bloggie blog

Recently, IMDb Pro did a small redesign. Quick review: Looks better in browser, prints horribly.

I offer herein a quick fix to the printing problem, at least in Safari / Mac OS X. (Other browsers should have similar solutions for the savvy web user.)

Create a file named something.css and store it on your hard drive wherever you want. I call mine “overcome.css” and put in a my Documents folder. Edit this file with a plain-text editor. Do not use Word. Put this text, this CSS code, into that file, then save it and close it:

@media print {
#nav-wrapper { display: none; }
}

(Alternate solution if plain-text editing is beyond your computer routine: download overcome.css.)

Now in Safari, go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced. Where it says Style Sheet, select the file you just created or downloaded. That’s it! See the difference below, where I offer a side-by-side comparison of the first printed page of my IMDb Pro page. Quick review: Better. Way better. IMDb should hire me.

UPDATE: It turns out that Safari users will benefit from one other CSS change, due to poor cross-browser issues with the new IMDb Pro look. Add this to overcome.css in order to avoid the weird thing that happens where the page shifts down 21 pixels just as it finishes rendering. I’ve altered the download file accordingly.

#nav-wrapper #navbar { margin: 0 !important; }

Again, IMDb should hire me.

(Please leave a comment if you find it useful, or if you find an error.)

Over the last 3 days, I’ve had a lot of replacement parts to my black MacBook. Thanks to AppleCare and my 2 external backups, it’s been pretty painless, if a little time consuming. I got new RAM, and an unexpected boost from 2GB to 3GB. Then I needed a new hard drive, too, and an unexpected boost from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Embracing change, I switched the DNS servers on our Time Capsule settings from Time Warner Cable’s default values to the settings over at OpenDNS. The internets have gotten peppier with every one of the above changes. Upgrading your RAM or your OS will probably cost most of you money, but you can all upgrade to OpenDNS for free … and I highly recommend you give it a shot!

Just be sure to write down your current settings so you can reverse them if it doesn’t make things peppier for you. (Sidebar: If you say it in French, a peppier might be the guy that walks around fancy restaurants to grind some pepper on your soupe or salade.)

Okay. Facebook knows I’m a man, Facebook knows I’m single and Facebook knows I’m interested in women. Therefore, Facebook knows I am attracted to women with balloons in their shirts. Not well-endowed natural goodness, but actual balloons. The evidence is the looping image to the right of some ads I’ve seen recently on my profile.

(If your web browser is set not to show the loop of an animated GIF image file, you’re missing out on 5 out of 6 pairs of balloons in the animated image to the right.)

To be fair, once in a while the ad will have a normal woman and simply say Attractive Single Women. Once in a while. But I have posted this because it makes me laugh, and because I want Facebook users with different profiles from mine to see what ridiculous photos are being used to entice me to some lame dating site.

Single men can’t surely be the only target of laughable ads. What weird stuff do you see in your Facebook ads that I might not know about?

For a few years now, the size of fonts on my web site has been what it is as you read this, and that size is just that much larger than most other personal sites or weblogs. Just that much larger than most WordPress templates, as one shining example. And a whole lot larger than the trend to mini fonts that was taking over the Internet when I started this site. (Remember the mini fonts? You don’t see those much these days.)

Now, I believe there is a place for small fonts — in captions, in secondary data like dates and tags, etc. But I believe in making main articles easy to read!

Here are a few things I’ve noticed lately along the lines of type size.

1. Google has upped the size of the font you type into the search box. It’s been a week or two, now. Nice.
2. Newsweek has a font-size selector next to its articles that slides! Love it. See this article as an example.
3. If you disagree and think smallest is bestest, use this crazy font with an x-height of 3 pixels. (Typophile is awesome.)

Goodnight!

The other day, I quickly ordered a few items from drugstore.com and the message I got the next day saying my order had shipped told me that the items got sent to my parents’ house. Which kind of worried me because (1) I don’t know how they got that address and (2) did I order anything that might raise an eyebrow? A very quick check told me that there were no worries regarding (2), and a phone call to their 800 number ensured I’d get my items. But still!

Have I ever sent to my parents’ address before? I have from Amazon or others, I’m sure, but I checked my drugstore.com orders and that address didn’t come up. Furthermore, they had lost my current home address — and I just ordered from them two months ago. So, maybe I should be worried about their servers and privacy issues and stuff? And if they didn’t have my current address, why did my credit card company let them process the charge? Man oh man.

Anybody else have technical problems with drugstore.com lately?

Possible Facebook status update for the first day of 2009: “Kevin predicts chicks, flicks, pics — and Styx! — in MMIX.”

If you pronounce the Latin right, that sentence really kicks. Otherwise, nix.

For about as long as I’ve had this site, I’ve used Textpattern as the software that controls it. I log in, make changes to the site, or more commonly, post an entry. All well and good, but it requires being logged in and having a live internet connection for anything at all to happen.

Well, I’m experimenting now with MarsEdit, software that you install on your Mac, a way to access your blog not via a browser like Safari. So I’m typing this now on my Mac, and it doesn’t matter if I have an internet connection. This could be a big improvement. We shall see. This is a test. This is only a test.

In my quest to be sure to select the best photos of my 1,019 headshot options, I decided to get prints made of 116 that I like. Digital deciding needed to give way to analog analysis of the details. Thought about going over Walgreen’s, but instead I clicked “print” in iPhoto to get it done.

The iPhoto print process is easy, of course, and straightforward except for one thing — when will the prints arrive? Well, let me tell you.

I started my order on Thursday 12/11 at 3:20pm, it took a couple three hours to upload (some internet issues on my end included), the shipment and confirming email were sent to me some hours later after midnight, and now it just arrived today 12/15 at 2pm. This was with me paying for fast delivery (which bumped up the effective price of each 4×6 to 21.6¢). My photos originated in the Bay Area and came via the kind of UPS that doesn’t keep moving over the weekend.

Like many other things I’ve posted on my site, I post this in part because I could not find out this information from Apple before I ordered. They were vague on how long it would take, where it would ship from and via what method. But now you know what to expect, if you live in LA. Now that they’re here … I’m off to stare at photographic details … till I go blind.

UPDATE: Filenames don’t appear on the back side of the photos. And they don’t arrive in the order you sent them, but at random. Sigh, and sigh.