Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

22-May-2002

Thanx’s!

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 10:11 pm

Nyperold just pointed out to me what may be one of the stupidest spellings/apostrophe uses that I’ve seen in a good while: "Thanx’s!"

I guess I’ll have to extend a hearty "thanx’s" to Nyp on that one… ::sly grin::

Free Postscript fonts

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 12:31 pm

TrueType fonts abound on the web; a quick Google search turns up thousands of hits from both professional and amateur typographers.

But where are the PostScript fonts? They’re harder to find, but they’re out there. To start, the URW foundry has released their set of core fonts into the public domain as part of the GhostScript project. For more exotic designs, you can’t beat Apostrophe or Nick Curtis.

Last, but certainly not least, Adobe and Bitstream have even gotten into the act, releasing the Utopia and Charter fonts, respectively, as freeware. Note, however, that the versions available at that link are for Unix and its clones rather than Windows; however, I’ve gone ahead and converted them to the Windows pfb/pfm format:

Edited 2004-02-05 to add: Using the latest release of PFAedit, which finally produces proper OpenType hinting, I’ve generated OpenType versions of the two above fonts as well:

21-May-2002

Yet another pet peeve

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 11:53 pm

Grah. I hate those incessantly flashing banner ads. I wonder if any epileptic person will ever sue because those ads induced a seizure… 😉

Headlines! Yay!

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 12:06 am

Yay. The Tonight Show’s website has moved, and the official Headlines archive is back!

20-May-2002

The Volvo-Napster connection

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 8:15 pm

Are the music directors at Volvo’s ad agency old-school Napster fans or something? There was a Volvo ad running for a while that used Nortec Collective’s “Polaris” as background music; and more recently, I’ve seen another ad which uses DJ Logic’s “Michelle”– both songs which were heavily touted on Napster’s website back in the day.

Fell in love with a…Lego?

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 1:58 pm

If you thought the Lego animations of Spite Your Face were neat, you’ll really enjoy Michel Gondry’s video for the White Stripes’ "Fell In Love With A Girl".

19-May-2002

A random musing

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 1:28 am

Y’know, I really should start writing down the various amusing quotations that I overhear or, erm, “overread”. Granted, I’m easily amused– but hey, with such sites as InPassing.org and other quote journals, I think it’d be an interesting way of letting others peer into my rather unusual life.

18-May-2002

Arial, Schmarial

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 10:34 pm

I remember, when I got my first Windows machine, having tried to find the Helvetica clone in its font menu. There had to be one, right? I eventually stumbled across Arial, which was the closest thing I could manage to find– yet to my typographically nitpicky eye, it wasn’t close enough. The lowercase a, r and t, the capital G and R, and the number 1— they were all noticeably off somehow. And it annoyed me. Yes, I’m easily annoyed, I know.

It turns out that typographer Mark Simonson agrees with me on this subject; check out his quite interesting article "The Scourge of Arial".

What’s really annoying is that about half the signs on the Mercer University campus are in Helvetica (the older ones) and half of them are in Arial (the new ones). Grr. Am I the only one around here who notices such things?

And incidentally, for more typographical quibbles, check out Simonson’s article "Typecasting" on the anachronistic use of fonts in movies.

16-May-2002

PC Magazine does Middle Georgia

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 11:09 am

Heh. I was browsing through the magazine rack at the local drugstore and decided to look at the Backspace column in the May 21 issue of PC Magazine. The Pizza Hut map caught my eye, but it took me a few seconds to realize what seemed so oddly familiar about it: that’s my hometown being mapped.

And the kicker? Though the two alternate choices were full, dine-in restaurants, the location to which he was directed is a Pizza Hut Express take-out located within a strip mall.

14-May-2002

And yet another daft search request

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 11:08 pm

An even more inexplicable hit from the server logs: freshmen were hypnotized. Wha?!

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