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Rob Griffiths

A unique way to watch a basketball game

Last night, my wife and I attended the annual OMSI Gala, the main fundraiser for OMSI, which is our amazing local science museum. Through a bad quirk of scheduling, however, the event nearly directly overlapped game six in the Portland-Houston NBA playoff series, which was being played all of three miles up the road.

Game six was a biggie for Trailblazer fans, because Portland had a chance to win the series. For those who don't follow basketball, Portland's recent playoff history is not good—they hadn't won a first-round playoff game in 14 years, in fact. And if we lost game six, we'd have to win game seven in Houston to continue…not a very likely outcome. So while it was definitely do-or-die for Houston, it felt the same to Trailblazer fans; a loss probably meant the end of the series for us, too, though it'd take one more game to finalize it.

Knowing the importance of the Trailblazers to Portlanders (we have but three top-tier professional teams here; the MSL's Timbers and NWSL's Thorns being the other two), the OMSI event organizers did something very cool: they opened the Empirical Theater, home to a four-story-tall massively-wide screen, at the end of the event. That way, those interested could see the end of the game before driving home.

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WordPress and the Media Manager

WordPress has an impressive built-in Media Manager to help manage photos and screenshots used in posts. It includes a slick multi-file upload tool, drag-and-drop support, basic photo editing, automatic image resizing, simplistic galleries, and it provdes full control over how images are positioned in posts.

Despite all that, I rarely use it, and actively avoid using it as much as possible. I know, I just said it's wonderful. So why don't I use it? And why might you want to consider abandoning it as well? (Note that this will be much easier to do if your site is just starting out, as opposed to being well established with hundreds of images in the Media Manager.)

While the Media Manager has a number of minor interface issues (in particular, browsing large collections of images is a real pain) that make using it harder than it should be, there are two main issues that drove me away from it: poor organizaiton and a lack of portability.

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Watch It: A Fish Called Wanda

A Fish Called Wanda Blu-rayA Fish Called Wanda (1988) is an entertaining movie (wonderfully written by John Cleese) with an all-star cast (Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin). The movie starts with the gang pulling off a jewel heist, and from there, it quickly evolves into a tale of double-crossing and trickery as each member of the gang tries to outwit the other to steal the loot.

I won't go into the plot more than the above; it's more fun to watch when you don't have any idea what happens. I will add that the scene in the barrister's house involving the necklace is 15 minutes of pure comic mayhem. The cast all do a great job, but Kevin Kline really steals the show with his performance as, well, you'll have to watch.

One minor note: the humor here is clearly adult, so send the kiddies off to bed before starting the show.

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When the music really matters

If you follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen my #WKRPFlashback hashtag in action: I'm rewatching the original WKRP in Cincinnati comedy series, first aired from 1978 through 1982, and tweeting out the occasional funny moment.

For those who don't know, WKRP in Cincinnati is all about radio: WKRP is a fictional AM station in Cincinnati. Given that premise, music is obviously an integral element of the show. You'll hear songs used as transition bits in the broadcast booth, and occasionally as background music playing over the station's speakers. You'll also hear the actors discussing the songs, mentioning titles and artists with regularity.

The songs also work their way into plot lines:

The songs were often tied into the plot of the episode, and some pieces of music were even used as running gags. For example, the doorbell to Jennifer's penthouse apartment played "Fly Me to the Moon" (which was later replaced by "Beautiful Dreamer" due to copyright reasons). [Wikipedia]

Here's one example of how songs and plots were tied together…

That's a clip from "Patter of Little Feet," in which Mr. & Mrs. Carlson discover that they're about to be parents again, very late in their married life. Mr. Carlson has asked Venus to play something "soft and sweet." Venus chose The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun," which is funny in a few ways, given the context. The end result is a short, poignant scene with a fairly funny audio joke thrown in. And that particular song is obviously integral to the scene.

As you can see (and hear), music was a very important element of the show—and that's where the troubles begin, at least relative to trying to watch the shows years later.

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Use one image to link to WordPress galleries

Note: If you're not running a WordPress blog and using its built-in gallery feature, the following will be of no interest to you; it's posted here mainly to make it easier for me to find in the future, when I forget it once again.

WordPress includes a simple-but-usable gallery feature. Unfortunately, posts with embedded galleries display a thumbnail for every image in each gallery—and there are no options to limit the display of thumbnails. While fine for shorter galleries, such as this one, if you've got a lot of images, this can make for an ugly page.

What I wanted was the ability to include an image gallery in a post, but not show a thumbnail for every picture in the gallery. Ideally, I'd just be able to use the first image from the gallery, or perhaps even a text link. After a lot of fruitless searching, I finally found the very simple answer in a post by malissas in this thread.

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Apple’s Q2 2014: A graphical look

I've been tracking and updating Apple's financial results for many years, and have a number of charts that I update each quarter. I don't do much with them, other than stare at some of the numbers in amazement, but they do show some very interesting trends.

If you like numbers (really big numbers) and trends and graphs, perhaps you'll find these of interest, too. There are 10 charts in all; click on the first one at right to start the pop-up slideshow. (You can expand images within the slideshow by clicking the icon at the top right of the window. Note that some of these are really wide!)

Here's what you'll see, in order: Sales Mix for the "Big Four" products; overall revenue and profits by same quarter by year; iPad, iPhone, iPod and Mac units sold by same quarter by year; and those same four categories by year.

I'll post updated versions each quarter, and like this time, without any financial analysis: lots of people get paid money to discuss and guess on that subject; I just enjoy looking at the numbers.



My iMac’s literal bug

Another lost-to-Google-policies Tweet movie; this time, about a bug in my iMac that was lingering after 24 full hours.

The bug, of course, was a real one; here's the video that's vanished from the above tweet:

Thankfully, the little buggy vanished not soon thereafter, thankfully not remaining onscreen for eternity.



Amazingly fast garage door opener

I posted this to Twitter a year or so ago…

Unfortunately, just after I posted it, Google decided that YouTube accounts also had to have Google Plus accounts, so I closed my YouTube account. So here's the video of those fast garage doors at our local Toyota shop.

These doors are tall, yet roll up in under a second; they come down nearly as quickly, too. The end result is that the service bay entrance area isn't exposed to the elements for any length of time at all.



On the effect of stock splits

As a finance guy by training, I've always been fascinated by stock splits, such as the incredibly-rare seven for one split Apple announced yesterday. First off, just how rare is a seven-for-one split? Incredibly rare; since 1980, there have been only three splits bigger than that; all were ten-for-one splits.

By the books in Finance, a stock split adds no value to a person's shares, because it's simply a redivision of their current holdings. Consider someone holding 100 shares of Apple at yesterday's closing price of $524.75 per share:

  • Pre split: 100 shares * $524.75/share = $52,475.00 value
  • Post split: 700 shares * $74.9643/share = $52,475.00 value

The Finance books look at that, and say "no change in value, ergo, a stock split has no intrinsic worth." And they're right; there's been no change in value for any investor's holdings. But studies done over the years have shown that stock splits do have a positive impact on investor's holdings:

A 1996 study by David Ikenberry of Rice University measured the short and long-term performance of stock splits. His research included all the 1,275 companies whose stock split 2-for-1 between 1975 and 1990. Mr. Ikenberry compared the split stocks to a control group of stocks for similar-sized companies in similar sectors that had not split. His results were startling. The split stock group performed 8% better than the control group after one year, and 16% better after three years.

Why might that be? I'm sure the studies have detailed financial models to back up their findings, but to me, it boils down to two things…

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Behind the scenes: WordPress plug-ins, take three

This marks the third (one, two) in a continuing series of occasional posts about the plug-ins I use to run the site. Since the last update, things have changed a bit.

  • For various reasons, I've had to disable GrowMap Anti-Spambot and Stop Spammers. Anti-spam services are now provided by Akismet, JetPack's comments plug-in, and Sabre.
  • Sliding Read More also bit the dust, because it wasn't compatible with WordPress' built-in Gallery feature.

So much for out with the old…read on to see what's been added…

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