Nothing But Words

View at Picasa American Idol rejects – my brother John and his girlfriend Miss tried out for American Idol, along with 1,000 other people, in Providence, RI18-Aug-2007 07:59, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 200

My brother John and his girlfriend Miss – doing their best to look like braindead hicks in this picture – sang in the American Idol tryouts last month in Cranston, RI. John said there were hundreds of eager folks there to try out. Everyone had to sing a capella and solo – Miss did a song from Little Mermaid and John sang the old blues standby Sitting On Top of the World. He said he blanked on some of the lyrics while singing it, but was able to substitute some lines from the NoMeansNo version without missing a beat. That’s my boy ! John wasn’t planning to tryout, but when he told his boss Miss was going, his boss offered him the day off with pay if he agreed to sing too. So John was proud that he was probably the only person getting paid to be there.

They weren’t shocked or crestfallen that they weren’t among the finalists. But John said it was bizarre and sad to see how devastated some folks were. There were even people who were so agitated they threw up when they found out they were rejected. If you’ve put all your eggs in the basket of making it onto American Idol, you probably need some help. Fortunately there weren’t many who had such extreme reactions. Overall, it sounds like it was a good time.

Check out this YouTube video: Debunking myths about the Third World. It’s about 20 minutes long, so bring some popcorn and put up your feet (apparently 500,000 people have watched it already, so I’m a bit late to the party). It’s a presentation that illustrates what the real differences are between the western world and the third world, in terms of income, fertility, child mortality, etc. As you might expect from the title, the reality of the differences is quite different from what most people think. What makes it dazzling is the animated graphs, which demonstrate the changes over time like nothing else I’ve ever seen. 20 minutes is longer than a typical YouTube video, but take the time to watch it – you’ll be glad you did.

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Prof. Hans Rosling uses software from Gapminder debunks a few myths about the “developing” world. This global health visionary has discovered a powerful new way to communicate complex data about the world; his remarkable interactive graphs help deliver profound insights about global trends and will change forever the way you think about “us” and “them.” Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a nonprofit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

View at Picasa New design, with drop down menus

If you do a Google search for “CSS drop down menu”, you’ll find a number of examples that have been provided by well meaning folks. I wasted a lot of time with them. With only one exception, they were either:

1. Poorly modularized, in that if I included their stylesheet and javascript files, and then dropped their menu markup inside a div in my design, my page would explode into a million pieces, or
2. They relied on 100+ lines of javascript, which seems really unnecessary in the age of CSS (except for IE’s lack of CSS support for hovering with anything other than an anchor tag), or
3. If I scrolled through the submenu items, the hover color on the top menu item would disappear, resulting in a goofy menu display (that’s a problem most don’t know how to solve without javascript though, including me).

The one exception was the CSS Express Drop Down Menu, which was the seventh or eighth one I tried. It has only one small javascript function (to patch the IE hover problem), the xhtml and css aren’t unnecessarily complicated, and the css is very well documented. It even includes special handling for the notorious IE5 for Mac. After dropping in the code, I just had to spend about 20 minutes tweaking the css for fonts, colors, and padding to fit my design, and now I’m good to go. If you’re looking for a good CSS drop down menu, this is the one to use!

My Picasa plugin for WordPress is now available. I’ve been working on it for months now and I’m pleased to have it in good enough shape for others to try out. Please keep in mind I’m the only one who’s used it so far, so if you encounter any problems, please let me know, and I’ll fix it. You can get it at my Shashin page, where you’ll also find detailed instructions.

I had intended to make it available exclusively at the WordPress.org plugins site, as that’s where it would reach the widest audience. But I filled in their “add a plugin” form almost a week ago and haven’t heard anything back yet, so at least for now I’m making it available here.

View at Picasa The new design I’m working on for toppa.com

I’ve been busy working on a new design for toppa.com – this is a screenshot of it. My site is cluttered with a ton of links that really are more distraction than anything else. My design is inspired by the simple and clean open source “Cash” design. As you can see, I want to go even simpler (the CSS for Cash is also needlessly complicated, so I simplified that too). I’ve been using a lot more photographs in my posts over the past year, so I want to maximize the available width for pictures, but still be friendly to low-res monitors. Put all that together, and it means the sidebar has to go.

One part I still have to work on is rollover menus for the top navigation. The header area can be overlaid with a tag cloud, blogroll, etc. if someone wants to look at them. Otherwise, they’re neatly hidden away. After that I need to convert it into a WordPress theme, but I think that part will be easy.

Let me know what you think. If there’s any interest I’ll be happy to make a downloadable version – just leave me a comment.

A Hummer H1, with partially complete modifications for an expedition to the South Pole. View at Picasa A Hummer H1, with partially complete modifications for an expedition to the South Pole.07-Jul-2007 08:33, Panasonic DMC-FX01, 2.9, 5.2mm, 0.01 sec, ISO 80

Years ago I had the pleasure of working with Nick B, when we were at Ask Jeeves together. Nick went on to found Drive Around the World, a non-profit organization that has raised funds for causes such as fighting Parkinson’s Disease. Along the way they’ve “built homes for refugees in Asia, taught farming techniques in small villages in Africa, and worked with thousands of school children worldwide.”

They’re gearing up for their next expedition, to the south pole, and Nick is looking for support. Here are his words:

Drive Around the World (DATW) programs are a creative response to helplessness. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, DATW takes on challenges that to many, seem insurmountable. Our method is simple. We pick a specific problem, build an extraordinary expedition around the problem, then leverage the adventure to educate and raise funds. The model worked very well during the LONGITUDE Expedition, which raised money for Parkinson’s research…

Back in June we held our annual board of directors meeting and added four new members: George Gorton, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s campaign manager during the recall; Mark Bernstein, energy analyst in the White House under President Clinton; Chris Paine, director of the film, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”; and Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer co-founder. A DATW adviser for years, WOZ believes in our mission–he even drove his car from Los Gatos to Santa Monica for our meeting. (A side note: it is rare to meet your heroes, let alone become friends. I am a lucky man indeed.)…

ZERO SOUTH will bring attention to global warming and raise awareness for the viability of fossil fuel alternatives by taking four different alternative fuel vehicles to the South Pole in December, 2008. Pioneering astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Steve Wozniak have signed up to make the drive and they will be joined by scientists from Caltech, JPL and NASA. The project includes a documentary feature film and a two-year education tour across the U.S. in which kids can climb inside an alternative-fuel vehicle that actually drove to the South Pole and experience the virtual expedition. (The exciting journey unfolds on windows replaced with LCD panel.)

Because our project is “different,” we need to go the extra mile so my goal this summer is to complete a ZERO SOUTH prototype vehicle.

Now that ZERO SOUTH has a physical model, we can make giant strides.

If you’d like to be a part of the ZERO SOUTH effort, please go to www.drivearoundtheworld.org/donate and make a donation.

We’ve produced a limited edition ZERO SOUTH pin and donation certificate for those who support us during this time. With your help, Drive Around the World will continue producing these unique, positive adventures for the benefit of mankind long after we are gone.

View at Picasa I had to disassemble the dashboard of our new Prius to remove change from the CD player, put there by my little “helper” Eidan29-Jul-2007 06:01, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 160

A few weeks ago I was letting Eidan play in our new Prius, and I took my eyes off him for a few minutes – always a bad idea. He took the opportunity to stuff some change in the CD player. My first impulse was to pick up the car by the rear bumper and shake it, in order to get the change to fall out. But lacking the ability to turn into the Hulk – no matter how mad I am – I had to look for a different solution. I was worried that trying to play a CD might damage the player, so I called the dealership, and the guy I talked to agreed, and said they could take out the CD player (for about $100 worth of labor) and try to get the change out. That sounded like the least bad option, so Maria called later to make an appointment, and instead got an inquisition. “Who did you talk to? That’s wrong! We’ll have to remove the CD player and then ship it out to be fixed or replaced.” The whole thing was going to run $300 or $400.

So I decided to give it a try myself. Car stereo installation guys take out factory stereos all the time, right? First I opened the hood to disconnect the battery, to avoid any accidental shorts. I quickly discovered that “battery” is a bit of a different concept when it comes to a hybrid car. I didn’t see anything that remotely resembled any kind of car battery I’d ever seen since my high school motorhead days. Instead of being smart and looking it up, I decided to live dangerously and turned my attention to the dashboard. While it looked like it was composed of a set of discrete panels, it turned out they were all interlocked. That meant removing the center section (where the CD player is) required starting with the sections all the way on the edge of the driver’s side, and working my way across, resulting in my opening up pretty much the entire dashboard.

View at Picasa The CD player with the change it, and the little boy who put it there29-Jul-2007 06:01, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.013 sec, ISO 100

This is really not something I wanted to do to our brand new car. The force required to pull out the dash panels felt like it was just short of the level of force that would break them. The one that really had me scared at first was removing the touchscreen panel above the CD player, but it turned out to actually be easier than some of the others. I also had to keep an eye on the various sharp metal edges of the components inside the dash, to make sure I didn’t scratch any of the exterior surfaces on them as I moved things around.

It all worked out fine. It turns out the CD player had a good design, with a small well in the front, so that any small objects (like coins!) would fall in the well instead of getting jammed in the drive. I shook out 52 cents, which I gave to Kai, and then put everything back together. The whole venture took about an hour, and the CD player still worked fine. And it didn’t cost $300 .

Note: I found a number of people posting on various car forums with this same problem (apparently Eidan isn’t the only toddler who’s attracted to putting coins in CD players). I imagine it’s likely other Toyota cars have their dashboards put together in a similar fashion, but I can’t say for sure. Don’t try this yourself unless you are mechanically inclined – there are plenty of opportunities to accidentally damage things. If you do try it yourself, and you have a foreign car, be sure to have a metric socket wrench set handy.

A short video about Kai’s school – Takanawa Yochien View at Picasa A short video about Kai’s school – Takanawa Yochien05-Aug-2007 03:51

I’ve uploaded a minute and a half clip from a show that was on our local cable channel in Tokyo about Kai’s school – click the image to play it. Kai makes a brief appearance towards the end of the clip. It’s in Japanese of course, but even if you can’t follow along, you can still get a good sense from the visuals of what the school is like. Sitting next to Kai in the video is his friend Hiroki. Hiroki lived with his parents in Albany, New York for a while, and he went to school there, so his English is quite good. Kai had another friend at the school named Kaito, who also speaks English. Both of them helped Kai out a lot, since he spoke very little Japanese.

In the video, the woman greeting the kids as they arrive is the principal. That wasn’t staged for the video – she’s out there every morning, rain or shine, to hold the gate open and say good morning to everyone as they come in. While the other teachers spoke at least a little English, she didn’t speak any, so my (attempts at) conversations with her were always the most challenging for me.

It was a really great school for Kai, and I’ve written many times before about how much he enjoyed it. The teachers and his classmates were very supportive and understanding, given that he didn’t speak any Japanese at first. But he did learn quickly. One thing that was fun for me was watching him with the kids in the playground after school, and hearing him try to transpose English words into Japanese. There’s actually quite a bit of English that’s been borrowed in Japanese. Once Kai figured out how to transform English words into their “correct” Japanese pronunciation (e.g. “hot dog” becomes “hotto doghu”, apple juice becomes “apploo juicoo”), and once he mastered a few key Japanese phrases, it was amazing how much he could communicate. One of his first Japanese words was “dameh!” which means “stop it!” – a vital playground survival phrase.

The show about the school was on the Minato City channel, as part of a regular series on the local schools. Each year they make their way through all the local kindergartens and elementary schools. It struck me as a really nice way for residents to get a broader sense of their community, and see how their neighborhood school compares to others in the area.