In Summer 2003 I talked up a TV show: the CGI Spider-Man cartoon on MTV. It was hot. I loved it. It was cel-shaded. That means it looked like a traditional cartoon, but it was done with computers. The first time I saw that effect done on TV was the ship on Futurama. Nowadays you mostly see it in video games like Jet Set Future Radio on Xbox and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on Gamecube.
So anyway, sometime between Summer 2003 and … two days ago — let’s split the difference and call it Spring 2004 — I spotted a Spider-Man: The New Animated Series DVD at Wal-Mart. Only problem was, it contained only three episodes. I found another disc containing an additional three episodes. But I wanted the whole first season.
I have to interject here. If you go to the archive page and read my 2003.07.25 23:34 post [UPDATE: link], you’ll see that I spoke about the show and actually said, “When they put out a DVD, I’m gonna snap it up.”
So I was at K-Mart two days ago and came across this. The whole first season, two disc set, audio commentary, special features, widescreen. I nearly soiled myself right there. $19.99. The three-episode discs were like eight bucks a pop. So I snatched it up. I give it five stars out of five.
Firefox Gripe: I want to be able to resize tabs within windows.
You know how some sites are still optimized for 800×600? You know how some center the used portion of the screen, some right justify it, and some (like ESPN.com) give extra crap to fill in all the way over to 1024? To conform 800×600 sites to what I want, I resize the window. But if I resize one site in a Firefox window, then I resize them all … I want to be able to resize the browser in one tab and leave the browsers in other tabs alone.
Until next time …
Published on
March 17, 2005 in
The Site.
I modified the color scheme a few days ago. You might not even notice. The top and left edges are darker. You can tell the difference (more or less) by checking out the old page.
I still have aspirations of extending the effect to all four edges of the screen … and keeping it there even when you scroll down. The only site I really see doing anything technologically along the lines of what I want is Bungie.net. At least I’m happy knowing that the whole thing renders correctly in Firefox and it validates.
So besides the dubious layout wishes … maybe next I’ll create a database system for the posts … something generated on the fly … I’d like that.
It appears that ESPN.com is in the final stages of rolling out a new site design. You heard it here first. Right this second I’m looking at the golf homepage, and it’s actually a little messed up. A story within the golf site doesn’t display the ESPN logo, and some code is visible. I read an article in the hockey section earlier today, and that’s what really tipped me off. For a couple months now, some articles on the site have featured a new horizontal navigation bar that looks a little bit like Apple.com‘s candy/transparent plastic look. You can see that in the NHL article. I say article because it appears that the rollout (and I noticed this in the last version of ESPN.com) affects articles first, before sport homepages or the main ESPN.com homepage itself. However, I expect that the main page will change before the lesser and offseason sports’ pages catch up.
The front page will now validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Eat that, Lewis. Insert better-late-than-never “your site is down” joke here.
You’ll find two entries below that I wrote a couple weeks ago but never got around to uploading.
Based on the appearance of this site on flat-panel monitors and the fact that I have started to use a 1280×1024 screen resolution, I will be making some cosmetic changes to the site soon. Look out for that.