Notes From The Abyss, Pt. 1. Television continues to be little more than a distant memory over the holidays—even if there were a lot of good first-run series I’d somehow missed in my hour-a-week habit over the past four months, it wouldn’t matter because they’re all on holiday break. Instead, all that seems to be on the glowing box of doom is holiday programming. That’s right, the most interesting thing on television was the time-honoured Yule Log.One particularly interesting phenomenon, however, is the continuing disintegration of TLC. Once upon a time you could rely on TLC to actually show something interesting, whether they be old BBC shows like James Burke’s Connections or new BBC shows like Desmond Morris’s Babywatching. Then they stopped airing all of their hard science shows (insofar as stuff like Connections and Understanding… was hard science) and started playing one-off documentaries of poorer quality. Even during these lean times, however, there were two shows on the air that make up the entirety of what TLC has managed to get right in recent memory: Junkyard Wars and Trading Spaces.Having utterly laid waste to Junkyard Wars years ago (read: the second TLC actually started taking responsibility for the show instead of letting Channel 4 do everything for them) TLC has finally turned to the gargantuan task of destroying Trading Spaces. First they start a hackneyed Family version, incorporating the one element no one ever liked on a television series: small children. Then, apparently, during this holiday season, they decided to air it non-stop for about two weeks.My father is apparently a big fan of Trading Spaces, enough so that repeated airings of the program is not only tolerable but acceptable. This would explain why, whenever I was within earshot of the living room, it would take all of two minutes to either hear Paige Davis’s voice or the Trading Spaces music. Except, of course, for the six hours a day when TLC would stop showing Trading Spaces non-stop and start airing While You Were Out non-stop instead.If television networks should have learned anything by now, it’s that overexposure is not only lethal, but all too easy. ABC killed the goose that was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? by showing it on four seperate nights, and then went on to do the same to 20/20; that both of these shows deserve an ignomious fate does not cancel out the underlying premise. Same goes for NBC and Dateline. Or Survivor, the best reality show everyone stopped caring about after the one with the cannibalism and the elaborate native pagan worship rituals to the god of the earth. (Season five, I think.)Presumably, at some point TLC will simply bury everything else in its lineup like so much landfill, and air absolutely nothing but A Wedding Story, A Baby Story, A Dating Story and A Makeover Story 24/7. The Story Channel, they could call it.Then we could all start a new Learning Channel, get some guy to make a show about building time machines, and then follow the steps so we could return to 1992 and watch the old Learning Channel again. Or at least make us some SVCDs to bring back to the present.

From time to time people will come up with some great ideas for public transit like up-to-the-minute service updates at bus and streetcar stops. Ingenius! Imagine the convenience of knowing when the next bus was coming, if it’s been delayed, etc. People would love that sort of thing.It takes a couple of seconds to remember that, oh right, public transit systems are apparently not worth funding these days. Every year for the past decade at least, the TTC threatens a fare hike in order to shore up its operating budget; probably about half the time it follows through because every branch of government turns a blind eye. There was a time when the TTC was called one of the finest transit systems in North America, just like there was a time when all Americans could say about Toronto was that the people seemed very nice and the sidewalks were clean.GPS-fueled service updates? I bet Toronto will start seeing those at its bus stops in about four or five decades or so. Still, though, great idea. Maybe if the new deal for cities comes through, it’ll be sooner.

Having jumped back into web design recently for a spell, I have learned one important lesson: the days of using kludges like the one-pixel GIF spacer have not ended. If anything, it’s even worse these days because of the many different things we’re trying to do with web design now.First, we’ve gone from making the HTML horribly complicated using tables to making the CSS horribly complicated using id / class / descendent selectors. This is fine, though; some would have you believe this was the point all along (notably those who scream, seperate your form and content!). Plus, it’s still simpler than the old table-based layout 95% of the time, and if you take the CSS away, the HTML isn’t completely useless.Where things take a turn for the worse is the current state of CSS compliance. Back in 2001, Mozilla’s CSS1 compliance was pretty good, allowing designers to do a great many things with simple markup. By mid 2002, Internet Explorer 6.0 had been released, partially catching up to the open-source browser. Fast forward to late 2003. Mozilla and Opera-based browsers do a pretty decent job of handling nearly all of CSS1 and much of CSS2. Internet Explorer, in the meantime, has not been updated since August 2002 and never will be again in its current form.Take a look at any number of articles describing cool CSS tricks and you’ll find one caveat in many of them: this won’t work in Internet Explorer. In order to make the cool trick work in IE, new workaround code has to be concocted. At best, the new code mimics the function of the old code perfectly, but requires more code to do it. Sometimes the workaround code itself has a caveat: suddenly you might have to know exactly how large an element will be, or perhaps you’ll have to forget about pixel-perfect positioning. At worst, none of this is even an option: Internet Explorer won’t do a thing properly no matter what voodoo you tell it.Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb say it best in their CSS dropdowns article: “The more you use and develop with browsers such as Mozilla the more you realize how pathetic Internet Explorer can be when it comes to web standards.”

If I had known this would surface maybe I would’ve joined Metafilter three years ago. Now I’m just an idiot with questions to ask and answers to give, and no forum to post them in. It’s like being the only kid at Ikea who can’t go in the ballpit because your mother had nightmares about brightly-coloured plastic balls when she was 13. Or something.

So, I was playing Halo yesterday, and I think I’ve figured out the formula the people at Bungie used to make Halo such an exhilirating experience:Bungie Developer #1: Wouldn’t it be awesome if, say, when the player thinks he or she is done with a level, suddenly another level comes up just like it?
Bungie Developer #2: Yeah! Then it’d be, like, three games for the price of one!
Dev #1: Okay, so we’re agreed—repeat cool levels a lot. Then we can, like, even put in funny names for our levels so people will know we added them specifically to enhance gameplay! Like, uh, “But I Don’t Want To Go On The Elevator Again!”
Dev #2: Whoa! That’s so postmodernistic!
Bungie Developer #3: Hey guys, how’s it hangin’?
Dev #2: Ha ha, Bob, you’re always so clever in the mornings! Pull up a chair, we’re discussing how to make Halo kick mucho ass.
Dev #1: Yeah, we’ve got a killer idea you’ll just eat up and—
Bob: Oh, hey, I just came up with an awesome idea in the shower today, just pickin’ the old nozzer and I had this idea just pop in. I’m going out on a limb here, but… what if we made it so the player had to take on a huge army of weird alien things all the time?
Dev #2: You lost me.
Bob: You know… like, every level, the player would get into the cool alien base, and then BOOM! We throw a huge army at them! So many aliens and so many guns the player won’t know what hit ‘em. And if that army gets decimated, we just spawn a whole new one three meters down the hall!
Dev #1: I like… keep going…
Bob: Okay. So, like, we’ve got armies spawnin’ all over the place, left, right and center, and then maybe the player makes it to the end in one piece after passing through all our nifty checkpoints. What do we do? Next level… MORE INFINITELY RESPAWNING ALIEN FIEND ARMIES!Silence envelops the room. Dev #1 looks at Dev #2 for a brief moment.Bob: What? I say something wrong?
Dev #1: Bob…
Dev #2: You’re…The boss enters the room.Boss: …a GENIUS! Bob, you get started on that idea right away! The video game industry will kneel at your feet in unending gratitude for the revolution you’ve started today!
Dev #2: Yeah! Way to go, Bob! UNENDING ARMIES! AWESOME!
Boss: And you other two… repeating level structures over and over again… that ain’t too shabby either.Dev #1 and Dev #2 glow with pride.Boss: But not good enough today. Bob, you can have my office—you deserve it more than I do. You two, clean out your desks. You obviously can’t play in the major leagues like Bob here.
Bob: Well, thank you, sir! It’s an honour—
Boss: No, Bob. It’s an honour working alongside talent such as yourself. With ideas like infinitely respawning alien armies—
Bob: Alien FIEND armies, sir.
Boss: —you’ll go far in this world. Now get to it.
Finally, Audioscrobbler is back up. Hurray beer!

It’s December. This means it’s time for the annual glut of best-of-year lists. December is always the best month—larger-than-life holidays, mammoth Boxing Day sales, best-of-year lists, and sex on New Year’s Eve. Three out of four ain’t bad.Songs For A New Generation
(really cool 2003 songs in chronological order)Rainer Maria, The Awful Truth Of Loving. It’s like a bad diary entry you wrote when you were fourteen: it makes you cringe, you’d never show it to anyone else, and if anyone but you had written it you’d never let that person live it down. Never in a million years would you throw it away or forget it existed, though.Cardigans, You’re The Storm. A Camp to the extreme. This ain’t no Lovefool, and this ain’t no Carnival, and that’s more than okay. It seems somehow impossible to believe this won’t be the last Cardigans album; playing the mature card works for some people, but with the kind of history the Cardigans have had, it seems like Long Gone Before Daylight is the sound of disappearing into the night, or maybe their forties. If this is it for them, though, they’ve done well.Broken Social Scene, Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl. Technically a 2002 release, but most of the world won’t know that. I hated this song when I first heard it—why on earth would anyone ever want to sound the way Emily Haines does on this track?—but one day it all made sense. The one thing I love most about this is how Haines sounds literally like she’s growing up as the track goes on, even though all she does is repeat herself over and over. Impossibly beautiful, and even though I’d come to like many other songs on the album (Leslie Feist on Almost Crimes kills me every time) this was the first and still the best.Throwing Muses, Mercury. And so the Muses come back with a vengeance. If there’s anything wrong with this 2003 comeback album, it’s that it’s too raw, too pounding, relentless in its drive and energy. You can only listen to it for so long before it literally overwhelms your ability to deal with it, but you keep coming back for more anyways. Mercury opens the album with a rollicking intro that deserves to be played loudly out of every car window on the highway.Goldfrapp, Train. Who cares if she jumped on the electroclash bandwagon? Alison Goldfrapp still sounds twenty times better than most everyone else plying the same trade. Her 80s-glitz sex-crazed German cabaret world could easily fall apart if she didn’t sell it so well by sounding so seductive. Like I’ve said before, this is how electroclash should be.New Pornographers, All For Swinging You Around. With the second album, it became clear that the New Pornographers were extremely good at doing one thing: making frenetic high-energy pop music. This was one of the best examples of such.Dears, Lost In The Plot. The last gasp for the Dears? Maybe. End Of A Hollywood Bedtime Story often sounded as though it would fall apart or come apart at the seams, it was so all over the place at times. No Cities Left is more cohesive (or at least Side A is), with only this track threatening to pop like a cork from the urgency and tension.Aislers Set, Emotional Levy. Never bought an Aislers Set album, and probably never will—the last song I fell in love with was early single I’ve Been Mistreated. Amy Linton appears to be fostering a reputation as the San Francisco indie scene’s Phil Spector, minus the crazy. Emotional Levy is far from a wall of sound, though; it’s a pop song stripped down to bare components, driven mostly by a chorus of singers and a pounding bass drum. Somehow there’s more than enough, though, to stick in your mind just the way all great pop songs do.Junior Senior, Move Your Feet. Liquid cocaine for the ears and the feet. The super-awesome pixel-love video certainly doesn’t hurt, either. EVERYONE MUST DANCE.Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Date With A Night. Not quite the Spin poster children, but more interesting than the Strokes. Karen O’s spasm schtick doesn’t work at all (as evidence, try listening to their performance on Letterman, and then watching it—painful) but the songs are still great. And yeah, it did take a girl to point out that Karen sounds like she’s having an orgasm. Somehow I’m okay with that.Dressy Bessy, Baby Six String. Every successive album has seen Dressy Bessy get rawer and rawer, but the pop hooks are still close to the surface even now. Baby Six String isn’t nearly as coy as older tracks, but just as easy to dance and sing along to. Who could ask for more?Basement Jaxx featuring Dizzee Rascal, Lucky Star. Basement Jaxx always had limited appeal for me until Kish Kash. I liked Romeo and Red Alert but little else. Kish Kash, however, was a revelation, and this track was the biggest shock of all. It’s a stormer that takes Romeo’s underlying influences and puts them on steroids. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s frenetic, it’s amazing. It’s more than enough to make me forget Supersonic is also on this album (worst song of the year? all signs point to yes!).Beth Orton, Carmella (Four Tet remix). The Four Tet remixes from The Other Side of Daybreak almost singlehandedly redeem the unfortunate mess that was Daybreaker. Carmella in particular adds the special ingredients the original desperately needed, turning a song too twee to be listenable into something you can put on repeat and listen to over and over.Kylie Minogue, Slow. Time has treated Kylie far better than it has Fischerspooner, showing that she has indeed gotten the better deal from the bargain (see Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World, remixed by Fischerspooner). The minimalist backing on Slow works, and while she probably won’t reach the chart heights of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, she obviously isn’t leaving the stage anytime soon if her Top Of The Pops performance was any indication.Pretty Girls Make Graves, This Is Our Emergency. Another revelation. Pretty Girls Make Graves seem to be in the business of producing the anthems of the indie rock revolution (see Speakers Push The Air for corroborating evidence).

With the impending or recent release of several iPod killers, it seems many people are beginning to ask if Apple’s halcyon two-year run as the undisputed king of portable audio is coming to an end. Already out now is the venerable but recently updated Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, a player with more capacity, better sound and a lower price point than the iPod, but with none of the interface / look and feel characteristics that has made the iPod so desirable. There’s also the iRiver iHP-120, an even clunkier-looking competitor that nonetheless offers a number of features like seamless OS integration, optical in/out and integrated recording that will attract its fair share of users.Closest to the iPod in many ways is the Dell DJ, which mimics the iPod interface closely and offers a similar form factor as well. Its two big selling points: cost (anywhere from $50 to $100 less than the iPod depending on storage space) and battery life (16 versus the iPod’s 8). I bought one because I don’t have the money to spend on an iPod, and the short battery charge scares me.Not long ago, though, the iPod was the one and only player anyone with the money should buy. I used to argue that Minidisc players were superior to MP3 players in that their storage capacity was effectively unlimited, while even the best MP3 players of two years ago could only hold 128MB at most—fine, perhaps, if you bought four or five of them and switched players every two hours. Otherwise you couldn’t convince me that 128MB would ever be enough space for anyone.Where did things go wrong? Competition, mostly. Because the iPod’s success relied equally on technological advances and industrial design, Apple squeezed more market life out of the iPod than most devices ever have a right to see, but eventually the market would become crowded. Part of it, though, must be a certain arrogance Apple always displays whenever one of their products becomes remotely successful. The New York Times Magazine interviewed a number of Apple officials, including Steve Jobs himself for a story on the iPod’s two-year anniversary. It’s a great story—a testament to Apple’s amazing research and development processes, as well as their marketing acumen. It’s also a testament to Steve Jobs’ dismissal of any and all threats to his new music empire.In a sense, Steve Jobs truly is an optimist. He should be right when he says people will pay more for the superior product. Unfortunately, this is not the case all the time. There are obvious weaknesses in the iPod design, most notably the battery issue. The biggest advantage to the iPod, in many people’s eyes, is its fashionista-rivalling weight and size. iPod owners claim other players feel like bricks after you’ve owned an iPod for so long. This does absolutely nothing to convince me, though—iPods are so small that I own calculators bigger than one. If I can save $100 and the worst hit I have to take is carrying around another ounce, I’ll submit to you that I got the better end of the deal.In a perfect world, great design would be king. In this world, sometimes price and mimicry wins out instead. It’s great that Apple plans to continue improving the iPod, for the buying public will expect nothing less. Me, I hope to enjoy my new DJ for years to come.Now if it would only just get here. Damned backorders.