I have several interesting things/trips/events to report on but in keeping with the decline of the Today show and news quality in general I’m putting all that aside to report on my brush with celebrity a few minutes ago. It turns out Lakeshore Entertainment, the production company that made the Oscar-winning film “Million Dollar Baby,” is shooting several scenes on campus and downtown for its new movie “The Last Kiss.” Starring are Zach Braff (“Garden State” and “Scrubs”), Rachel Bilson (“The O.C.”), Blythe Danner (Gwenyth’s mom), Tom Wilkinson and Jacinda Barrett. I have no idea who any of these people are except for Zach Braff – I was pretty impressed by the fact that he wrote, directed, starred in and picked the soundtrack (which rocks) for Garden State. All before turning 30. So my co-workers and I wandered up the hill, and sure enough, there he was. The scene ended shortly after we arrived so we went down to the memorial union – and there they were again. Note the fact that I will never make it big as one of the paparazzi – the guy was 10 feet from me, smiled and waved and I still got a blurry shot a half-second too late. Here’s a much better photo taken by one of our professional photographers on staff, Michael Forster Rothbart, of Blythe standing in front of Bascom Hall.
Archive for June, 2005
Hangin’ with Zach
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005
Lots o’ strawberries
Sunday, June 26th, 2005I finally made it out to Carandale farm for strawberry picking this year. Turns out it’s only a few minutes from Bryan’s house, just south of Fitchburg. So we went both yesterday and this morning, picking about 20 lbs. of strawberries in total for around $20. Not a bad deal and they taste fantastic. Five pounds or so went to Station #5 – Happy Birthday Schroeder – and the rest were frozen, eaten or put into Bryan’s liquid concoctions, consisting mainly of strawberries and tequila.
San Francisco
Tuesday, June 21st, 2005Recently JeffO, who lives in San Fran, announced that he would be moving to the midwest at some point later this year, and JenO, whose company is based in San Fran, announced that she would be living there in June as Intrax was temporarily short staffed. Plus we would get to hang out with Amy and Sean and Anil, who was also coming to visit. So we went. While the trip was a bit painful at times (long story to be covered later) we enjoyed some hiking, good food, a trip to napa with lounge time and bocce ball and I got to see Pat. Plus there were numerous lily pads to be photographed. I love lily pads. I think it’s left over from my childhood obsession with frogs. I also got a great photo of Jen, Jeff and Anil playing bocce ball at a vineyard in Napa and still managing to look quite thug-like.
The UW homepage
Friday, June 17th, 2005Well, after a year of research, focus groups, advisory committees and endless presentations, we launched the redesigned UW homepage last week. Credit for the architecture, coding and general navigation goes to NickW and NickO, while I was largely responsible for the design. Going into the launch we felt fairly confident that we’d covered our bases but the feedback turned out to be a real eye-opener. Personally, I learned that:
- People hate change. We had numerous panicked emails that basically said "you changed it and now it’s different and I can’t find anything".
- Students, by in large, are mean. Variations of "It sucks" (and worse) turned out to be our most popular criticism, often left anonymously from a campus IP address.
- People can’t write. Granted there was no spell checker on the submit form, but I’d guess that well over half the responses contained multiple misspellings, serious grammatical errors or both. Keep in mind our audience: prospective students, current college students, their parents, and faculty and staff. Interesting.
- Don’t mess with Hoofers, Diversity or Athletics. People feel strongly about these issues. To the point of being completely irrational.
- Beige can look quite pink on some PC monitors. Pink is bad, bad, bad.
- Night owls are grumpy. I don’t think we received any positive comments between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Generally speaking though, late afternoon responders were quite positive.
- And lastly, don’t write off the chatty IT guy on your advisory committee. You never know what might happen.
The new green screen
Thursday, June 9th, 2005People often ask me for recommendations on web hosting companies, since there are so many to choose from. For the last couple years I’ve been touting the benefits of using iPowerWeb, the company this site is hosted with, which gives me all the services I need for $7.95/month. This morning though, a story in Wired caught my eye, entitled "This Blog Is 100 Percent Solar". Apparently there are several firms out there that offer web hosting by running data centers that are powered entirely by solar panels. This is cool. I checked into the prices and they’re higher but still affordable, ranging from $10 to $15 per month for a basic package. Something to consider if you prefer clean energy and are in the market for a new host.
I might be flattered if they weren’t using my bandwidth
Monday, June 6th, 2005I was looking through my stats the other day as I do every few months and realized, much to my surprise, that I have quite a following in the Netherlands. Particularly among gay men in the Netherlands as it turns out… several members of the "www.gay.nl" community have linked to a few of my photographs. For example, "Whoops", a large, bald, gay Netherlander apparently has written a poem (about half-way down) and used one of my scuba photos as accompanying art. I think… it’s all in Dutch. This provoked further investigation which turned up all sorts of links to my photographs. In the lead is the Malta photo (top of second column) with about a dozen links, closely followed by the Moonflower, followed by a different Malta photo (first big photo 1/3-way down). And then there are a whole host of innocent photos being used on sites I’d rather not link to. Of course now they’re at my mercy. I think a Photoshopped picture of Mr. Whoops with a woman might mysteriously appear instead of the angel fish photo.
Now I can buy another iPod!
Friday, June 3rd, 2005Apple has finally stepped up to the plate when it comes to acknowledging that the battery life on their first, second and third generation iPods is NOT 10 hours, as claimed. Assuming the settlement goes through, people who can produce receipts for the purchase of an iPod before May 2004 "are entitled to receive $50 redeemable toward the purchase of any Apple products or services except iTunes downloads or iTunes gift certificates”. So hopefully I will soon have $100 to spend in the Apple Store. Although, with 2 million customers heading to their local Apple Store, you have to wonder if it’s the consumer or Apple who’s coming out on top here.