Brian Alvey

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 posters to the wall so they don’t get stolen. But a $75 million painting is just hanging on a wire in a museum in Norway and “it took a long time for the police to come.”

Isn’t it enough to make you want to, oh, I don’t know, shout?

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 them at home if they contained any of this eavesdropping technology.

Now that’s not practical for a caffeine addict like myself. You can’t open a can of Coke at home and expect it to still be fresh when you get to work. A caffeine addict’s motto is: never open a two-liter bottle that you can’t finish today. Tomorrow morning, it’s just not the same. It’s well on its way to flat. It has lost that certain, oh, I don’t know what, but I know the French have a nice way of putting it.

Anyway, caffeine addicts don’t really drink tiny little cans of soda and that’s not my point.

Well, they finally figured out what was going on. It had nothing to do with cell phones or GPS chips. Somebody was worried that if you put two cans of C2 next to each other, you get C-4.

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 a notebook and a pencil. There’s also some kind of controversy about whether the new guy is the old guy’s brother. Great.

I was told that my great-grandmother had a similar experience in the seventies when she tuned in to watch Charlie’s Angels and it was a bunch of women in bikinis fighting crime — not the religious program she was expecting.

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 months back.

The trouble is (when you run a real-world CMS at a company that needs to work as a business) there are still some browsers that suck at using CSS for layout.

Just because a site shows seven sample CSS column layouts that work with 50 words of Lorem Ipsum dummy text doesn’t mean that they won’t break in spectacular ways when bloggers jam 600px wide images into a 400px column or when someone types the letter “g” 700 times in a row without a break in a comments form. Both situations blow apart CSS “columns” and neither one does the same damage to a layout that has a wrapper table. Browser support for min-width is probably 10% (meaning everyone but IE) and I’d love to have a table-slamming, standards-championing site here and say that IE isn’t the best browser for viewing our sites, but that’s not practical.

If you save this page and remove the wrapper table, there’s a great structural design at work. But I finally gave in and put a table around the columns when I saw the following happen in IE:

1. At a certain width (or with certain content), the content column would drop down below the floated right-hand navigation column and readers would have to page down three times to see content. (That means they’re leaving the site since they think it’s empty.)
2. Shrinking (not expanding!) the window, the content would miraculously find the room it needed to come back up and sit next to the navigation column.
3. Shrinking the window a little more, the content would no longer have enough room to fit next to the navigation.

How is a designer supposed to code for that?

My readers are more important than the year I’ll spend in purgatory for using a single table in an otherwise modern layout.

I’ve already decided that if/when we redesign, I’ll be using the same compromise/cop-out that every other marvel of standards design uses these days: a fixed-width layout.

Since my blog is one of the top results for searches on “man I feel like a woman chevy commercial” (okay, it’s the number one result), I figured I should be the one to announce our newest Weblogs, Inc. site: Autoblog.

It’s packed with news for anyone interested in cars, trucks and everything in between and we’ve got some talented (car-obsessed) bloggers feeding the system a steady stream of great entries.

I was on a site that still serves banner ads earlier today — one of the ten remaining sites that hasn’t switched to Google AdWords — and I saw an ad that started out completely white. Slowly a bunch of letters rotated in place to reveal the message, “Seize the week.” In the next frame, they were replaced by a Business Week logo.

I was shocked. Not because the ad had been poorly resized, but because I made that ad — probably five years ago — and I hadn’t seen it since. It was like a reunion or a message from the great beyond…

So, with about four hours remaining, I decided that I was going to seize the week.

I remember it like it was yesterday:

“On May 17, 1814, the Norwegian Constitution was signed, giving Norway independence from its 500 year union with Denmark. That request came from his wife. Deep down he knew she was right. But he also knew that someday he would return to her. With nowhere else to go, he appeared at the home of his childhood friend, Sweden. Sometime earlier, Sweden’s wife had thrown him out, requesting that he never return. Can two Scandinavian countries share a border without driving each other crazy?”

Happy Norwegian Independence Day!

As I watched Derek Jeter toss a ball to a young Yankees fan who was sitting front row at Fenway Park this afternoon, I imagined that the kid might go home thinking Derek Jeter is his new best friend. Maybe he’ll get calls from Derek on his cell phone, but Derek will have to suddenly get off of the line before any of his friends can get on and talk to the celebrity shortstop.

It reminded me of the weekly email I get from someone who found my Meet The Makers interview with Darby Conley and needs me to help get them in touch with their favorite cartoonist.

Darby and I talked for a little over an hour one afternoon. His syndicate never gave me his number. He called me and I never checked the Caller ID. The email address I have for him is the same AOL address everyone else has, but if I hear from him, I’ll let him know that you need to get in touch with him. And yes, I had a blast talking to him.

One of the first things they teach journalists (and groupies) is the difference between having a good one-time-thing and being in a relationship.

The second reminder was Niki IMing me today’s Get Fuzzy for a little pick-me-up, laugh-out-loud Sunday Bucky.

Darb? If you’re reading this, please call. I miss you!

In November of 2001, I was the best man in a wedding at The Ocean Club in the Bahamas. It was scheduled to be an outdoor wedding, but a hard rain was falling and a hurricane was only days away. The hurricane would hit after we had safely traveled home and wipe out enough of the club that the honeymooning couple would have to relocate to Atlantis.

What do I remember most about that weekend?

Was it Megan dancing with the waiters? No. Watching the World Series in November? Nope. The DJ playing “Mandy?” Guess again. Damien’s never-ending toast? Honestly, if you hadn’t mentioned it, I would never have remembered that he was at the wedding.

Was it The Dune Breakfast? Dude, no fair. You read the subject line. Yes, it was The Dune Breakfast! (Sorry, Megan.)

I ate The Dune Breakfast two mornings in a row at the Dune restaurant. It arrived on a large black plate and consisted of three little mini-breakfasts. One was French Toast with mango sauce. Wow. The second was Eggs Benedict, which on its own would have been a top notch breakfast. The final member of this all-star team of breakfast foods was a potato pancake topped with sour cream and lox. I’m getting teary-eyed just describing it to you.

Since that trip, The Dune Breakfast has been the gold standard to which all other breakfasts are compared and only one breakfast food has challenged its status: the McGriddle.

You know how you go to McDonald’s and you want a McMuffin kind of sandwich, but you also want pancakes and you don’t really want to get the Deluxe Breakfast, which has pancakes, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns and one of those nasty biscuits? Well, McDonald’s had this genius idea called the McGriddle where they make muffins out of pancake batter and inject them with syrup. So you’re eating a pancake sandwich stuffed with sausage, eggs and cheese. Brilliant!

I was eating a McGriddle recently and I realized that I now liked McGriddles more than The Dune Breakfast. Was it because two and a half years had elapsed since I had eaten a Dune Breakfast or was the McGriddle really a superior meal?

I started planning an Ocean Club trip. I clicked several levels deep into their Flash-based Web site to find the Dune restaurant. It had some photos, but no details from the menu.

Then I decided to check out the McGriddle on McDonald’s Web site. What a big mistake.

The nutrition facts for Sausage, Egg & Cheese McGriddles reveal some disturbing information about these sandwiches. Based on a 2,000 calorie diet — and best I can tell they’re talking about 2,000 calories for breakfast alone — a single McGriddle only provides me with 86% of my daily cholesterol requirement. How do I get that missing 14% and meet my breakfast nutrition goals?

When I tell you that the McGriddle has taken the place of The Dune Breakfast in my heart, I mean it literally.

I have to get back to building features for our Weblogs, Inc. sites. I have a renewed sense of urgency and a new goal: get more done so I can take time off and visit the Ocean Club again ($450-750 per night) and eat more Dune Breakfasts ($30 each as I recall).