insane weekend.

tuck, angela, and i went up to syracuse for hellfest 2003. 3 days of hardcore and death metal. over 100 bands.

it was fantastic. the festival was really well organized and run. they had things set up with 3 stages. two of the stages ('A' and 'B') were right next to each other and they would be setting up on one stage while a band played on the other. a third stage ('C') on the other end of the fairgrounds had the smaller name acts. most bands played for about half an hour each except a couple of the bigger names which played for 45 minutes or an hour at the end of each day. the advantage of the setup was that there was almost no wait between bands. someone was playing at all times on at least one of the stages.

the bands were amazing. there were no real disappointments. standouts were Darkest Hour, Walls of Jericho, Lamb of God, Anti-Flag (who were excellent to see on the 4th of july: “you’ve gotta die / gotta die / gotta die for your government? / die for your country? / that’s SHIT!”), In Flames, Bouncing Souls, Shai Hulud, Dead to Fall, Jude the Obscure, Brother’s Keeper (they announced that they were breaking up and hellfest was their last show ever), The Locust, and With Honor. but seriously, pretty much every band i saw was good.

the crowd was just as impressive as the bands though. crowd participation and enthusiasm was mind-blowing. even after three solid days of moshing in 95 degree heat and clouds of dust (one of the few negative aspects of the weekend was that the fairgrounds were really dusty and it was hard to see or breathe quite often. i think i have gravel in my lungs now and all weekend my snot was black), they were still jumping around and stagediving every chance they got. at every single band, even the obscure Stage C acts, there were people going crazy jumping on stage and they all knew all the lyrics to all the songs.

i brought my new toy along and took a ton of pictures. it was hard to get very many good shots though. for many of the bands, the mosh pits were extremely violent and took up such a huge area of the floor in front of the stage that i really couldn't get closer than about 100 feet without risking getting my camera and my skull destroyed.

aside from going to hellfest, i would recommend that you just stay out of syracuse. driving around that area was a nightmare. they seem to have the most confusing system of roadways imaginable. there were hidden exits, ambiguous or just missing signage, an overall twisted street layout that felt like it had been designed by a spider on benzedrine with a cruel streak, and everything looks the same. we literally spent hours driving around just trying to do simple things like finding a convenience store or getting back to our hotel. every turn that we were supposed to make we would manage to miss the first time around and have to back track to it. just when we'd get back on the right track, we'd suddenly find ourselves in an exit only lane and have to spend half an hour just trying to get back on the highway (a process that would usually end up involving about 14 turns). it wasn't just one or two cases of bad design, the whole area seemed to suffer from it.

the <a href=”http://www.webstandards.org/“>WaSP</a> has a new <a href=”http://webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/“>opinion piece</a> on microsoft’s recent announcement that MS IE on both windows and mac will cease to be developed as free standalone products.

now is probably a good time to mention that i am a WaSP <a href=”http://webstandards.org/about/bios/apearson.html”>member</a>.

for future reference, i’ve collected all the little sketches i’ve posted here over the last couple years in <a href=”/images/sktchs/“>one place</a>.

our gerbils managed to get mites somehow. not a big deal but annoying to the poor little guys.

so last night, lani and i instituted a little mite holocaust. we took the gerbils out of their cage and let them run around in the bathtub while we disassembled the cage and cleaned it thoroughly. then, before they went back in, we sprayed each of them with some kind of anti-mite spray.

in the process we’ve learned several things about baby gerbils:

1. baby gerbils are the slipperiest objects known to man. if you pick one up and don't complete enclose it with your hands it will launch out of your hands like it was fired from a gun with absolutely no regard for its own safety and paying no attention to how high up it is from the floor.
2. baby gerbils are, as far as we can tell, indestructable. making a parachute free descent of 5 feet onto a hard tile floor (thanks to #1) startles them for a second but otherwise seems to produce no ill effects (to the gerbils at least. lani and i both had mild heart attacks).
3. if you turn the baby gerbil onto its back in the palm of your hand it seems to hypnotize it and it will lay there without moving indefinitely. if you ever need to transport baby gerbils, this appears to be the way to do it without them going aerial on you.
4. wet gerbils are cute in a pathetic sort of way.

i’ll post some pictures later when i have time.

i finally broke down last week and got a digital camera. i already have a really nice manual 35mm SLR that takes fantastic pictures. it’s just big so i never carry it around, setting up shots takes too long so whatever i wanted to shoot is usually gone by the time it’s ready, and i tend to just scan the pictures in anyway so i can put them on the web.

so my priorities for a digital camera were that it be small so i could easily carry it everywhere and automatic so i don’t have to spend a lot of time setting up a shot. with a little help from <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“>peter</a>, i settled on the <a href=”http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxoptios/“>Pentax Optio S</a>. it’s 3.2 Megapixels, has a 3X optical zoom and is small enough to fit in an empty Altoids container.

so far i’m quite pleased with it. it really is tiny and light. i can just stick it in my shirt pocket and have it with me 24/7 in case i see anything photo-worthy (like the <a href=”/nodes/4601”>ass pizza</a>) while i’m walking around. the pictures that it takes are high enough quality for my purposes (i’m not exactly planning on doing poster size blowups anytime soon). i’m just worried that since it’s so small, i’ll end up losing it.

but until i lose it, expect to see more pictures posted here.

folks in the webdesign community today have been linking to and talking about this <a href=”http://www.alistapart.com/stories/accesskeys/“>ALA article</a> about <a href=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey”>accesskey</a>.

i’m all for accessibility for web-pages and applications. but i have to ask if the use of <tt>accesskey</tt> is more or less obviated by mozilla’s “<a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html”>find as you type</a>” feature.

i hate mice and strongly prefer using the keyboard for as much of my interaction with my computer as possible. until mozilla introduced find as you type, browsing the web was about the only computer activity i engaged in for any substantial amount of time that i actually had to use my mouse for. (<a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html”>bash</a>, <a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html”>emacs</a>, and <a href=”http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/“>ion</a> being my other main apps).

now, with find as you type, i almost never need to use the mouse except when i hit the occasional flash site or sites that use graphical elements for navigation in ways that make it difficult to tab to the link i want.

to me, find as you type just looks like a better designed solution to the problem of navigating the web using only the keyboard than <tt>accesskey</tt> does. the big problem with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that it requires webmasters to specifically add it to every site. in mozilla, find as you type <em>just works</em> on <strong>every</strong> site (well, every site that uses text-based links for navigation). no extra development work needed. with <tt>accesskey</tt>, users have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts for each site they visit. that means that designers must somehow provide visual cues for the user to let them know what shortcut is for each link (the ALA article gives some excellent advice on how to do that). find as you type works the same on every site that it works on. another subtle issue with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that someone has to come up with all of the mappings. this leaves a lot of room for overlap and confusion. does ‘h’ mean “home” or “help”? what happens when you have 100 links on a page? do you actually expect a developer to sit down and try to come up with a shortcut for each of them? they certainly aren’t all going to make sense let alone be obvious.

the only big problem with find as you type is that it’s only available to users of late-model mozillas. hopefully that will change someday.

as far as i can tell, just about everything that can be done with <tt>accesskey</tt> can also be done with find as you type and there are far fewer problems. so why do we still care about accesskey?

each user diary now has its own RSS feed. just append ‘/rss’ to the url. eg, mine is at <a href=”http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary/rss”>http://thraxil.org/users/anders/diary/rss</a>.

since auto-discovery is cool, you may also want to add some code to the <tt>&lt;head&gt;</tt> of your diary template like so: <tt>&lt;link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”rss” title=”RSS feed for my stupid diary” /&gt;</tt>

the other week the sci-fi channel was showing a movie called <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Title?0264508”>Dagon</a>, which was loosely based on HP Lovecraft’s <a href=”http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/works/innsmouth.htm”>The Shadow over Innsmouth</a>. as a Lovecraft fanatic, i had no choice but to watch. unfortunately, as i’ve pretty much come to expect from HP Lovecraft stories turned into movies, it really sucked. they moved it from new england to the coast of spain which seems criminal to me since the new england atmosphere was so important to Lovecraft. they added a few characters, changed the plot so it doesn’t really make sense anymore and destroyed what was left with bad acting and cheesy special effects.

why has no one ever been able to make a decent movie out of a Lovecraft story? more importantly, why has no one ever really even tried? all it would take would be a half-way competent director and a little bit of a budget to hire a cast that can actually act and slightly better than B-movie special effects.

too much going on for me to post anything lengthy, but here’s the brief summary of the last week:

went to boston for <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/“>OSCOM 3</a>, which was ok. stayed with kam out in mission hill. got to hang out with <a href=”http://www.goatee.net/“>joe</a> between sessions. tuck came down thursday night and we went out to see <a href=”http://www.prickmusic.com/“>Prick</a> play at the Middle East. i didn’t have very high hopes for the show since Kevin is notorious for not liking to tour or play live. i was pleasantly surprised to find that they are fantastic live. played almost all of the first album, including ‘Make Believe’, which i totally wasn’t expecting. i felt bad though because there were only about 200 people at the show. at $10/ticket, there’s no way the band was operating at a profit. hopefully they had more people at the (better advertised) long island show the next night.

friday night, through a miracle of organization, we managed to get me, <a href=”/users/tuck”>tuck</a>, <a href=”/users/emile”>emile</a>, <a href=”/users/kamden”>kam</a>, <a href=”/users/jere”>jere</a>, <a href=”/users/matti”>matti</a>, nigel, teri, and eventually <a href=”http://www.superultramega.com/“>jP</a> all together for vegan chinese food and drinks. those of us who were left at midnight went out and saw <a href=”http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/findingnemo/index.html”>Finding Nemo</a>, which was quite amusing after all those beers.

saturday tuck, kam, and i only left kam’s apartment to pick up some chinese take-out from down the block. the rest of the day was spent watching movies, playing GTA: Vice City, and working our way through a case of PBR.

sunday morning was dim sum in chinatown with jP, his brother, and some assorted other folks and then heading back to nyc.

while i was gone, lani and i’s gerbils gave birth to four little baby gerbs. i guess that answer’s the questions we had about what genders they are. we didn’t even realize that they were pregnant. the babies are tiny, hairless and have little stubs for tails. if anyone wants a couple, let me know in the next few weeks. leftovers get donated back to the pet store.

Nullsoft, makers of the handy little mp3 program Winamp, released a pretty neat secure p2p/im client for a small secure network on Wednesday. They called it WASTE. AOL, who owns Nullsoft, didn’t like the legal liability that this application created, so they had Nullsoft pull the plug.

<p>Luckily, the <span class="caps">WASTE</span> site was <a href="http://www.freedomware.org/waste/index.html">mirrored</a>. I think it&#8217;s worth checking out. The source is available for anyone that wants to pick up the slack.</p>