Month: October 2002

Trading Spaces: Behind the Scenes

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Linked from this Ask Slashdot article with questions for Cathy Rogers (from Junkyard Wars) was this Behind the Scenes for Trading Space. On Trading Spaces, if you haven’t heard of it, two homeowners trade houses for two days to redecorate each others’s rooms:

Once inside, I met the sewing coordinator. The very existence of the sewing coordinator was for a long time a closely-guarded secret. His name was in the credits, but they never referred to him on camera. The need for a sewing coordinator is obvious; any given episode features a huge amount of sewing, some of it very complex, and the homeowners and designers simply wouldn't have time to do it all themselves. The sewing coordinator, therefore, stays behind the scenes and makes sure things get done on schedule. Later in the day, after he had finished all his tasks and packed up his equipment, I caught up with him and asked why he was never shown on camera. He explained that it was a logistical decision. Each episode, he pointed out, already features eight “characters,” and adding a ninth would be tricky. Makes sense. […]

Alex.numJobs++

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

I am once again employed! I interviewed with Hybrid this morning, and I start on Thursday.

Hybrid is an e-consulting company, much like AIVIA or Xpedior. There, I’ll be doing HTML coding, working alongside web designers and back-end developers (just as I like it). They’re on the first floor of Bryan Tower in downtown Dallas, which is certainly an improvement over the commute that I had to Steamatic ;).

I wouldn’t mind going for a little celebratory trip to Braum’s sometime this week, if anyone would like to join me. I’m quite busy this weekend with some freelance work, but perhaps Wednesday or Thursday evening would work (I’ll write more about this closer to the time).

Rye Pizza?

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

I was talking with Bryan earlier today, and he mentioned that he was planning on making homemade pizza this evening. He hadn't made one before, but was plan was to use pre-made bread dough for the crust (as recommended to him by some pizza-making friends).

That caused my mind to wander for a moment — oh, the possibilties of being able to customize the dough. Wheat-pizza was an obvious one, but what about something like using rye-bread dough to create a rye pizza? Hmm, a rye pizza topped with Italian sausage and Canadian bacon… ?

The others in the group seemed to conclude that rye-pizza was a gross idea (including even Bryan “chocolate chips with hot dogs” himself), but I wouldn’t mind trying one of those. Of course, I’m not even certain whether bread-dough is suitable for homemade pizza-making in the first place ;).

Mandrake 9.0 Review

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

From Slashdot, I was pleased to find this review of Mandrake 9.0. It wasn’t as positive as I thought it might be, though:

[…] Mandrake is using pretty much the default themes and colors of KDE 3.0.3, which looks dated and ugly at best. Even the default Gnome2 looks better than the default KDE. MandrakeSoft should realize that their two main competitors have made strides in making their desktops more delightful and nicer to the eye and the usability (while RH and SuSE are not even trying to compete to the desktop as straightful as MandrakeSoft is), while Mandrake is still the same old, same old. I had to change a lot of things to my desktop to make it look something that can moderately please me. The fact that you can change a lot of KDE’s aspects with some downloads is not the answer. Mandrake should have worked on the looks and the UI. I wonder if they do employ a UI designer, and if they do, if their developers actually listen to him/her.

MandrakeSoft replied to me that their customer research showed that businesses favor their default grey-ish UI, while home users customize everything on their own. Personally, I find hard to believe that businesses would not favor a better UI, while the home users won't have to tweak everything after installation. […]

That’s not to say that Mandrake 9.0 is a bad distiribution, but I really value Eugenia Loli-Queru’s opinion. She did a great review of KDE 3 (from a UI standpoint), and I consider her UI intuition to be on par with Anand’s hardware intuition ;).

She also recently reviewed Red Hat 8.0, which she seemed to like a bit better:

As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven’t seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is “Sans”) are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920x1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. […]

For me, the killer feature of Red Hat 8.0 is its antialiased fonts (thanks to Xft2). As far as I know, Red Hat 8.0 is the only major distribution to come with XFt2 out-of-the-box. And, that makes it quite tempting to me.

On the other hand, Mandrake is very solid overall, and it’s sure to include Xft2 in its next point-release. So, maybe I’ll wait a bit for that. Really, it all depends on how soon I get my new PC built (which is going rather slowly with my current income).

The Transporter

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I went to see The Transporter yesterday, and I really enjoyed it. Ebert was right in that the first 1/3 of the film is probably the best third (almost all the clips from trailers and commercials are from that third). However, I have to side with Roeper in that the movie is still good overall.

The last third features a cookie-cutter semi truck action scene, and I thought at the time that I had seen something just like it in one of the Bond films. And, then there’s a wacky oil-slick sequence that may have been better left out.

So, maybe the movie wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was definitely worth seeing. And, Jason Statham shows that he can easily take on an action role. Besides, I’m always a sucker for a good driving movie.