Sunday, June 28, 2009

Fireworks at Gallup, NM

It has been five years since I last drove to Gallup, NM to purchase fireworks. The Latvian and I left Phoenix, Arizona bright and early to make this 10-hour round trip pilgrimage to New Mexico. It was during the same trip five years ago that inspired me to start HanziSmatter.com.

We stopped in Bubba's Fireworks stand, which is a giant tent located in a dirt lot just north of King Dragon Chinese Buffet on Highway 491.

What is interesting about fireworks is that all of them are made in China. Even the patriotic American tanks in Stars and Stripes:



And World War III may start right here on the folding tables between China and US:





Some of the packaging are just mundane, like this Widow Maker:



Excalibur:



and National Treasure:



some are humorous and sliding towards the offensive side:


Can You Handle It? shows a large Black woman with her hair in curlers jumping out of a burning building while three firemen with looks of horror on their faces trying to catch her.


One Bad Mother-in-Law illustrates the harmonious family of a stereotypical White trailer trash.


500 Gram exploits urban blacks on low-rider bicycles displaying their assault rifles. The front man appears to have strong resemblance of Easy-E from N.W.A., Niggaz With Attitude.


Hustler, Warning: shoots flaming balls. Get it? Flaming balls.

My personal favorites are fireworks shaped to be beer mugs and bottles to entice idiots to hold them in hands:





and same time the warning labels tells them not to:



And little suicide packs from boys and girls:




What Boys are Made of, with matching What Girls Want:



Even Britney Spears is endorsing them:



Nothing says Perfect Silence than after you have blown your ear drums:

Sunday, June 14, 2009

HOWTO: Optimize The Daily Show Embedded Videos

One thing I am annoyed about The Daily Show embedded video option is its restriction on video's size.

For example, Boing Boing recently posted about Jason Jones visiting the New York Times on their site using the default HTML code supplied by The Daily Show/Comedy Central.



The width of Boing Boing's main column is set to 500 pixels, however the video does not fully utilize this space, rather it leaves a rectangular void.



The problem is caused by the video's default width & height setting within its HTML code, which is set at 360x301 pixels.

Also, most of the HTML code supplied is irrelevant and has nothing do to with video's function.



To optimize this, only HTML code needed is within the embed tags.



By changing the values in width & height fields, video is able to fulfill maximum column width.



In this case, the video's size increased to 400x335 pixels from its original 360x301 pixels: