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Amazing how many “people” are sending Facebook messages to the postmaster account, offering helpful links to resources for *ahem* improving uptime.

On a related note:

Google’s Social Graph thinks I own Cute Overload. It seems to treat all LiveJournal syndication feeds as one profile, and I linked to K2R’s LJ feed with XFN.

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Pushing Daisies is being resurrected as 12-issue comic book miniseries! Bryan Fuller tells E! Online:

We got a 12-issue order for a comic book for DC Comics. I think the comic book is great, because it has all the characters in it, and it starts a new story. It’s basically Chuck, Ned, Emerson and Olive versus 1,000 corpses, so it becomes a zombie movie, but the zombies are articulate and smart and can do things that no other zombies can do. The Pie-Maker versus 1,000 corpses. … It’s the movie idea that I wasn’t sure we’d get to do. [The plot] is not really so much the back nine [episodes] as it would’ve been on the television show, it’s a whole new story that wraps everything up in a different context.

Update 2024: Sadly, this never happened.

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While waiting in the 15-items-or-less line at the supermarket to buy a single carton of half & half, and waiting for the person in front of me to process a return (apparently not realizing that the purpose of the express lane is to handle simple transactions quickly, and if checks aren’t allowed, returns certainly shouldn’t be), I hit upon a solution to the problem of people misusing the express lane.

Once someone’s made it to the front, you can’t just send them back and tell them to get in another line, for several reasons:

  • It makes them even angrier than the people stuck behind them already are, making a scene. If it’s an honest mistake, they feel they’re being put upon. And if they’re trying to pull a fast one, they won’t like being caught.
  • Checkout lines are only set up for one-way traffic, so there’s a logistics problem.
  • And there’s that pesky “the customer is always right” meme.

My suggestion: Charge a small fee, maybe 10¢, for every item over 15 or whatever the limit is that you’ve chosen. Post it on the sign and treat it like a late fee. If you want, donate it to some charity so people will at least feel better about it.

  • It’s an economic incentive to discourage people from bringing in too many items and slowing down the express lane.
  • People stuck behind them will feel a little better knowing that hey, at least the dummy with 25 two-liter bottles of soda is getting dinged for it.
  • The line can still move forward smoothly.

Sure, you’ll still get people arguing “I didn’t notice I had 16 items!” (Just pay the ten cents already, and count more carefully next time.) And I’m sure there will be some people full of righteous indignation that how dare the store try to charge them for exercising their right as a consumer! It also won’t take care of people trying to handle returns through the express lane, but I expect that’s a less frequent problem.

So…good idea? Bad idea? Some horrible flaw that I missed? What do you think?

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Neil Gaiman remarked on his blog that images his agent emails from Germany end up with the colors inverted, and posts an example of a Coraline poster:

Coraline (German, inverted colors)

“…ah yes, I thought. That’s the sequel, all right. CORALINE APOCALYPSE”

I used to run into this with TIFF images when building websites. (No big surprise, given that there are a million variations on the TIFF format.) I think it was around 2000 or so that I was working on a website for a law firm, and they sent me their logo. The logo, as I received it, was yellow on light blue, so I built a site with black text on a white background for the main areas, and yellow on light blue (matching their logo) for the title, navigation, and borders.

I sent them a link to the test site. They looked at it, and said it was very nice, but could I try to match the color scheme on their logo instead?

It turned out that red and blue had gotten switched around (and possibly more, because I can’t remember how the yellow ended up in there), but anyway it was supposed to be white on light brown. I switched the channels, redid all the graphics and styles for the site, and they stuck with it for several years.

Back on the subject of Coraline, Gaiman adds in his post that the film has become “the second highest grossing stop-motion film ever” after Chicken Run. So why does it seem to be forgotten already? Just two months ago, commentators were falling all over themselves to say Coraline was the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick. Now everyone’s talking about how Monsters vs. Aliens is the turning point for 3-D animation being part of the storytelling and not just a gimmick.