We finally took the plunge and signed up with Netflix. We’ve had the HBO/Cinemax thing going for quite a while — and actually we thought once we got the HD DVR it might actually be worth something since we could record the HBO HD feed when they played good movies — but finally determined that they are, with few exceptions, tripe. You could count on one hand and probably have at least the all-important center finger still available for derisive gestures the number of movies on those 22 friggin’ channels that we actually want to watch each month and that’s stretching the term “want to watch.”

I’m currently sitting on 48 items on my Netflix queue. That’s some serious entertainment there.

When bloggers ATTACK!

Not really. Though what you should be fearing is the pending bimonthly redesign. Yeah, I know it hasn’t been that long. But the Kubrick-derived thing I have going here is no longer doing it for me in many ways. I am no designer, not by any stretch. But I have will.

I think our lawyers came up with this. Though by all accounts it has since been rescinded, this was my corporate-mandated email signature as of last year:

“The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting all copies. Thank you.”

I’m sure that we paid these mental giants what my people refer to as beaucoup bucks for this unenforceable, embarrassing missive. Seriously, my normally less than prodigious corporate email output plummeted once this stricture was in place. Because right above it was my name and position and I’ll be damned if someone is going to think that I had any desire for that verbiage to appear anywhere near it.

So, The Superbowl. It’s almost impossible to miss. I truly don’t care about the NFL, couldn’t give a rip about the Eagles or Patriots, have zero chance of naming 3 players on each team. But we watched it for the pure spectacle, as it will probably be the best-produced high-def thing around. Here’s the things that stuck in my mind about this year’s:

• Mustang convertible. ColdForged want.
• Budweiser parachute commercial. That, friends, was humor.
• Some sweet catches by T.O. (he really can play) and Deion Branch.
• That touchdown pass that McNabb threw to Westbrook between two diving defenders. Holy…
• GoDaddy’s busty commercial. 10 to one odds that no one still knows what GoDaddy actually does if they didn’t before.
• Impressive high-def production values throughout. Though where was this vaunted “turfcam?” Or was that the thing that showed a center’s crotch every now and then? If so, rethink the turfcam.
• One part of me, deep down, wanted Paul McCartney — in the middle of his dry, utterly inoffensive halftime set that could just as easily have been broadcast in the 70s with, perhaps, a slight degradation in technology — to simply belt out “thank you Superbowl, you guys are fuckin’ awesome!”
• “Did you hear me? You’re getting robbed.” Seeing people maced, pummeled and shocked just never gets old. Just don’t ask me what the commercial was for. Oh wait, that Mortgage company?
• “Guy holding cat drenched in spaghetti sauce and knife” commercial. Same company, right?
• One of T.O.’s earrings could pay for my aforementioned Mustang convertible. And a nice stereo.
• Final 4 minutes of game time. Did the Eagles simply forget what the score was? “We’re down 10. Common sense dictates we should hurry up. Let’s have a huddle and grab-ass for a while longer.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a successful onsides kick.

UPDATE: The plugin is ready!

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Well, it least not based on looking at my headlines. What you’re seeing up there are, in fact, real soft-shadowed headline titles. Yes, you may swoon, it is allowed. I’ve had the images up there for quite a while, in fact I tweaked an existing plugin in order to get it to work to my liking with my longer headlines. But with the new redesign I’m planning I really wanted to have the option of soft-shadows. So I dived back in and this is what you have now.

Now you know why I seemingly randomly posted a link in the asides recently to a Gaussian blur example. A Gaussian blur — well, a close approximation of a Gaussian-distributed blur anyway — is how I’m generating the shadow effect. I don’t know whether I’ll keep it, really. Hell, I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to keep it as it is quite processor intensive to generate an image so the hosting provider might disallow it (it’s never a good thing to see roughly 99% of one of the server processors chewing on your PHP script). But, the images are cached so once the initial pain is over there shouldn’t be too much processing going on.

Anyone want the code?