Monthly Archives: January 2007

Ah, Hollywood Accounting!

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Kelson

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Dreamworks and Aardman are going their separate ways after the disappointing performance of Flushed Away and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Wait… Wallace and Gromit? Wasn’t it #1 on opening weekend? Didn’t it stay in the top 5 for at least a month?

Aardman’s dry British wit went over well with critics on such films as “Chicken Run” in 2000 and 2005′s “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which won an Oscar for best animated feature.

But both “Wallace & Gromit” and “Flushed Away” were costly misfires, failing to resonate with American audiences. DreamWorks reported a $25-million loss on “Wallace & Gromit.”

Hmm, according to IMDB, W&G had an estimated budget of $30 million. It grossed $16 million its opening weekend and went on to gross $56 million by January, 2006. Domestically. That’s not even counting foreign distribution or DVD sales.

If they spent $30 million and made more than $56 million, how exactly did they “lose” $25 million? Where did that missing $50 million go?

Posted in Entertainment | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

LJ Apology

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Kelson

To all three of you reading this via LiveJournal syndication, sorry for filling up your friends list with repeats. I changed the footer on the feed, and didn’t realize that LiveJournal will repost articles as new if there’s any change.

I guess this means I’ll have to be careful about things like fixing typos on the latest 15 posts.

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Unlikely Partnership

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Kelson

Here’s a surprise: web standardista extraordinaire Molly Holzschlag is now working with Microsoft to promote web standards within the organization.

Improving interoperability, especially at high-profile services like many of Microsoft’s, is critical to the future of the web. I can only hope that the emphasis on standards will feed into the design goals for Internet Explorer 8—and that IE8 will be released before Windows XP drops from mainstream to extended support in 2009.

Posted in Web | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Pilates of the Caribbean!

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Kelson

Found these next to each other at Costco the other day:
Pirates of the Carribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest DVD in front of a Pilates set.

Posted in Signs of the Times | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Sushi…Coffee?

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Kelson

I was catching up on my brother’s Flickr posts and found this photo:

Sign: Sushi Coffee
©Brion Vibber, used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Not a combination I’m used to seeing…

He’s got a handful of other photos tagged wtf.

Posted in Food, Signs of the Times | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

LJ Feed

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Kelson

Interesting. Apparently someone has set up a syndication feed for this blog on LiveJournal: ksquaredramblin. I’ve been thinking about setting one up more or less since I joined LJ, but I resisted since I worried people might start commenting in two different places. I guess it’s a moot point now!

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Clikipedia

Posted on January 25, 2007 by Kelson

I’ve been meaning to post on this subject for quite a while now, and it turns out someone has gone and said it more succinctly than I ever could have: The Problem With Wikipedia. Continue reading →

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Smallville Traffic Spike 2.0

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Kelson

After last week’s Smallville episode, “Justice,” featured Cyborg, Aquaman, Green Arrow and the Flash Impulse, there was another spike in traffic to my Flash site and the profile of Bart Allen, Smallville Edition.

Daily traffic to Flash section for January 2007, showing a 1.5× jump on Jan. 18

It jumped up to 1½ times the usual number of visits on the day “Justice” aired, then quickly started trailing off to normal levels. It’s nowhere near as big a jump as last time the Flash appeared on the show, when I saw a threefold spike in traffic for the first two days.

Why the difference? I’ve got several theories:

  • Interest in Smallville has waned over time, so fewer people dropped in. Pure speculation.
  • Viewers remembered Bart from “Run” (which was rerun a few weeks ago) and many didn’t feel the need to look him up again. Again, speculation.
  • Bart was sharing the limelight with other guest stars this time. But I’d expect people to look for all of them, which is borne out by the number of people who have searched the site for Green Arrow in the past week.
  • Overall site traffic is higher, causing the jump to be less noticeable. Wishful thinking, but the last spike hit ~7,600 hits/day, while this one hit ~8,200, so the numbers hold up. (Hits & bandwidth are down for the Flash section, but I’ve done several rounds of optimization in the last few years.)
  • Fewer sources linked to the site. Last time, there were lots of links from forums and blogs. I even got linked from Television Without Pity. (They decided to go with Wikipedia instead.) This time around, it was mostly search engine hits.

Posted in Comics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Updated to WordPress 2.1

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Kelson

I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.1. Please bear with the site as I make sure all the customizations work. (Yeah, I know, living dangerously by not waiting a few days.)

Right now the category tabs are showing all categories instead of just the top three… but only on single posts.

OK. That’s fixed. Apparently WP 2.1 removed the ability to list only the top-level categories, and caching was half-enabled. I also had to apply the fix for PHP 5.2 again. (I really figured they would have fixed that by now!)

Everything else seems to still work, except for the word stats plugin and wp-amazon plugin. Both are composing plugins, and I wasn’t really using either of them anymore.

Update Jan. 25: I also updated WP-Cache to version 2.0.22, and it doesn’t work quite right. In particular, it won’t clear the cached copy of a page after someone posts a comment. I’ve reverted the cache to 2.0.17+tweaks for now, which seems to work.

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged | 10 Comments

Enhance your… mortgage?

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Kelson

I suppose it was only a matter of time before these two genres of spam collided. Today I received a spam advertising body-part enlargement products, with a link to a site called bmsMUNGEDcommercialmortgage.info (without the MUNGED).

Apparently, getting a new mortgage is supposed to increase my ability to handle huge tracts of land.

Posted in Spam | Tagged , , | 3 Comments