The fight to Save Antioch College continues… Here’s my unofficial and unapproved flyer(?)…

so it’s a new year and generally that means a new look for 36invisible.com websites and this year is no different.

not only have we upgraded the design and functionality of 36invisible sites (this news site/blog included), but we’ve also moved all of our domains over to our new home at svaha.

because of the move and because of insanely technological coding details i don’t want to go into yet, a couple of things on the main 36invisible site are still unfinished. the number one issue is, well… your browser’s back and reload buttons won’t work as expected (on the main site only) since i’ve wrapped the entire site in AJAX for navigational deliciousness. i’ll fix this as soon as possible.

also, if you experience any other problems with this site or the main site, please post them here and i’ll fix them as they come in. i’m guessing that some links are probably broken… thanks in advance for anything you find.

anyway, happy 2008 and stay tuned for more updates and news.

on another site that i’m helping to develop, i’ve integrated Carnegie Mellon University’s incredible reCaptcha script into PunBB (the forum software running on that site).

reCAPTCHA channels the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into correcting OCR mistakes for scanned books.

because the current release of PunBB is not plugin friendly, integrating reCaptcha isn’t a one step process, but with barely any effort it’s completely doable.

PunBB 1.2.15 was used.

Here’s how to do it:

Read the rest of this entry »

i’ve always been a huge fan of Forest Whitaker. he (along with a few other actors) always embodies each and every roll he takes on and he’s done it again, incredibly so, in his Oscar winning performance in The Last King of Scotland.

another thing that i really appreciate about the film is how the writer blended the fictional with the real, injecting a fictional character in a historical story.

since this blog isn’t really intended to be a “film review” site, i won’t go further into detail, but if you’re up for an incredible movie (largely due to an incredible performance by Forest Whitaker), then definitely check it out.

so i’ve finally gotten around to upgrading wordpress and while i was at it, i went ahead and created a new theme.

destroyed_minimal is a clean, two-column theme and (when selected) uses a script i wrote to overlay the title headlines with on-the-fly generated (and/or from cache) headline PNGs in a specified font of [my] choosing. also added was a print stylesheet that will hide the image headlines when printing.

i haven’t tested this on a non-Mac yet, but everything validates ok. however, if you’re experiencing problems with this site, getting errors, the image headlines aren’t fully covering the text headlines, or terribly slow load-times, please let me know.

hope you enjoy it.

update: i added a stylesheet switcher (to the sidebar) that will allow you to choose between destroyed or minimal. it works via Ajax, requires no page reload, will function with or without javascript enabled, and will also give your browser a cookie to remember your preferred style for your future visits. however, it’s a little slower than my javascript-only version and even if you’ve chosen minimal, the images are still loaded in the background. i’ll improve these annoyances when i get some time.

update (1.13.2008): none of this applies any more since the 2008 redesign.

This year the academy basically robbed Babel and Alejandro González Iñárritu of best film and best director respectively.

Best director? Yes Marty deserved an award, yes his body of work needed to be recognized, yes his films are masterful and unique, yes i attended the same grad film program that he did and will probably be chastised for this comment, but directing is about making choices and Iñárritu’s were flawless (yes even the casting of Pitt for that particular role). Marty, on the other-hand… not so much. The final image of the Departed (the rat) is just one such example.

I won’t go on about best film.