Author Archives: Brian Alvey

A year and a half ago, Jason and I had tickets for a Foo Fighters show in Camden, NJ. I didn’t know when I got the tickets that Camden was practically a suburb of Philadelphia, but we made the best of it. We drove from Manhattan to Philadelphia, sat at Morimoto’s sushi bar and had an amazing dinner servedContinue reading “Times Like These in Camden”

Doesn’t everyone have one of those friends who swore that if Bush was re-elected that he or she would be leaving America and moving overseas? Maybe you don’t have one of those friends, but you know a celebrity like Alec Baldwin who made a statement like that. Maybe you’ve never heard of Alec Baldwin. MaybeContinue reading “Go Gadling”

One of my favorite childhood movie memories was seeing the first Superman movie. We had been living in Brooklyn, NY for almost a year after moving from Virginia. It was New Year’s Eve and it was snowing lightly. We went for a long walk in Bay Ridge and arrived at a movie theater that wouldContinue reading “You’ll believe a man can fly”

Last weekend we needed a break from work and medical misfortunes, so Niki, Jack and I headed to Connecticut for some apple picking. I could have sworn she said we were going to the “Apple Store,” but it turned out to be an amazing afternoon anyway. Jack ate apples off of trees and had aContinue reading “You can pick your friends and you can pick your apples…”

Amnesty USA picks some pretty cool people to work with. Even Jason used to work with them. Happy Cog Studios started Amnesty’s redesign project nearly a year ago. Even though I have been a “lead developer” on Happy Cog projects, Amnesty already had their own sprawling international content management system and my lone contribution to the project was informationContinue reading “First Peter Gabriel, then Jeffrey Zeldman”

This morning in Norway, two masked armed robbers stole Edvard Munch’s famous movie poster painting of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. There wasn’t much security in the museum — the thieves just plucked the paintings off of the walls and walked out the front door to their escape car. Our local Applebee’s bolts three-dollar postersContinue reading “Munch and run”

Last month, officials at several military bases were concerned about the security risks of a Coca-Cola contest that rigged Coke cans with cell phones and GPS chips. The NSA and Army bases including Fort Knox declared these cans a threat to security and advised engineers and soldiers to examine their soda in advance and to leave themContinue reading “No can do”

Our latest blog, Blogging Baby, covers babies, baby. It’s serious news about kids’ stuff. Early versions of the site featured background audio with Dick Vitale saying things like “diaper dandies” and “bay-bee,” but my meds kicked in and we launched audio-free.

I turned on Blues Clues and it was a huge disappointment. I was expecting a CBS-style drama — like CSI or Without a Trace — starring guitar heroes like B.B. King and Eric Clapton. It turns out the show is about a cartoon dog and a goofy live action guy who solve puzzles with aContinue reading “The thrill is gone”

In a recent comment, the otherwise likeable Photomatt gave me grief for having a single table in my HTML for Weblogs, Inc. layouts: I would love to see the designs stop using table layouts from the late 90s. 😉 The sites actually use a great fluid CSS+XHTML rounded corners layout and were table-free until a few monthsContinue reading “Periodic table usage”