MAKE: Television

The MAKE stage has gotten a whole lot bigger! Coming to public television stations across America, Make: television brings the spirit and energy of the magazine to TV sets in beautiful HD.

Make is a great magazine, so I hope the show can manage to be as good. Make’s senior editor Phillip Torrone was excellent when he hosted the Engadget podcast years ago, so making him a part of the show (I don’t see him in the trailer) would be a surefire way to make it good.

And let’s hear it for Twin Cities Public Television and PBS. I’m sick of all the cool, geeky, science shows being out of my reach on cable.

Sesame Street is “Back”

Of all the PBS Kids lineup, Sesame Street is my favorite to watch with my eldest daughter. But like any long running TV show, Sesame Street has gone through dry spells where the writing just wasn’t up to par.

Not to say recent years have or have not been part of any such spell, but Sesame Street season 39 kicks off next month on August 11th, and it looks to be a great one:

I’m not necessarily a sucker for celebrity cameos, but Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris (as a shoe fairy, of all things)?! (Jack Black and Jonah Hill should be fun, but it looks like their clips are short and simple.) Not to mention last season’s EXCELLENT full time cast addition of Christopher Knowings as Gordon’s nephew Chris.

It makes me sad when cornerstones of my childhood change (the new, early 2000’s performers for Cookie Monster and Big Bird just don’t have the voices right, for example), but it’s nice to see that Sesame Street can once again keep things fresh and original without losing the magic.

Freakazoid on DVD

I don’t know I’d go quite as far as Mr. Doctorow here (mostly because I don’t know enough about TV cartoons), but Freakazoid WAS in a class of its own. My sibs and I watched it religiously, and not a year has gone by that I haven’t lamented its lack of a DVD presence. Now that it’s out, well…I don’t know if I’ll ever own any of the seasons. But I do look forward to more YouTube clips! Oh yes.

Ode to Beaker

Happy Monday:

Firefox’s Image Placeholder Changes Again

Not very newsworthy, but I figured I’d continue the series. Back in May I pointed out that Firefox 3 had a different image (and broken image) placeholder for the first time since the 0.1 BETA (which was copied from Netscape/Mozilla). It looks like 3.0.1 has changed it again.

I definitely liked the old-new one better:

But it’s still better than the original:

Illustrating The Unseen

I imagine numerous essays and books have been written on the subject of art attempting to depict incredible things described in literature. From indescribable beauty to unimaginable horror, countless authors have included such elements in their stories with little or no effort. “A face more beautiful than any that of any man or woman who ever walked on the earth” is an easy enough phrase to write, but would probably not be done justice by any visual representation other than a photo of that very face (if it actually existed).

Posting From My Phone

(I’m writing and posting this from my Palm Centro.)

Nobody makes a WordPress specific app for blogging from a Palm smart phone. And while self-hosted WordPress blogs can set up posting via e-mail, WordPress.com users get no such feature.

But this morning I found out about m.wordpress.com. It seems to work fine for posting, although it’s nowhere near as slick as a native Palm ap would be.

I’m not sure that this would cause me to continue more Twitter snippets as full blog posts, but it could come in handy if I ever just HAVE to blog.

What’s Happened To Become A Robot?

What’s happened to the Become A Robot blog? Twitter, mostly. Little things like starting or finishing a book, finding a great new website or product, seeing a movie, learning a lesson…all of these have been reduced to few-sentence blips on my Twitter feed.

If I actually had something else to write about, I expect this refinement of blog content would be a better thing. But right now it just makes for some loud echos around here.

I have some things I’d love to complain about, like authors and publishers not getting serious about e-books, or childless people’s reactions to young children in public. But these types of things tend to just get shuffled over to Twitter too. I’m lazy, and it’s a lot easier to condense my thoughts down to 140 characters than it is to blow them up to a reasonably sized blog post. Even regardless of length, I can Twitter by sending an SMS from my phone, which is a lot simpler and faster than firing up a browser and clicking through WordPress admin screens (if only WordPress loved Palm like they love the iPhone).

So know that even while the cobwebs are collecting around here, I’m still alive and active on teh interwebs (and in real life too I guess).

Books…Oh, No…

While getting my 22-month-old daughter dressed after her bath last night, my wife directed my attention to the TV. The evening news was showing the first pictures taken from the inside of the Cedar Rapids Public Library after last weekend’s record smashing flood.

I had wondered and worried aloud about the status of the library and its contents repeatedly during the flooding, to a point that my wife had to mock me for being so focused on one part of the extensive destruction. But for days as the waters rose, the general public knew nothing of what steps were (or weren’t) taken to protect the library. Around the time the water was cresting, an interview with the library’s interim director came out, saying that they had used volunteers and the final hours before evacuation to move books on the 1st floor up to higher shelves. My wife and I were shocked that they didn’t just move as much as they could up to the second floor. There’s an elevator to make such a task easier, and lots and lots of room up there for materials. They were busy moving things out of the basement too, but there was never a call for volunteers on TV or radio or city websites or anything. We had no idea they didn’t have the manpower (or brainpower) needed to move things to the 2nd floor.

So I took my daughter to the computer and we looked at the pictures on the Gazette website.

Her response to the above photo was, “Books…oh no…” She knew something bad had happened to the books. Other photos like the one at the top of this post caused her to screw up her face in concern and confusion as well. We’ve spent hours at the library with her, and she easily recognized her favorite indoor place to visit.

Plans for a major renovation are currently on hold (although I suspect they’ll be getting new carpet, furniture, and computers now that they have none), and it’s possible that a tax levy will be utilized. I imagine a lot of citizens will be even more upset about the poor preparation for the flood (like not moving anything upstairs) if they’re asked to help pay for it.

Another one of many sad stories here in Cedar Rapids right now. This one just happens to hit a little closer to home for us than most.

A City Recovering

Late yesterday afternoon my wife and I packed up the girls and drove to a birthday party on the other side of town. With only a couple of bridges open across the river, the 20 minute drive was replaced with a traffic clogged 40 minute trek. Still, it was nice to have SOME way to get across the river, so I can’t complain much. This morning the National Guard restored access to 3 bridges downtown making it much easier to get around the city for the first time since late last week.

As the Cedar River’s water level continues to recede (but still has over 6 feet to go before it’s below “flood stage”) recovery efforts are progressing across the city. I had saved some photographs to posts here on the blog, but instead of stealing from the fine folks at the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I decided to link directly to some of the excellent (and sobering) galleries of photos taken by Gazette (and some AP) photographers.

Don’t let the thumbnails fool you, these links take you to galleries of multiple photos.

Aerial Shots From Monday by Cliff Jette

Downtown Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Liz Martin

More Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Cliff Jette

Cedar Rapids on Tuesday by Courtney Sargent

The Gazette has many more galleries of photos related to the 2008 Iowa floods, here, including photos from last week when the city was submerged and recovery efforts weren’t yet an option.