Serenity my ass

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

It's time for another of Jordan's Five Second Disqualifications. This, um, month's winner is Firefly, the beloved Sci-Fi Channel series that was tragically cancelled before its time.

I've seen a few Sci-Fi Channel shows and have always come away unimpressed. I feel like I'm missing some essential creativity gene; I fixate on the shabby sets, terrible lighting and downright awful acting in their shows and wonder who pays the bills around there.

The opening scene of the first episode of Firefly involves a ground war. Do you remember that bit in Terminator 2 where they show the robots in the future fighting the humans? Piles of human skulls, awesome metallic dropships, green lasers and stuff? Wasn't that cool? Now imagine you had to film that scene for twenty bucks and you'll get a good idea of what the start of Firefly was like.

I watched the rest of the episode in stunned horror. This is Firefly, the show everybody and their browncoated mother likes? Did the actors get the script five minutes before the shooting started? Why does the camera zoom in and out in a desperate attempt to get a compelling shot? Did they really put in a sex scene lamer than high class British porn? And why, oh why, is the music written to deliver emotions as bluntly as a club to the head?

I wonder if I should cut them some slack because it's the first episode. Was the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation this poorly acted? Was the X-Files this shabbily directed (also, when did Mulder and Skully get those awesome blue flashlights)? I ejected the Firefly disc three times during my first viewing, gasping for air like I've been dumpster diving. Someone has to explain the appeal of this series to me. Or give me some LSD for my next session.

I didn't get much gaming in this weekend, but I had a good reason: overcome with a desire to start anew, I began reprogramming the Coldfusion framework we use for our sites at Liquifusion. The Fusebox 5.1 framework is out, so I grabbed that and the newest copy of FCKeditor and got to work. My goal this time is to use 100% stored procedures. Given the things Coldfusion does for free, this method is a pain, but the performance boost is astounding. I'm also going with PNGs for graphics and designing the site for Firefox 2, IE 7 and Opera 9 only. With IE 6 in the dust I can pull out many more tricks from my CSS bag.

And I'm wondering how I can make this sound compelling. I poured over thousands of lines of code, spent a dozen hours programming an entirely new login procedure, even adding features to the convoluted Fusebox framework itself. On Sunday things got really interesting as the interface came together. I, uh, "borrowed" the login screen from the new version of Wordpress and got a new icon pack from Icondrawer. As you can see, we're going big with everything. There is always more room on my pages even at the lowest resolution, so I decided to have no more squinting.

Per our company's water themes, the new design and upgraded framework is called Torrent.

• Login screen
• Blank page, I guess
• List with add button (up top)
• Edit screen
• Error message