When The Matrix came out in '99 I was working part-time shifts at my school's Mac Lab as a support-monkey. The day my buddies went to go see it they came back to the Lab and pleaded with me to take-off early and join them for a second screening. I declined, but joined them for their third screening a few days later.

Impressive film to say the very least. We went to the "geekfest 2000" screening in Brookline, MA the next year which was perhaps my favorite movie-going experience to date (though Star Wars at age 3 is a close contender). From the moment Trinity axes the cops in the beginning the crowd was going cuckin' frazy!

So, being that I live in New York these days, and being that Bjørn is travelling all the way from Minnesota to Boston to for the release of Reloaded it's imperative that I make it to Beantown by 1PM Thursday. Steve has purchased 4 sets of tickets for the 1PM and 4:xx PM screenings at the Fenway theaters. That's right, we're seeing it twice.

But I'm not going to be a pussy about getting up to Boston - oh no - Tommorrow morning I'm getting up early, putting on my bicycling shoes, Filling my paniers with sandwiches, climbing aboard my touring bike and heading NorthEast. Being that it's 240 some-odd miles between the two cities, I'm going to have to bed-down for the evening somewhere in Connecticut...

But I'm not going to be a pussy about that either. I'm just going to crawl in to the woods at some point and find some nice pine branches to build a little lean-to out of. I'll cover my head with something so the creepy-crawlies don't bother me, and that's it. I guess I should bring enough materials to insulate my body warmth - it still get's cold at night in the Northeast.

There is no spoon.

Part I: Whatever looks good to PBS (and other, lesser orgs) in my Portfolio

One of my next projects will be to create an interactive world map depicting regions in which the different standardized Unicode scripts are used.

While Unicode.org's lists are informative, they lack a certain... Panache? Usability?

My concept is relatively simple:
An embedded list-field that shows first the block-range of the script followed by the name of the script in its native script. Once selected from the list, the romanized name of the script and its approximate usage in volume will appear beneath the world map, and the surface-area of the Earth that pertains to that script will become highlited on the map.

There are only a few hundred mainstream scripts to contend with, yet I'll need to leave the project open-ended as more scripts become standardized by the Unicode Consortium.

While my initial thought is to use Flash as a platform, I'm unaware as to whether Flash can interpolate Unicode characters in and of itself, or if it leverages the system font engine. I'm guessing the former, which would drive me towards HTML/XML/CSS if Flash don't play nice with Unicode. I could always simply create vectors out of each individual script name to build it in Flash. The tradeoff is between excluding a large percentage of visitors who lack Unicode support in their browsers and that of a larger movie to download (I'm guesstimating around 15,000 individual bezier vectors for the current list). XP and OS X clients would be able to see it properly out of the box if I went with HTML/CSS - beyond that, who knows?

Part II: Visit the Objective C-shore

Beyond that project, I'd like to create an OS X Dockling that allows a *Book user to adjust the whitepoint for the primary display to counteract environmental lighting conditions.

While a simple X or Y axis slider would suffice, I'd like the dockling to pop out with the Gamma Grid of the specific display with a diagonal slider. The panel to do this with 'Display Calibrator.app' uses an X-axis slider with feedback on the whitepoint grid in the form of a tiny cursor.

Currently, a *Book user needs to create presets and select through them to fastidiously adjust whitepoints in the field.

I've been procrastinating Re: learning Objective C, so this should prove to be a good introduction.

I've also been wanting to use the name "Ugly Dockling" for some time, though I don't know if this project would suit the name. Gammaling or Gammling would be the more natural choice I think, but I suppose I'd have to add Gamma control on top of Whitepoint...