might think. I’ll probably pick up the DVD when that’s out, I think in November.

There was supposed to be a Q&A with the director, Gary Hustwit, after the movie, but apparently he had to run off to Moscow for the Russian premiere,  so the Q&A was replaced with a brief monologue and asking trivia questions in exchange for prizes.

The first question was what the original name of Helvetica was.  I had some idea, so I raise my hand and answer “something-something grotesk”. Not good enough, apparently. Someone else, who was probably a graphic artist, and thus paid to care about such things, nailed it, with Neue-Haas Grotesk.

What’s funny about this, at least to me, is that the second and final question Hustwit asked was  “I baked something this morning. What was it?”.  This, to me, was the perfect set up for a pretty weak burn. Namely, to use the same answer from before - “something-something grotesque” - to describe his baking.

Unsurprisingly, he looked right at my smirking face, and proceeded to call on just about everyone else in the room, until someone got it. Probably better that way, but it seemed like a pretty good burn at the time. If it matters, if the Q&A had happened, I was planning to ask him if he’d considered a sequel to Helvetica, about another incredible font that everyone loves. Namely, Comic Sans MS. Again, probably better that that didn’t happen.

More on New York later.