Stefan Hayden

Bespin updated and they seem pretty excited with the project. I was excited with Bespin when I first heard about it but it has yet to really solve the problem I was hoping they would tackle. I really wanted a TinyMCE or FCKeditor replacement where I can just drop some JS files in my webroot and then plug Bespin in to textareas on forms. There has been a ticket to do that for a while and it seems like they have written it but didn’t seem to make it out this build.

Bespin is still young and has a lot of growing to do. Right now their focus is on developer tools and making Bespin very customizable. I’m sure this will give Bespin a solid foundation to move forward with.

I hope that they shift their focus from education developers how to customize to educating people who make webpages how to easily get Bespin up and running and why they would want to. Some easy things to do would be to offer a download of just the needed scripts to run and not a tar ball with python generators. Or even have a big download button instead of a small link that leads to a server generated index of files.

I always think jQuery is a great place to look. They put a lot of focus educating people how easy it is to use but also build what seems like a strong community of developers. Bespin is awesome and I think I just needs to better focus it’s marketing message.

The current numbers for the amount of oil leaking in the gulf before June 3rd have just been updated to up to 40,000 barrels a day. That’s a large number but I really think it’s hard to put in to perspective.

A good way to put that in context is to compare it to the amount of oil the USA uses a day. The US Energy Information Administration says the USA in 2009 used 18,686,000 barrels of oil a day (chart).

(18,686,000 / 24) / 60 = 12,976 barrels a minute

40,000 leaking barrels a day / 12,976 = 3.08 or 3 minutes and 4.8 seconds

So while that’s a lot of oil, it’s only a small fraction of the oil we use a day. Even over the whole 47 days between April 20th and June 6th only 2 hours and 25 minutes of oil were spilled.

I’m not saying that it’s not a catastrophic disaster but every day we pollute by several magnitudes more and it’s good to keep these things in perspective.

Awesome new mini-series with some of my favorite actors. sadly no rss feed.

I’m a big fan of Donald and I’d love to see him get Spiderman (as well as some side campains) but america is still so bad at talking about race that there is an odd dialog going on.

The big question seems to be “why go black?” and “does it make a difference?”. These questions seem to just be a failure of imagination to me. It’s as if people are expecting the exact same movie with just a black lead. And to me that would be a tragedy.

Race matters and should have an effect on the story. Different cultures have different perspectives and viewing those through a prism of a well known tale is a great way to talk about those experiences. This is even more interesting as comics have oftain been a haven of white only characters and have made grave missteps trying to represent other cultures. Hollywood is obviously not the kindest to other cultures but still comes off as worldly compared to comic books.

I hope Donald gets the role and I hope it had a meaningful impact on the story. I hope it’s a success and has broader impact on comics and how we view races other then whites as lead roles.