The irony being that an important part of eating healthily is knowing what you’re eating, yet I have no clue what the hell these things are.

They are wrapped in brown plastic, so they look like a candy bar. But they don’t say things like CHOCOLATE on them. Judging by the front of the package alone, it is ‘XoBiotic’ which — according to my rusty etymology skillz — ‘Xo’ means alien or other, and ‘biotic’ means living. Which would make this alien anti-food. What has a name that starts with X that isn’t followed by “The Conquerer” or “Space Mercenary”?

The second artifact is an “Xoçai MEGA” which — an X and a cédille? It’s a name better suited to a Quebecer’s fighting robot than a piece of candy. Maybe the MEGA means it’s for body builders? Does Creatine come in chocolate?

What other clues are there? It has 750mg of Flavonoids, which doesn’t do anything to quell that uneasy alien feeling. Is that a lethal dose?

It also has a staggeringly low or high ORAC VALUE of 5,100, which would be helpful if I knew what that meant. The only word I do understand on this thing is ‘Squares’, but as the package seems to actually contain one rectangle, I’m not convinced of that, either.

Flip the item over and find a note that *ORAC & Flavonoid values may vary. So it would seem the ORAC value is only accurate to two significant digits.

What flavor is it? The second item has orange slices on it, so that’s easy to assume, but the first block has green bubbles. Mint? Algae? Organic soap? Maybe it’s just decoration, since nothing else on this package gives a clue to the enigma inside.

Whom is it made by? The back label says it’s from Brunswick Labs, which is a peppy name for a candy company. Or maybe it’s just certified by Brunswick Labs, meaning it has been tested to contain no more than the maximum number of xenomorph spores safe for human consumption?

No wait, that is just the inspector. It is produced by MXI Corp, of the ominously generic Trademark Drive, Nevada. David Cronenberg, meet your chocolatier.

Although the texture is like pressboard, and I’m guessing the taste is akin to tree bark, I have not completely ruled out eating one of these things.

Circled: Sure you don't want the Gorillaz Experience instead?

Also, I have a feeling the online experience, access to a live broadcast, online game and other extras listed on the Experience CD+DVD are the same extras offered with G-Club. Looks like Gorillaz are double-dipping their fanbase.

Purchasing options for 2010’s Plastic Beach:

• Full (though hardly complete) album
• Album with two extra bonus tracks and DRM (works only in iTunes)
• CD with making-of DVD for twice as much as the album (without bonus tracks)
• A modestly-priced Japanese version with one of those aforementioned extra tracks
• And let’s not forget £25 for the privilege of buying tickets earlier and 25% off merch.

Reject false icons. But first stop at our online store.

Listening to him recall his sound engineer work at Apple, he is one part Dwight Shrute and one part Bill Hicks. I simply love his candor, honesty and frankness when talking about his work, his industry, his coworkers …and all the little blunders they never quite thought through.

Grounded employees like this are a valuable asset to keep a project on the rails, and simply to keep people from developing really bad ideas. I can only hope to aspire to be as much of an incisive crank as Reekes.

Here he is again talking to One More Thing about the Mac’s startup tone. (You haven’t gone crazy, the introduction is in Hungarian.)

OMT in San Francisco #3: ‘Let it beep’ from One More Thing on Vimeo.

…and now you know the origin of Sosumi.

So far we have:

• an Alien remake
• an animated Dark Star
• a topical documentary that can be good if it can get past its indulgent, utterly twee, cutesy-poo blogger idea of “humor”
• a movie that got picked because it looks like Moon
• a vampire movie
• yet ANOTHER re-imagining of the vampire mythology
• Kick-Ass (a movie produced by a Hollywood studio — so why is it as SxSW? Street cred?)
• a movie based on an SNL sketch

“Pfft. I was over this stuff before I’d even heard about it.” Yeah, I know these gripes must smack of hipster one-upmanship, but none of these films look particularly moving, original, or good.

http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

How many versions of Photoshop and Adobe CS have come out since favicons have been popular? There has to be some reason beyond me responsible for this lack of support. Either that or this is some kind of bizarre blind spot on Adobe’s part for making one of the most ubiquitous and simplest images on the web.

I propose a new solution for developing web pages: start with HTML. Imagine you are developing a clean, informative page for Mosaic. Only once your HTML is done do you start mucking it up with CSS. Have we forgotten this is the way style sheets were intended to be used? We’ve let them be perverted to add rounded corners, fix IE bugs, and even add arbitrary spacing. Your CSS will be much cleaner and more meaningful if you start with the information as the structure, and then build on that.

This is a common theme in the community. You can kludge your way to victory with just about any feature set you can think of if (and only if) you write enough hook_$n_alter() code, can find some contrib modules to pick up the slack, and have a designer who can code php tucked in your back pocket

Freeman’s states that the reason Drupal failed to win CMS of the year over Wordpress is because Wordpress is simply easier to use.

What I believe is called for here (and installation profiles are definitely on the right track) are larger full-feature modules that implement 100% of a common feature (forums, image galleries) with no requirement to install a bunch of add-ons.

Yes and yes. Drupal has gotten too scattered in its feature set and forgotten what people actually use it for. Image galleries, WYSIWYG editors, forums, profiles — make these part of the core system, or such that developers don’t need three and four modules working together just to do one thing.

UPDATE! Case in point: my Wordpress database has 10 tables. Drupal? 116. Yes, it does more, but eleven times more?

If it’s the case that anyone can direct a film, then it’s also the case that anyone can not direct a film. “I know stories about very well-known figures who are revered for directing films and who basically do nothing,” [Nick James, who edits film magazine Sight & Sound] tells me. “They just put their name on it at the end.” Is this a problem? According to James, there is a simple formula for making a film. “There are two things to get right at the start: the casting and the shot-list. After that you can basically sit back. The fact is, there aren’t too many directors who know anything about light metres or camera lenses. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Two things to remember: get casting and pre-production right. Also, from the Leadership and Project Management class I’m taking, it looks like directing is more a matter of project management than of being behind the camera. …or is that producing?