As much as I love The Daily Show there\'s really very little out there about the process that goes into making each show. Jon Stewart is an incredible host but there\'s a whole team of writers slaving away all the time to supplement his delivery. So, when Amir sent me this link to a series of videos showing a roundtable discussion with the writing staff I was pretty pumped. As you\'d think, they\'re all really funny and incredibly smart people. Hulu doesn\'t make watching it a very easy experience but start with the first video and turn on continuous play to help get through the series of clips. Well worth it.

First off, thanks for providing a service that allows a consumer such as myself to have digital copies of an analog format, I really appreciate it. When I go to buy something on vinyl and it doesn\'t come with a digital download card, I become hesitant to purchase it at all.. so you\'re really doing a great service for people. That being said, I have some insights for you:

• Dropcards, you\'re interface is decent and the downloads are fast. However, you provide zero option to download a single ZIP file of an entire album. I do not want to click 14 different links to get my album. I am lazy, help me out.. give me a single ZIP link.
• Gallery AC - I love Arts & Crafts, you are easily one of my favorite labels. However, your digital downloads have ZERO meta information baked into them. None. How is that possible these days? Please take steps to provide mp3\'s with Artist / Album name and track titles.. at the very least. Please?

And to the rest of you that I haven\'t experienced yet, start servicing your mp3\'s in 320 kbps format. Or at least offer it as an option. If we\'re moving as a culture to a more all-digital format the least you can do as a provider is to give the widest range of sound possible. It\'s a disservice to the music you\'re distributing if you don\'t.

Sincerly,
A Concerned Music Consumer Who Sees The Opportunity For Massive Improvement With Little Effort

Did anyone happen to get a visit from the Valentine\'s Day alternative Death Bear? Apparently it\'s a half art project / half useful service that enables someone to have painful memories of their ex\'s carted away. It also looks to be the perfect recipe for a horror movie and/or horrible string of murders.

Some weeks are better than others.. there\'s a bunch of good stuff this week, so get to watching. Here\'s the playlist breakdown:

• Mortal Kombat vs Donkey Kong - so so dumb but I find it amusing regardless. The best part is that there are a bunch more - equally ridiculous / dumb.
• Snowlapse 2010 - I\'m sure you heard that DC got ravaged by snowfall but this video really gives ya some perspective on how it adds up.. literally.
• T-Shirt War - clever stop motion animation and a lot of t-shirts. A whole lot.
• Mirror Scare - from the guy that brought you No Signal, here\'s another compilation of cliche mirror scare clips. WAXY reminds us that the best use of this has been done.
• Kewpie Tarako - Japanese commercials are terrifying. I\'m not sure if it\'s intentional or not but they are.
• Angela Lansbury Sexy Workout - I dare you to watch the whole thing. I bet you can\'t do it.
• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy - a 3 minute TED talk comparing the ridiculous hippie dancer viral video to the broader idea of starting a movement. It may be reaching a bit but it makes some valid points.
• Bill Murray with Anthony Bourdain - I don\'t usually watch No Reservations but this clip pretty much convinced me that I need to start.
• Raptor Devours Cheerleader - sometimes, occasionally, sporting events do have things worth watching. This is a fine example.

BONUS

• Mosquito Killed By a Laser - title says it all. Via Chad.
• The Funniest Man in the World - I\'ve been a fan of Jay Johnston for a long time, glad to see Street Carnage agrees and is giving him a proper sendup. That spit take video is perfect.
• Logorama - the Oscar nominated short film.. the whole thing has been floating around for a few days but the preview should whet your whistle properly.

Have a great weekend everyone. Be on the lookout for Fav4 blowing up all over the place!

Public School\'s Cody Haltom just released a brand new website for fellow member / photographer Jay B Sauceda and it is a doozy. Super clean design with a heavy emphasis on large, compelling photographs. Love that the images scale with the browser and still manage to look great. I was going to recommend checking out the \"Sign Painters\" and \"Dim Lights & Thick Smoke\" sets but, really, you need to look through everything - because it\'s all good.

Long Exposure + Alluring Light Source + Curious Moth = Beautiful Flickr Set. There\'s a great chaotic mess involved with their trails but it\'s that chaos that makes it so appealing.

I realize these Javascript posts might not be interesting to the entire readership of the site but when I see something like this Color Wheel Demo I can\'t help but think everyone will be as blown away as I am. Using a combination of jQuery and Raphael John Weir has managed to recreate the standard color picker UI pretty much perfectly. Impressive to say the very least.

Thanks to Mat Wiseman I got the heads up on the jQuery plugin Quicksand; a super simple utility for sorting items based on attributes of your choosing. The animations are slick and the markup is easy to understand. Maybe I will try to integrate this with Fav4 just to give it a whirl.. looks very intriguing.

Over the past couple weeks I launched two quick sites - both fairly small in scope but still effective in their representation. Please check em out:

• Heartbeater - local Nashville band that asked me to make them a site. I like what they\'re doing so I agreed. The entire thing is run off RSS feeds from other sources - ArtistData, Vimeo, Bandcamp, Flickr, etc - so they can update pretty much all of it without a CMS or assitance from me. Check out their EP, you will enjoy it.
  
  Materials designed by Monkey Ink.
• Caitlin Rose - this is just a one page teaser site that is in no way indicative of the full site coming down the pipe but I liked the image scaling trick I stumbled upon.. and Caitlin is doing some great things. If you haven\'t snagged her EP, you should.. as well as check out her newer offerings here.
  
  Photography by Rachel Briggs.

You\'d think a game that only involves using the left mouse button to get you through a series of one screen challenges wouldn\'t be all that engaging but such is not the case with One Button Bob - a fun little flash game that only involves you pressing one button to accomplish a variety of tasks. I thought I\'d play it for a few seconds to try it out but found myself carving through for much longer. Viva la simplicity!

Via Revgoomba via Will.

I\'ve not had the opportunity to try it out yet but Uniform appears to be an incredibly easy / smart way to skin form elements via jQuery. One of the bigger hurdles as a designer / developer is to get form elements to look the same across browsers and not just fall within the standard browser UI look; that\'s where Uniform steps in and takes over. An argument could be made for form elements needing to be left alone so they make immediate sense to the end user but I think, when done tastefully, a little styling is a welcome implementation. I look forward to trying this out.

The timing of the release of Information is Beautiful is pretty spot on. The past few years have shown pop culture / web success for Venn Diagrams, Annual Reports and loads more... so a coffee table book of random visualizations based on a myriad of data seems appropriate. The designs look to be pretty much fantastic and the site has plenty of great Charts and Graphs too.

Yea, that\'s right.. 16 panda cubs all lined up for their class photo. If your heart isn\'t the slightest bit warmed by this sight I fear you may be too far gone. Also, be sure to scroll down and check out the mother, Mei Xiang, playing in the snow. I dare you not to crack a smirk of enjoyment.

Daniel recently had an epiphany that it could be handy to have a browser homepage that quickly linked to your four favorite sites - as most people don\'t really seem to branch out from a few destinations as their starting point. So, he whipped up the design and started coding Fav 4. I swooped in to help with some javascript and now we\'ve launched it live. It\'s a silly little project that could easily be done with your Safari start screen or your own bookmarks but it\'s a nice looking lander, big beautiful icons and very easily customizable.

Try it out: Fav 4.

Anyone have Google Buzz activated in their gMail yet? Is it worthwhile at all? Do we need another social network? Is it possible that people would leave Facebook for such a thing? Will it fall as flat as Google Wave has? Can I possibly ask more questions about this thing that I\'m only vaguely curious about?

Having done a tiny bit of mobile site development I have to say that this LiveView application sounds pretty intriguing. Being able to do a bit of dev with the actual device you intend to be viewing your work is obvious and brilliant. Intel, Micron announce 25nm NAND flash production - it\'s one of the nerdier sounding headlines of late but basically it\'s a huge step forward for Solid State Drives; bigger capacity, smaller form factor, same insanely fast seek times. The writeup provided along with that announcement is an incredibly easy-to-understand bit about why SSD\'s are important and why you should want one. I\'m not chomping at the bit to get one until the prices drop a little lower but I am very excited to think that the harddrive style we\'ve been using for 20+ years is finally on the way out.

If you didn\'t know it, I also run a Tumblr Blog along with this one.. I really should merge them into one mega-yewknee-beast one day but, for now, they are separate. In case you\'ve missed out.. here are some recent goods.

• No Joy - shoegaze rock recommended by yvynyl - free on Bandcamp, well worth your time.
• Dogs reacting to the Law & Order theme song - this is too bizarre not to check out. Via catbird.
• Mary Robinson - photo by JeremyOkai (I think) of a friend photographer.. good stuff.
• Our Awesome President - sneaky. Via Kate.

Great post from Big Spaceship for developers.. basically about changing your mindset about being a developer of strictly one technology and being prepared to have more tools in your toolbox than you generally give yourself credit for. This summed it up for me:

You might meet a lot of carpenters who will tell you the power drill is a great invention, but you\'ll never meet a single one who will tell you it\'s the only tool for the job. True expertise in a craft is where bias for a specific execution is weighed against all the possible ways to do the job right.

While the article is specifically aimed at developers I think the message pertains to anyone who has a specific job title, sort of pigeonholing them into a particular role. It\'s a good bit of inspiration to break out of that and learn to wear many hats.

Rarely do I post about work on this site - usually because once something has launched I\'ve looked at it so much over so many weeks that I\'m no longer excited by it one bit. However, I worked very little on this one.. so I\'m super excited to see it hit the light of day.

Long story short, we built and launched Let\'s Get Aquatic in tandem with the debut of the Superbowl Ad for Pop Secret and Emerald Nuts - one of the craziest and most enjoyable commercials of the day. The client was awesome enough to want to take things to the next level and requested we make an 8-Bit Game inspired by the spot.. so we did! Eric did the majority of programming on the game and it turned out incredibly well.

Go get aquatic or read about it.