pres.umptuo.us

• Colbert Does the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The man knows no fear.

  Sunday April 30, 2006

• Possible “Surprise” Endings to the New Samuel L. Jackson Film Snakes on a Plane. Genius.

  Friday April 28, 2006

• Student’s Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy. *In Nelson voice* Ha ha!

  Friday April 28, 2006

• The Birthday Problem. This was explained to me in a math class before, but I forgot the reasoning behind it. Good to know.

  Thursday April 27, 2006

• Carfree Cities. I’m such a nerd that I have the urge to load up SimCity and try to build one of these.

  Thursday April 27, 2006

• Revolution has a new name! Wii!

  Thursday April 27, 2006

• Watch these movies, then we can talk (kottke.org). Just froma a quick glance, I think I’ve barely seen 20 of ‘em.

  Wednesday April 26, 2006

• BLDGBLOG: The Garages of Branislav Kropilak. The other photos on his site are great as well.

  Wednesday April 26, 2006

• Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. Check out Paul Robertson’s Journal for more of his work.

  Wednesday April 26, 2006

• The Morning News - In Praise of Loopholes, by Matthew Baldwin. Yay for taking advantage of the system.

  Tuesday April 25, 2006

• Wes Anderson American Express Ad. Man dresses like his movies.

  Tuesday April 25, 2006

• Pimp My Snack. An instructional website on how to make the crazy candy you’ve always wanted to eat? Sweet!

  Friday April 21, 2006

• February 2, 2006 Rainbow at Elam Bend (McFall, Missouri). If I’d taken those photos, I’d just retire and never try to take another photo again.

  Friday April 21, 2006

• Why Cartoon Network is Airing Saved by the Bell Reruns. Hand-drawn animation always seems like it’s on the verge of extinction by the big execs up top. Saved by the Bell at midnight is so good though.

  Friday April 21, 2006

Holy crap! Jorge just told me that he saw my site on CSS Beauty, and sure enough it looks like I’m one of their featured sites. I’m a bit puzzled since I submitted my site almost two months ago, but regardless, welcome to everyone visiting for the first time.

It’s a bit humbling though, and kinda funny when I think everyone’s gonna come and see me trying to pick a fight with Shaun Inman and making fun of Jorge’s PDF Portfolio. Talk about getting caught off guard.

Btw, I noticed my site “usurped” vitamin on CSS Beauty’s featured sites list, which has Shaun Inman listed on the Advisory Board. That’s Eric Lim: 2; Shaun Inman: 0. ;-)

Looking for a Front-End Developer

As an addendum, and something I’ve been meaning to talk about anyway, I served as Juxt Interactive’s HTML/CSS dude for a year, and just recently left to join Go Farm in Pasadena. As such, Juxt is looking for someone to fill my spot as a Front-End Developer. If anyone’s interested (particularly visitors from CSS Beauty), they’re looking to hire.

• Mike Davidson: Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace. Bow down.

  Tuesday April 18, 2006

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The title already lead me to think of some cheesy uplifting story, but I had my hopes that it wouldn’t be all that bad. I was hoping for the wrong thing.

I found this book to be way overrated, and not something I would recommend to anyone. The plot and the way it’s written is well-done though, in that it made me keep reading it, and sure enough I finished it in two days.

But the message, and ultimately the reason for reading any book, just made me say, “Duh.” The book’s title should really be “How to Live Life to its Fullest for Dummies.”

No-No Boy

Victor recommended No-No Boy by John Okada to me after he had read A Wild Sheep Chase on my recommendation. I expected this book to have some aspects of Murakami in it, but it ended up being far from it.

No-No Boy follows the main character Ichiro, who is a Japanese American, or “Nisei,” shortly after he is released from prison for refusing the draft during WWII. Because of this, other Japanese-Americans hate him for not being American enough, but his mother and other Japanese immigrants respect him for being Japanese. Ichiro has to live with the decision he has made, and through the course of the book questions if society can overcome racism and nationalism.

There is some really good stuff in here, and while it moves a bit slow in the beginning and Okada isn’t the greatest of writers, it really pays off. While reading the afterword I realized No-No Boy is a book about Asian-Americans written by an Asian-American. Wow, finally an Asian-American story that isn’t a total copy of Amy Tan or Maxine Hong Kingston’s “My controlling parents are the root of all of my troubles” storyline.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone out there, as its subject matter and message ring very true in today’s world.

About a month ago I finally got around to playing with sIFR for a project I was working on. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, sIFR is a method of rendering text with Flash through the use of javascript, jointly developed by Shaun Inman (the “i” in sIFR) and Mike Davidson. It is essentially a workaround for the limitation of fonts that can be used on the web without having to create images for everything.

The tutorials were all fairly easy to follow and I ran into only minor problems on getting everything setup. But when it came time to getting the fonts to size correctly, sIFR was not going my way. IE seemed to be dealing with it okay, but Firefox wasn’t complying.

Continue reading “Eric Lim: 1; Shaun Inman: 0″

• Gigapxl Project Image Gallery. I think I’ve caught the photography bug again.

  Sunday April 16, 2006

• Luke Seemann’s eulogy for his father Howard Seemann. I’ve always thought that eulogies and graduation speeches were excellent forms of writing.

  Saturday April 15, 2006