I briefly review a couple of “best Picture” Oscar nominees: http://www.breathingfire.com/movies

Going into geeky web developer mode here:

In a CSS layout, any block-level element that has an outline applied to its :focus state (by default in Firefox and most browsers for accessibility reasons,) and that is also enclosed in a container element that has overflow: auto applied to it (a widely used float clearing method) will potentially break the layout on focus.

The fix for this is to include :focus { outline-offset: -1px; } (or a similar value) in your stylesheet. This fixes the issue in Firefox 3.5.2 Win. More testing to come soon (Opera.)

I watched Avatar in 3D last night, and was underwhelmed. See the movie review.

(also returned the graphics and colors on this website. It might be a few until I can redesign.)

I’ve added reviews for Pirate Radio (just ok!), Step Brothers (meh!), Men Who Stare at Goats (terrible!), and Sherlock Holmes (awesome!) on the Movie Reviews page.

Our NBA Playoffs bracket has proven to be very popular over the last few seasons, and now we’re making it easier than ever to access the bracket goodness!

Just go to NBAPlayoffsbracket.com and you will be taken to the latest in updates (currently for the 2009-10 season, but each year will direct to the current bracket.)

And for our experimental NFL Playoffs bracket, we’ve implemented NFLPlayoffsbracket.com to make that just as easy.

Stay tuned for more announcements soon concerning the brackets and Breathingfire.com!

The 2009-10 NBA season officially began today, and to kick things off right, we’re introducing our 2010 NBA Playoffs bracket!

If you are new to our brackets, here’s how it works: Throughout the season, the current standings are used to create a picture of how the playoffs would be structured if they began on any given day. It’s a fun way to track your team as they fight through 82 regular season games on their march to the Playoffs. The bracket is updated automatically with the conclusion of each game (refresh to see the changes after the games conclude.)

When the Playoffs arrive, the bracket will be updated with each team’s wins, along with game times and scores.

View the 2010 NBA Playoffs bracket now! If you have any comments or suggestions, please comment on this post. Thanks for visiting!

Breathingfire.com is known for its popular NBA Playoffs bracket, and now we’ve reached into the world of the NFL to bring you live playoff-placement coverage all season.

During the regular season, the 2010 NFL Playoffs bracket is updated live as games finish, giving you an idea of where your favorite team(s) are in the Playoff picture. During the Playoffs themselves, the bracket will be updated with scores, and winning teams will advance along the tree.

We recently completed a total overhaul of the bracket CSS (our brackets are 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1, of course,) so the bracket looks a little bare at the moment. But we will be sprucing it up over time. But the main theme of these brackets is quality over quantity and usability over flash.

If you have suggestions for how we can improve this or any of our brackets, please let us know by leaving a comment below. Otherwise, check out the 2010 NFL Playoffs bracket!

Note: We’re still working on getting the standings correct, as the current seeds are not lining up right. We’ll update this when we have that fixed.

…and no, this isn’t Naked Day.

I removed the graphics from this page because I was sick of looking at them after a year and a half. It was looking stale and amateurish as well.

I’ve played with some different designs over the past couple of months but haven’t gotten anywhere solid yet. I’ve got some big changes coming up in the next couple of weeks (in real life) so I’m not sure if I’ll have time to make things look better here during then or not. We’ll see.

In the meantime, you get white! (and a hideous logo. Wow that sucks.)

In an attempt to save what was really in the whole of the universe and life a measly amount of money, I recently bypassed the wonderful and tasty boxes of cereal for the bag cereal. Yeah, you know, the bag cereal.

I thought, “Hey, here’s this giant 2 lb bag of cereal, for this low, low price. That should get me through quite a few days. More than that micro box of Life for $4.99, for sure. So what if it has a giant circus elephant on the front? Once I get past utter embarrassment at the checkout line, I’ll be fine. I can have yummy cereal all the time now thanks to this giant bag!”

Ha, yeah, all except for the yummy part. My mom brought me up better than this.

I bought the circus elephant equivalent of Cheerios. I could have gone with “Magic Shapes” or “Fruit Whirls,” but I thought “nah, I’ll stay healthy with ‘Toasted Oats.’” Oh my God they were the grossest thing ever. You know how Cheerios are like actual, rounded donuts of toasted whole grain oatey goodness? Well, someone let the air out of “Toasted Oats” and forgot to add the goodness. Instead I get fried, soggy wetness, and flat withered discs of sort-of oatey material.

Never, ever again. Cereal is expensive, but so is health care. I’m so sorry body, for putting you through 2 lbs of that stuff. I’ve bought some real Cheerios and some real Lucky Charms so that we can be friends again. Let’s go grab our new friend Mr. 2% Milk and chill together.

* munch-munch-munch *

Mmmmm, talking bees and leprechauns FTW

Between applying for six friggin’ jobs today, I made some major improvements in how I use my MacBook Air. This included adding some programs and doing this and that here and there:

• I used to swear by NetVibes for reading feeds from my favorite websites. I still think it’s pretty nice, but I’ve officially made the switch to Google Reader. The thing is, I’m not really sure why. Maybe it loads faster? Maybe I didn’t need my web stories all grouped neatly by website, but rather like them in one big list. Maybe I didn’t think Google owned enough of my life. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. But I like it, and I’m sticking to it. So I’ve been using that website for a while, but today I downloaded NetNewsWire, a desktop application for reading news feeds that now syncs with Google Reader. So it’s much prettier than the GR website, and is probably faster. I’m giving it a try.
• I dropped the standard Google Gmail Notifier, which did not support multiple accounts, and replaced it with Gmail Notifr which does support multiple accounts and checks those accounts more often.
• Lacking a Microsoft Office installation, I downloaded the trial for Office 2008. I have 30 days to come up with $1000 or whatever it is to pay for it now.
• Downloaded an excellent application called Burn which is free and does much of what the $100 Roxio Toast does (which is burn DVDs.) Love it.
• I’ve officially switched from Adobe Dreamweaver to Panic’s Coda for web development. Gee, I’ll actually use most of the stuff in Coda!
• It was a couple of weeks ago, but I used GarageSale to post an item to eBay. It was a very nice experience. I’m not sure if it’s worth $35, but if I did more eBaying it might be.
• Paparazzi is a very cool little app that I’ll be using to take screenshots of websites.

I guess that’s about it, but it was a fair amount of researching and downloading and testing different versions of each application to see which I liked best.  Ok, I’m tired of staring at this computer now so I’m going to go fiddle around in the garage like I know what I’m doing.