Our cheeseburger fridge

Is looking pretty sweet.

Big Blue

It is just over a week since the New York Football Giants pulled out one of the greatest victories in the history of professional sports in truly incredible fashion. It was exactly one week ago that the world’s greatest city celebrated the world’s greatest football team with a genuine New York ticker tape parade through the famed “Canyon of Heroes.” ExpandTheRoom was out in full force – a tidal wave in the sea of blue maniacs. A few of us made it through the crowds to the office of good friend Dr. Douglas Fredman, where we got an eagle-eye view of the parade at the corner of Broadway and Dey. It was a day that none in attendance will ever forget. Here are some of our shots from Tuesday, February 5th when 7 million + people filled the streets and bars of the big apple to celebrate the SUPERBOWL XLII CHAMPION NEW YORK GIANTS! GO BIG BLUE!

ETR’s hockey team has made the playoffs!

We’re getting our blades sharpened and doing calisthenics at 6AM every morning in preparation of the big series. Come watch us skate and fight our way to victory (seats are cheap…very cheap and they allow beer in the stands). Check back often as we’ll post the playoff schedule soon. In the meantime, see our captain and some of his words of wisdom.

First!

In this picture, you can see 11 people photographing a football player who is, in turn, taking his own picture of them:

Only one sad fan is actually raising an index finger to show his support for the New York Giants.

Is taking a picture with your cell phone the equivalent of posting "First!" as a comment on a message board or blog? Just something you do to create a digital record that you were there?

Yet people are lining up to feel that sense of connection and interaction. Now matter how many filters you create to get rid of spam and other meaningless user comments, you can't stop people from trying to be a part of your community.

Especially if the parade or website provides them with a distraction from their job for an hour or two.

Running Internet Explorer 6 on Mac OS X

Can you run Internet Explorer on a Mac? Can you run Windows on a Mac? Sure. Many by now are aware of Bootcamp and Parallels...But what if you don't want to load an entire operating system just to run Internet Explorer which you are only running to make sure your web page looks the same on all browsers? What then?

Good news. You're not stuck. You can in fact run Internet Explorer 6, 7 and many other Windows executables on your Mac without loading Windows! This cuts out the extra overhead and keeps things running faster. It also doesn't require you to launch Parallels or restart with Bootcamp just for a quick check.

There's a handy project called ies4osx. This uses Darwine, a port of Linux's wine emulator that lets you run Windows applications in Linux. So you actually can run other Windows applications as well.

Where's the catch?
Ok, so there is one. You need an Intel based Mac to do all this. A minor catch. However, after running 3 installers you're pretty much ready to go. You need the X11 terminal (found on your Mac OS X system disk) and then you drag Darwine into your Applications folder and finally you can run the ies4osx installer that will do all the leg work of setting up IE for you -- it even creates shortcuts for you in your Applications folder (that you can throw on your dock).

Is it really Internet Explorer?
Yes. It renders the same. Don't believe me? Look at the screen shot in this article. I compared Internet Explorer on the Mac to Internet Explorer on the PC (running a remote desktop application called VNC). The only slight difference is in resolution between the VNC window and the Mac's resolution.

Why not just use VNC? I suppose you could, but it requires a physical Windows PC machine and the VNC software. It's also slow because you're sending instructions for keyboard/mouse over a network.

Two Worlds Colliding.
Before you start cheering about how wonderful your Mac is...Note that a PC can also run OS X. There's some interesting things out there as the two worlds come closer and closer together. All the hardware is becoming the same. So why wouldn't a Mac be able to run a Windows application? In turn, why wouldn't a PC be able to run Mac applications? Including the operating system on both sides.

Well, PC can run OS X and Mac can run Windows. There's things like the x86 project that is showing us how it's absurd to be forced into software choices based on your hardware choice.

Now if only software started conforming to standards and not just the hardware...

Font Travesties

And now a blog entry for everyone who has requested more Broadway news from the ETR team... I saw Tom Stoppard's new play Rock 'N' Roll last night and thought the writing, directing, acting, and staging were great, especially Rufus Sewell in Act II.

I will take issue with the production's atrocious use of fonts and video effects in a series of projected titles. That wouldn't be a big deal usually, but this play has a lot of titles. It opens in the wake of the USSR's invastion of Czechoslovakia's in 1968 and follows the lives of Max Morrow, a British academic and unrepentant Communist Party member, and Jan, a Czech student who becomes a dissident as a result of his love for rock music, particularly the Czech indie band The Plastic People of the Universe.

Between every scene, a screen lowers, and a relevant rock song plays for about 30 seconds. Then the title, writing credits, recording session information and label notes for the song are projected on the screen. It's more than just a cheap theatrical device -- it crystallizes the rebellious nature of the music, the pervasive record-keeping of both Jan and the Czech Communist Party, and the mood of the era (as well as, I suppose, offering time for hair and make-up changes).

So Jan's rock music and his Nick Hornby-esque dedication to the minutiae of it are a key to understanding his personal rebellion against the system. And in that sense the title screens are an essential part of the play ... but they're hideous.

A mish-mash of tacky fonts and cut-rate video effects (swirling and glowing text) suggest that a grade school child got access to AfterEffects and went wild. Or, possibly, Trevor Nunn hired a graphic designer who previously worked on karaoke videos. As a polite theater-goer, I did not take any photographs during the performance, but here is an approximation of what the titles looked like:



By the way, I'm only talking about the text-based graphics used during the show. The production materials are actually pretty cool, and I was tempted to buy a t-shirt:

http://www.rocknrolltheplay.com/

And the play itself is great, so go see it.

Next time: I dissect the kerning and margin spacing of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.

The Eye of the Tiger

Seven members of the ETR team joined the gym across the street on Monday.

So far, I am in a four-way tie for most gym visits.*

Until we get some pictures up on our website, you'll have no way of recognizing me, but the next time you're at the gym and you see a guy with glasses on the treadmill rocking out to a podcast about modern British theatre, that just might be me.

*Current record is one gym visit.