l-dopa

…by Dan Le Sac.

A great collection of photos of modern day hobos.

Fantastic compendium of unintentionally funny comic-book panels; rumor has it that some of the panels were nicked from Superdickery, but I can neither confirm nor deny that allegation… nor does it really matter, as they’re all lifted to begin with anyhow.

~jeff

a.k.a. “hold me closer, tiny pancake”

Even if you only have the most rudimentary interest in design (web or otherwise), you should read Khoi Vinh’s “Grids are Good” presentation, and especially check out the PDF. This guy’s a genius, no doubt — he breaks down his entire design process, from start to finish, and uses excellent examples throughout. Highly recommended reading.

~jeff

If you like Pandora, but wish for a bit more control and range, you might just dig Musicovery. Similar concept, but a very different interface, which brings with it a whole new set of advantages and failings.

A couple of days after my post about using disposable credit card numbers to avoid fraud, I got a call from Citi Bank saying that my debit card number had been compromised. The call was out of the blue which was weird, but she didn’t ask for any identifying information. She just started listing off charges I had made on my account, asking if they were legit. They all were, and she said they would be deactivating my card anyway and would send me a new one. She wouldn’t tell me why they thought it was at risk, stating that the security department had reason to believe it was the case. She transferred me over to the debit department to get a replacement card sent out, but my cell phone dropped the call while I was on hold. She called me back and told me it would be a long wait before someone would pick up. She offered me a phone number to call instead, and I took it.

I called them, and while I was on hold, I looked over citi.com in search of a listing of that number. I couldn’t find one. When the guy finally answered, he asked for my card number or account number. I pointed out that I really had no idea who he was, and how could he prove he worked for Citi Bank. He agreed, and pointed me to the customer service number listed on the website. I called them back, and everything was legit. How do I know it was legit? The person who answered was in India. Proof positive, buddy. Anyway, they are sending me a card, leaving me without any access to cash or any idea how this got started in the first place.

Howdy All! In the spirit of shameless ldopa self promotion, this is a plug for a new distraction for myself and a few friends, who just can’t seem stop focusing on food just a weeeee bit too much. As my dad like to say, “Food is love.”

Foodaism.net

I’d also like to invite an of the delightful authors here who would like to post a few thoughts on food to sign up for an account, and I’ll promote you to an author.

~ jesse

You may want to watch Andy Richter’s new show as soon as possible, because it couldn’t be more doomed to cancellation if it were named “Cancellation Island”. It’s good to see Tony Hale again too.

I don’t hate the NBC flash player. It’s nice and big and, for what it is, well-designed. They make you watch one commercial — for TurboTax, appropriately enough — per ten minute segment, which seems about fair.

~jeff

Imagine I want to buy something from a less than big-name retailer online. Could be anything from a custom piece of electronics, to a custom set of mittens. I’m not comfortable giving them my real email address, but for some reason, I hand out my credit card number, expiration date, and security code. If they cared to, they could commit some fun-time credit-fraud, and I just gave them the gun to shoot me.

Why haven’t banks embraced the use of one-time-use credit card numbers? Think about it. You go to your online banking page, request a temporary number, paste it into the retailer’s site. The number works only one time, and could even be keyed to the vendor’s domain. The banks get a great tool for not only preventing fraud, but tracking fraud that may be attempted.

We know they can roll out changes like this to vendors with comparative ease. They implemented widespread use of the ccv code with little noticeable trouble. They could even create a new format for the numbers, and require a new entry field for vendors.

I hear you out there saying, “But Tucker, what you’re recommending means Visa/MC/Amex/Discover have to get together with the various banks distributing their cards and the vendors as well to coordinate this whole thing!” That’s true. But think of the billions of dollars the industry loses to fraud every year. And think of the public relations benefits. I know I would move to a credit card vendor that gave me this feature in a heartbeat.

UPDATE: Apparently, I’m just using the wrong credit cards. Sounds like some banks do offer this, on selected cards.

Honestly, I could play with “Blueprints” all day.

~jeff

Here. Try this. Do a Google search for “ifuckgod”. Here. I’ll do it for you.

What you’ve got there is a guy who, far from having one giant HTML page, is really leveraging Web2.0 to synergize his strengths.

I’m not going to bother wishing that he’d come here and paste his magnum opus into the comments here on L-Dopa, so I’ll paste them down here myself.

It’s… it’s so beautiful. It even ends in mid-sentence. It’s an absolutely flawless work, rivaling that of the great Jon Land himself.

(Thanks to frequent L-Dopa contributor Cauley for finding this.)
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I’ve played around with a lot of these ‘AJAX gallery/overlay’ kinds of things, but GreyBox strikes me as perhaps the most flexible. You can overlay text, pictures, video, animations and even other websites on top of your own page. The author’s Python-powered AJAX CMS ‘Skeletonz’ looks pretty cool too.

UPDATE: also worth pointing out is the nifty new swfIR JavaScript + Flash image enhancement suite. Not to be confused with sIFR, the kind-of-a-pain-in-the-ass Flash font replacement, swfIR will take your pictures and scale them, round their corners, rotate them, and add drop shadows. This stuff is only getting better and better.

~jeff

A few years ago, L-Dopans Jon, Jeff and I went to see the world premiere of the Ballet Mechanique in Lowell Mass. It was a particularly Modern piece of music, interesting and intellectual, and honestly no worse than anything composed by the archvillain of music composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I suspect that these scores aren’t much better in implementation, but they sure are fun to look at.

(Thanks to the eversoawesome Music Thing)