Complaint Hub

Visit the new front page of the site here.  Things may be a mess for a bit, but it will get better, I promise.

Adobe cripples Flash video with DRM - Boing Boing

Amazingly, Adobe seems to have entirely missed the fact that the reason that the Flash video format has taken off is that it’s so fluid, versatile and remixable — not because they sucked up to some Hollysaurs and crippled their technology.

I know there are good uses for Flash (Homestarrunner, Google Analytics, YouTube).  But for every good usage, there are probably 100 bad uses.  If you’ve ever been to a site that takes forever to load, and then when it does, it’s impossible to navigate, it was probably made with Flash.  It’s not that the technology itself is necessarily bad, it’s just that the potential for abuse is so great.

Now, with the introduction of DRM and the inevitable flood of DMCA takedown notices, perhaps we will see the end of Flash.  Not that I think the absence of Flash will prevent bad websites, but maybe it will help.

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

You could remove many electronic boxes from our home and we would not miss them. But if you took our kitchen computer away, it would hurt. In fact two weeks ago the Mac had to go in for repairs, and we kept turing to its vacant spot for help, only to groan. It felt a little like some feel without their cell phone.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.  I think a small form factor box (Like a Mac Mini, since you all know what that is, but not a Mac, because Macs and I have a mutually antagonistic relationship) with a small touchscreen would be perfect to mount underneath a cabinet in the kitchen.  You could use it for recipes (We constantly bring a laptop into the kitchen for this, but I don’t like my laptop on the counter.).  You could use it, as mentioned in the linked article, for watching movies and YouTube and whatnot while cooking.

The kitchen has always been the most sociable place in the house for me, and probably for lots of others.  I would love someday to build a house centered on the kitchen, where the layout of the house encouraged everyone to congregate in a huge kitchen designed both for cooking and for relaxing.

Now I just have to convince the wife that this is a great idea.

I tweaked my strategy to import this blog into Drupal, and it’s working quite well on my local machine.  I had wanted to go with the brand new Drupal 6.0, but it’s not quite finished, and many of the modules that I might want to use haven’t been updated yet.  So I think I’ll go with 5.7, and then upgrade down the road a little when 6.0 is more mature.

My big problem is the permalinks.  I don’t want to have to write individual .htaccess entries for 700-some posts - I can’t imagine that’s a good idea.  So I need a redirect rule, and I don’t know much about writing them.  I think I can figure it out, though.  I think I’m going to have to map http://www.blog.complainthub.com/?p=123 to http://www.complainthub.com/node/123 or something like that.  I don’t think that will be hard, but you never know.  Luckily my webhost uses nice, sensible Apache servers, instead of some hideous abomination.

Anyway, my next challenge will be scraping together a new theme.  I have some ideas, but I need to execute them.  And I need to pick a color scheme.  You can leave suggestions in the comments, which I’ll probably ignore.  But you can leave them.

Most people won’t get the reference in the post title, but I don’t care.

“Blog Action Day” is the 100th category that I’ve used here at the Hub.  Not that the number of categories means anything at all, but I’ve been stuck on 99 for a while now.

A to-do list for the next ten days:

1. Fly to London this afternoon.
2.  Take a train to York.
3. Hang out in York for a few days.
4. Rent a car, drive a manual transmission on the wrong side of the road for the first time.
5. Be 1/2 of that cool couple that came all the way from the States to the wedding.
6. Fly to Dublin.
7. Enjoy a delicious Guinness at a pub.
8. Repeat #7 as necessary.

So, I’ll be out until Friday the 13th.  I don’t expect internet access while I’m gone.  But, I’ll bring back pictures.  And memories.

Have something you want to get off your chest?  Realize that my complaint submission page is a long way from being cool?  Your prayers have been answered.  VentBox is now live, and you can go sign up and start complaining about whatever you want.

Odwalla Beverages

We’ve taken the memories of home-baked banana nut loaf and turned them into a convenient on-the-go snack. Luscious banana is blended with whole oats and walnuts.

You know what sucks about the Odwalla Banana Nut Bar?  Not a damn thing.  That is one fine “nourishing food bar”.

Blogwise - Blog directory

I just registered Complaint Hub with Blogwise, although it will take some time for a real person to verify it.  Perfect timing, I say, because I’m in a bit of a posting slump right now.  But I won’t be forever.  Maybe a flood of readers from Blogwise will arrive at the same time I break out of my slump with a half-dozen brilliant posts, sure to turn the casual blog browser into a lifelong fan.

Or maybe not.