It is ridiculous the amount of juice the National Football League has. We’re not even halfway through the offseason, and the NFL has spent a good portion of it in the headlines. Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, Peyton Manning, Tim… somebody, Brandon Marshall, Sean Payton. But how do you know when an entertainment entity has a stranglehold on things? When a league-wide change to new uniforms steals at least a portion of most spotlights for a news cycle.

The league agreed to partner up with the little-mom-and-pop-shop-that-could, Nike, and that agreement includes a leaguewide makeover in uniforms. Add in a nation of fans terrified of/hopeful for the possible migration of the Oregon Ducks (their uniforms, of course)  into the NFL (including these fake monstrosities), and you have an improbable powderkeg of disproportional hype waiting to go off.

What happened? Not much really.

The league announced technical and physical to the jerseys, pants, pads–even the rope belts–but not much else. Most teams are making minor cosmetic changes. For example, the Chicago Bears have moved the TV numbers to the top of the shoulder pads and messed with the stripes a bit. The Panthers are rolling out a new logo and a unique addition, a message on the inside of the jersey collar.

Mercifully, however, Nike did manage to spruce up arguably the ugliest unis in the league, those of the Seattle Seahawks. Early last decade, they ditched their longtime blue, green, sliver and white duds for some true “duds:” a type of dark metallic teal with a bit of neon green trim. Sure it doesn’t sound so bad on paper, the team chose to wear dark muted teal helmets, dark muted teal jerseys, and dark muted teal pants. Seriously, one would watch a Seattle game and immediately want to watch the end of Old Yeller or Million Dollar Baby for a pick-me-up.

The Seahawks’ new garb tones it down a bit. The neon green is still there, but they morphed the teal into a bit more blue, and if they can somehow resist the urge to go blue, blue and blue (like they did in the introductory photo), it may actually look pretty good.

For those still concerned about Nike ruining everything, all I can offer is this. At least they won’t Maryland you, like Under Armour did.

(Image courtesy Seahawks.com)

VIDEO: Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1 of 3)

VIDEO: Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (2 of 3)

VIDEO: Mies van der Rohe\’s Farnsworth House (3 of 3)

In case you did not (or will not) watch the half-hour special featured in this post, the house was initially designed so minimally that the owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, of Chicago, complained that there wasn’t even a place in which to hang her clothes.

While living in a glass-walled house on a semi-remote stretch of riverbank, surrounded by twelve months of northern Illinois nature appeals to me, the philosophy behind the house is almost diametrically opposed to my stance on most things–most notably, web design.

Form over function.

In dealing with high-content websites, it has been my experience that form doesn’t scale gracefully. Even Google has had to deal with the demand for more content from time to time. There is always some new product or service that has to be featured. There is always another product that has become a irremovable fixture. There is always a shiny new trend or emerging practice to follow. As a designer and/or content manager of such sites, it falls on you to make your five-pound template hold ten pounds of content, and make it look like it was meant to do that all along.

Still, there’s a reason that we marvel over structures like the Farnsworth House and not, say, your nearest big box store.

(Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

Start a personal site. You will be amazed how quickly and thoroughly other projects will pop up and occupy what little free time you possess.

I was riveted. The pseudo-spoken verse is not normally my thing, but the imagery, easily Gordon’s strongest talent, had me for the first seven minutes. That, and I am a sucker for a good build, which kept me the final three minutes.

So, I lumped it. That was the last time I bought something from the iTunes Store. I started fresh, converted my purchases to MP3, re-ripped our library in Windows Media Player (complete with multiple genres reference from Wikipedia), and 739 albums later, we were back in business.

Unfortunately, I still had an 80 GB iPod Classic to manage and new CDs and purchases from Amazon’s new MP3 store, and a lack of satisfactory ways to sync my library. Enough was enough, and I headed back to the dance floor to check the devil’s card.

Music Bridge to the rescue. With a couple of clicks, I had ratings, genres, even album art in iTunes. Unfortunately, it was missing The Greatest Playlist Ever Created. (My wife scoffed at that title,  too, but she has since admitted it to be true.)

What happened? Bad import? Faulty program? Apple making me pay for scorning them those years ago? No, no and no. For some reason, that playlist was saved as an m3u, a format which Music Bridge could not transfer.

After some searching, I came across this thread.

Simply put:

1. Open your playlist in your favorite text editor. (Notepad++, for instance)
2. Save it as a copy and start editing the copy.
3. Find all instances of “\Users” or “..\Users”, and replace it with “C:/Users”.
4. Find all backslashes “\” and replace them with frontslashes “/”.
5. Set your encoding to “UTF-8 without BOM.”
6. Save and import the playlist into iTunes.

So now I just run Media Bridge, plug in the iPod, and I’m good to go.