barkingmoose

Another snapshot for the Bush family photo album.Sometimes a web address can tell a story all by itself—take the story running on CNN’s site with the URL jeb.bush.daughter.drugs. Wanna guess what it’s about?

My theory is that there’s a sibling rivalry between Dubya and Jeb that runs so deep, it’s extended to their children. Jenna and Barbara got an awful lot of attention for their shenanigans last year, and Jeb’s daughter Noelle was not about to let that side of the family hog the spotlight.

The score isn’t really settled yet, though, but I’m betting Marvin the is in the governor’s mansion down in Florida right now hatching a scheme that’ll really raise the bar.

While rummaging around the very limited archives I have of sites I’ve worked on in the past, I used the Wayback Machine and found something I thought was gone for good—the corporate website for Virtus from back in 1998. It was the first major redesign of a site that I oversaw as a “webmaster,” and I think it holds up well today (even if the company didn’t fare as well). The cute little 600 pixel-wide table layout was probably a little graphic-heavy for the times, but I didn’t have the heart to fight my creative director.

My boss at the time made me write the names of every page in the site on index cards, tack them to the wall and connect the tacks with yarn to create something he could visualize and comment on. I wonder if he spackled the holes over after they laid off the entire marketing department.

I’m involved in another redesign right now for another software company (which also starts with the letter “V”), and it’s still probably my favorite part of what I do. Ripping down something old and tired to replace it with something new, smarter and streamlined. Closely related is the thing I enjoy least: passing a site off to someone, then visiting six months later to see how they’ve mangled the thing.

Nice ring, huh?During the trophy presentation after tonight’s NFC Championship win over the Philadelphia Eagles, St. Louis Rams owner Georgia Frontiere showed off her Super Bowl XXXVI ring, a gaudy, glittering two-finger job. “Doesn’t that look nice?” One problem, Georgia: your team hasn’t won yet. The game hasn’t even been played.

Being in Philly, I was really pulling for an Eagles win today. But as a New Englander a few hundred miles from Foxboro, I’ve been following my hometown team, too. The Eagles had a great season, but the Pats have been an amazing story this year. They are the surprise unders heading into the Super Bowl, which suits them just fine. While Georgia and her Rams make plans for a victory celebration, New England will be preparing to spoil their plans. I hope those ring deposits are refundable.

I got an email from Sen. John McCain’s Straight Talk America organization today (I’ve been on his mailing list since registering my support for his 2000 presidential campaign). The message was regarding a significant development in the effort to pass campaign finance reform. After passing a reform bill in the Senate last year, a similar bill was stalled in the House by the Republican leadership. But in the wake of the Enron collapse, the spotlight has shifted to the influence of corporate “soft money” contributions, and the bill’s backers have now secured 218 signatures (including the names of 20 GOP members) on a petition to force a vote on the issue.

I read an article earlier this week in the New Yorker that put the whole episode in perspective, making a strong case for the elimination of large corporate donations which cloud politicians’ judgment in cases like this. McCain sums it up: “[A]s the Enron scandal has shown again, until we clean up the way we finance our campaigns and reduce the overwhelming influence of soft money donors, all of us will continue to work under a cloud of suspicion, where the public always assumes that we serve our own interests before the country’s.”

Just getting the bill to the floor is a victory, but it doesn’t ensure passage. I’m still rooting for my man McCain, though.

Evan Williams (who, for all intents and purposes, is Pyra/Blogger now) demoed a preview version of Blogger Pro at a Weblogger Interest Group meeting in Mountain View, Calif., last night (notes here and here), and a lot of the features have been a long time coming: post titles, editable date/time, upload images, broadcast via email, multiple blogs. Those same features—plus a robust comment system and much more—are already part of Movable Type version 1.4, and version 2.0 promises even more.

In a roundabout way, the debut of Blogger Pro made me realize how great MT is, and how much work Ben and Mena Trott have put into it. I’ve got several blogs running now on my one MT install—yankiwi and eabos, to name two—and others in the works, including this site. We’re in the process of using MT to set up a system to show comps to clients and get feedback. That’s only a fraction of the capabilities of the system.

Blogger is a great choice for beginners, and it completely blew me away the first time I saw it. But I’m hooked on Movable Type, and today I became one of the many users who’ve sent in a donation to support further development. And that felt good.

Late last week, Dutch file-sharing company KaZaA suspended downloads of their popular software to comply with a court order while awaiting a ruling in a copyright infringement case. There were some anxious moments for KaZaA users, but there wasn’t a rush to grab all the free music imaginable, because there didn’t seem to be a serious threat that the entire network would be shut down despite the court’s efforts. Only downloads of the KaZaA client had been suspended, not using the program to download music, movies, etc.

A final ruling from the Dutch court was expected around Jan. 31, but then KaZaA threw a wrench into those plans—earlier today, KaZaA was sold to Sharman Networks in Australia, effectively removing the website and the application from the Dutch court’s jurisdiction. Client downloads were immediately restored, and a glance at the ticker on KaZaA’s website shows it’s more popular than ever. I wonder what will happen if a similar lawsuit is filed in an Aussie court?

While poking around the KaZaA site, I found the KaZaA Winamp Plug-in. “You can search for music by artist, title, album or keywords, and play or enqueue the tracks directly in Winamp.” It’s in beta, and it’ll be installed on my machine first thing in the morning.

I admit my exposure to foreign language films has been limited this year, so I was willing to accept that the Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Film, the Bosnian No Man’s Land, might be more deserving of the award than Amélie, the best film I’ve seen in recent memory. After all, they are the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But then they go and award best motion picture to the forgettable A Beautiful Mind, and best actor to the predictable Russell Crowe. So forget what I said about Amélie. They were wrong. There were some good choices—Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Kiefer Sutherland in “24,” and awards for Rachel Griffiths and best series “Six Feet Under”—but not enough.

In other awards news, the finalists for the 2002 Bloggies are due to be released on Monday, as are the selections for the 2002 SXSW Web Awards. I’ll be watching both with much interest.

Update: At 6 o’clock et Monday night, the SXSW finalists are finally posted. Kinda disappointing. Still no sign of the Bloggies.

Another update: From Fairvue, host of the Bloggies—“The posting of the Bloggie finalists has been delayed by a few days. That is all.” Uhh.

Gorillaz in concert: sorta like reverse lip-sync.Gorillaz announced a North American tour, and one of the shows will be here in Philly at the Electric Factory. I received their self-titled CD as a gift over the holidays—it’s found a semi-permanent home in my CD player. Still, I’m not sure about these concerts because of some basic logistical problems: while the musicians are very much real, the band itself is not. They are a collection of cartoon characters, and you can’t very well have cartoon characters performing on stage.

Producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura says the solution is a show which “will definitely involve big movie screens and lights. The musicians will be behind the screens and backlit onto them.” According to one concert review, though, the results tend to be less than convincing: “The whole thing seems like half-an-idea run out of control.”

Upcoming projects for the Gorillaz include an animated (obviously) feature film and a CD of remixes and b-sides. Maybe half an idea is better than none at all, but maybe the cartoon Gorillaz should stick to performing in media more suited to a virtual band.

Even though I feel a little gypped because I didn’t get the chance to see this wax figure in its current state when we visited Madame Tussaud’s in London last month, I appreciate the extra effort they’ve put into the enhancements.

Mark Cuban sports a snazzy DQ tee.You gotta love Mark Cuban. He’s the only thing remotely interesting about the NBA nowadays (well, except for Shaq’s meltdown). The owner of the Dallas Mavericks is a rarity in pro sports—he actually cares about his team and their fans. His frequent run-ins with league officials came to a head last week when he criticized director of officials Ed Rush, saying he “might have been a great ref, but I wouldn’t hire him to manage a Dairy Queen.”

That comment led to a $500,000 fine from the NBA, and also raised the hackles of the folks at Dairy Queen’s corporate office. The company issued a press release challenging the billionaire to manage one of their franchises for a day. Cuban accepted.

On Wednesday, he’ll report to the Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas, to try his hand at making a Blizzard® or two. Store owner Parrish Chapman reminds Cuban that his responsibilities are not to be taken lightly: “Sometimes it takes three months to make our trademark curly top on top of the cone. We’ve had employees quit over that.”