Film Review: Troy

The largely talented cast (of many accents) resurrect an extinct form of blockbuster, from a time when the camera tilted upwards as our hero stares off into the distance. Director Wolfgang Petersen handled the battles well, but many dramatic scenes just don’t work and the body doubles get more screen time than the leads.

The highlight comes near the end when Orlando Bloom’s Paris finds his courage, a bow and arrow, and channels his inner elf. He shoots, he scores, you stop hating him, and the movie ends.

Only for a dare.

Hazel update: when asked to identify letters from her wooden alphabet, she gets them all right, except for F, E and P. 🙂

If your site faces heavy load, custom fonts (using @font-face) could bring you down further. The page linked here is, at the time of writing, loading, but the fonts it wants to use (about 10 are linked) aren’t loading because the site is being hit hard. Whereas a normal page might be missing images, because of the custom fonts, this page is blank. A few underlines are shown, but that’s all. Safari 4 bug?

Twelve Fives Hazel HD #01: A Year in a Minute

Here’s the iPhone-friendly version of Twelve Fives Hazel HD #01: A Year in a Minute. That’s five seconds of video from each month in my daughter Hazel’s first year. The second year is almost up and there will be another video in the next month or so.

Tech notes: Though this video is 640×360 — as other HD-sourced movies on this site will be — this video has already been posted in HD to Vimeo and YouTube. Why both? Vimeo is a much friendlier place for original video, but YouTube works on the iPhone. Finally, if you’re using QuickTime Player to create 640×360 from 1080i video, be sure to check “Deinterlace” in the QuickTime Player’s Properties window.

Dreamweaver for Web Design

As I don’t seem to have given this a permanent home, here’s the training manual that I wrote/edited on web design:

Dreamweaver for Web Design

The CSS section is a little thinner than I’d like, but at the end of the book there are many links to useful sites to close that gap.