Feaverish

Oh man, after a pun like that you gotta just hang up your quill and walk away from writing forever�

I’ve been working the odd late night here at work, and occasionally I’ll find myself all alone in the office after everyone else has gone home. The building’s dark and quiet and cold, and if it gets too lonely I’ll walk outside and chat with the video editors from the offices down the hall. They seem to live in the building, and they take frequent smoke breaks. A sort of after-hours camaraderie has developed, and we pretend to know enough about each other’s work to nod sympathetically about ripple deletes and CSS3 support.

Sometimes, though, I go outside and no one’s there. I’ll maybe watch the homeless for a minute, as they shuffle down the street to sleep on the synagogue steps, or try to appreciate a few bracing lungfuls of marine air, but then it’s back inside and back to the computer and back to work.

There’s a romantic loneliness to these moments, and finding a soundtrack for that mood can be tricky.

And so, Thao Nguyen. This song is from Kill Rock Stars’ The Sound the Hare Heard compilation, but Thao’s full length, Like the Linen, is every bit as good.

Thao Nguyen � Feet Asleep [mp3]

On my commute this morning, at Montana and Ocean, I skidded to a stop and my back tire popped. In the few weeks since I’ve had these tires ââ�¬â�� I still call them “my new tires” ââ�¬â�� I’d skidded through the rubber. The noise was surprisingly loud, and a middle-aged woman in a convertible next to me screamed and clutched her throat with one hand. As I got off my bike I smiled at her and shrugged ââ�¬â�� what can you do? She shook her head.

In the video, I’m playing around for maybe 30 seconds. In reality it was more like half an hour. Click the image to watch (it’s a couple of megabytes, so be patient):

This post really belongs on my design site, but since that site’s not built yet, and since I couldn’t find the solution to this problem on Google, I’ll put it here to get indexed.

Basically, I just had a problem where I was using a negative text-indent to hide text during image replacement, only some of the text wouldn’t indent in Internet Explorer 7. Turns out I had some <abbr> tags in the text I was indenting, and for some reason that prevented IE 7 from indenting it at all.

The solution is to specify text-indent for the <abbr> or <acronym> tags as well.

I took some screenshots of what I’ve been working on lately and ran ‘em through Photoshop to see what came out. The dark screens are from TextMate and the last one, the bright one, is from the excellent CSSEdit.

This is something I’ve been trying to do for years, but only recently figured out. The short version is, if you want to keep your iPod synced with your home computer but listen to it through iTunes on your work computer (or any other computer), it’s possible. Just set your iPod to sync automatically at home, and when you get to work and plug it in, set it to sync manually. When you get back home, set it to automatic sync again. There are several caveats, but I’ll let you read those and more detailed instructions after the jump.

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We All Have Hooks For Hands � Jumpin Jean-Luc [mp3]

You’re watching a movie starring me. I’m in bed, asleep despite a flood of sun. Cut to the alarm clock, which suddenly flips (it’s old) from 7:59 to 8:00. Instead of an alarm, though, you’re treated to the opening xylophone tings of this song. And instead of reaching over and turning the alarm off, I jump out of bed in my socks and underwear and punch the ceiling. Because that’s how awesome this song is. Listen to it once and you’ll be running around punching stuff. By your third listen I guarantee you won’t be wearing any pants.

You can read their bio and buy the album (only $10!!) at Afternoon Records, or listen to a few more songs at their MySpace page.