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).

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.

Rising Waters

I took another picture of the rising flood waters as seen from my work window on the 6th floor. Compare this one to the last, and you can see how the levels are defiantly creeping up.

Click the thumbnail for a full sized view.

Flood Sadness

Lots of crazy stuff has been going on here in Cedar Rapids. The Cedar River is flooding, and the city has had to enact its 500-year flood plan. Power is out over many parts of the city (our house was out for a few hours this morning) and power downtown where I work has been out since 7am CST (we’re running on generators here at work, and as a telecommunications company we have an independent internet connection).

My house is not in the expected flood plain, and now that power’s back on I really have little to complain about. But hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes, and dozens of businesses are going to have a lot of cleanup to do once these waters recede some day, all just in our town. Much more damage has occurred in other Iowa cities along the Cedar River.

Unfortunately, heavy rains here and further up the river mean water levels are continuing to rise. Here’s a bad camera-phone picture from out my office window on the 6th floor. I’ve marked how far the flooding has reached from the river in case you can’t make it out on the pic. It wasn’t nearly that high when I arrived less than 3 hours ago.

What’s your neighborhood’s walk score?

Cars are expensive to buy, to fuel, and to maintain. But we rely on them more and more all the time. Wouldn’t it be cool if we needed them less? Less gas, less miles, less frequent repairs.

But the explosion of suburban America is killing (if it hasn’t already killed) self-sustaining neighborhoods. City limits housing developments and vast Suburban parking lots are making the way of the pedestrian harder with every new inch of blacktop.

Walkscore.com lets you enter an address and get a “walk score” based on how far away grocery stores, schools, and other such staples of society are from where you live. My house got a walk score of “42 out of 100″, which puts me pretty close to the middle of all the averages. And I don’t feel like my house is in a particularly commercial or residential neighborhood. Just a nice, normal (albeit lower-middle-class/blue collar) neighborhood.

I wonder how it compares to other people I actually know. *hint, hint*