The Lex Files

Queer Eye: It’s Happening

Yes, believe it or not Lex-philes, Lauren REALLY WILL be on an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Girl.

And now there’s honest-to-goodness webtastic proof!

UPDATE: I believe that this page is up “early.” It lists the airdate as “Sunday,” but it’s my understanding that we’ll air at 10pm on Sunday, May 8th.

TV Or Not TV…

This article from the New York Times Magazine argues that because TV shows are, on the whole, getting smarter, that they’re more mentally stimulating for the audience watching them.

“24″ and “Lost” and “Arrested Development” have such intricate plotlines that the viewer is required to pay strict attention — not loaf or zone out — to stay current and informed.

So, Marnie, I urge you to reconsider. (Marnie’s my sister. When I picked her up from the airport today, she indicated that she’s rooting for “West Wing” and “ER” to get cancelled, because even though she once loved and now likes the shows, they’re sucking up too much time.)

I enjoy the time I spend in front of the television. I make it as efficient as possible, thanks to TiVo. And the programs I watch are rewarding for me — Lauren and I bond over them, they become office discussion fodder, and the storylines can keep me thinking (”Eyes”), wondering (”Lost”), or laughing (”Arrested Development”) for days.

PS: Kudos to “Jack and Bobby” for enjoying a slight uptick in quality, including an episode without a single “future-based” interview from Bobby’s presidency, relying on the interest we have in the characters now instead. Good call.

Life in California

Life in Los Angeles can be vastly amusing. In some places, if you feel a strange rumbling all around you, you might fear you’ve:

• eaten bad clams


• moved too close to a train


• been seated on a chair inside Brookstone

Grab.com’s fake popup

When development was gearing up for Grab 2.0, where Grab was going from a gaming site to an entertainment portal, there was a tricky little requirement snuck into the specs:

No popups.

Now, Grab isn’t the kind of site where we’d want popup advertisements or anything — that wasn’t the point. Rather, this rule was saying that we couldn’t even use popups for things like your friends list address book, or to confirm a change, or for brief help text.

Old Grab used popups for all that type of content.

These were all “onclick” popups, meaning the user has to initiate an action to cause the popup. In theory, most popup blockers allow user-triggered popups, and silence only those popups that the web page wants to have appear, but you don’t — when you initially load the page, or when you navigate away from it.

The problem is the weakness of that last sentence: In theory, most wasn’t going to cut it for the new Grab’s business requirements. Google’s toolbar popup blocker, for example, occasionally blocks popups that are triggered from “onclick” events. It’s not supposed to, and the behavior isn’t consistent, but it’s reproducible. Same holds true with Maxthon/MyIE2 and Firefox — sometimes, for no good reason, they won’t allow even a click-generated popup. (Safari, in my testing, doesn’t have this problem.)

Because i wasn’t content to lose all the functionality that popups can offer, I set about coming up with a universal fake popup for Grab.com.

Basically, we hide an invisible div on pages that need popups. Sometimes those divs hold iframes — but we’re careful not load another webpage into the iframe unless the fake popup is triggered, to avoid forcing two page loads if it’s not necessary. Other times, the hidden divs hold only text or images that are embedded right within the source of the page.

(Even better, I created a Smarty block function, so that our integrators can just embed content inside {fakepopup} tags without worrying about all the javascript voodoo in the background.)

When we want to trigger the fake popup, we just turn on its visibility.

But of course, I wasn’t going to settle for that.

So, when we trigger a popup, we also “grey out” the background (by drawing a translucent grey div across the entire page), hiding any Flash elements (and certain form elements, thanks to IE) that might try to overlap our fake popup even though we don’t want them to. We even add in a close button with a mouseover “hover” effect.

Even better, the fakepopup works pretty nicely across different browsers. It works great in IE and Firefox and Netscape, and it degrades nicely in browsers like Opera — where the background doesn’t grey out, but rather vanishes.

It also worked pretty well in Safari — even the greying out. But in Safari, up until this week, the popup itself was also translucent. Sadly, Safari’s not a big enough player in the browser market or for the Grab audience, so I wasn’t able to devote time to fixing it. Which was okay… since I couldn’t figure out how to, anyway.

With Apple’s release this week of OS X 10.3.9, which contains (according to Dave Hyatt) thousands of Safari rendering fixes, the weird transparency bug in Safari has magically been corrected.

That’s my favorite kind of bugfix: One that happens all by itself.

You can see the fake popup in action by answering the trivia question at the Grab movies page.

Lex goes to the dermatologist

I went to the dermatologist today. Hence this post’s title.

The purpose of the visit was a mole-mapping. I brought in our pet moles Randolph and Gertrude, and they wrote a treasure map using little golf pencils they held in their teeth.

That’s not true.

Rather, the doctor used a computer to digitally scan about 40 moles on my body. (Note: Richard Lederer says I can split infinitives, so I plan to eagerly do so for the foreseeable future.) You’ve never realized how disgusting your moles are until you’ve seen them magnified several hundred times.

Sadly, I have moles all over my body. No, you’re not hearing me: all over.

I got very well acquainted with the doctor and her aide today. And as I warned them, if those pictures end up on the Internet… I want framed prints.

Straight Talk

My goodness.

I get ever-closer to fulfilling my dream of only ever blogging about Queer Eye for the Straight Girl.

The show has been put on hiatus for a month to allow room for other fine Bravo programming like “Showdogs Moms and Dads.”

But… Lauren’s episode has been rescheduled again for May 8th at 10pm. Until next time.