Blog you can’t dance to this...but you can try!

A week ago, we found ourselves at a port in South Philly shooting dock workers as they loaded school buses into a giant cargo ship from Hong Kong. The ship was bound for Maine the next day. Unsurprisingly, the Philadelphia port authority was reluctant to relax stringent homeland security rules that prohibit cameras from rolling or snapping photos at US ports.

So we charmed them with the information that we were there to shoot a commercial for Bill Keller, a Pennsylvania State Representative who's been serving South Philly's 184th District since 1993. His name means a lot to the workers we met. Keller played an instrumental role in helping to revitalize Philadelphia's ports along the Delaware River.

Spending a day with Keller was quite an honor. There's rarely an opportunity to have any real time with an elected official. It was easy to see how committed Bill Keller is to his community and how hard he continues to work to improve the lives of his constituents.

The commercial begins airing on cable March 23. Here it is:

We've been busy building a green-minded web presence for Hawthorne Flooring, Inc., one of the country's most environmentally active providers of high quality bamboo flooring, decking, and other bamboo products.

Of course the new web site features our custom design and clean source code, but it also includes some other unique aspects as well: an interactive photo gallery, an intuitive Google-powered store locator, and -- our favorite -- a global environmental impact table. 

That's right. Among other things, this impact table allows users to actually calculate how much carbon their purchases will offset, how much coal they will prevent from being burned, and how many trees they will save.

Unlike the wood sold by traditional hardwood flooring companies, Hawthorne Flooring's bamboo is harvested from the same ancient root system every five to seven years. This means the source of the wood is never depleted and entirely renewable.

The Internet Explorer team released the developer's beta version of IE8 this morning on their IEBlog.

One of the main concerns for developers was whether or not Microsoft would improve interoperability with other major browsers (ie: Safari and Firefox) in their latest release. The IE team addressed those concerns directly with their first announcement about IE8:

"Our goal is to deliver complete, full CSS 2.1 support in the final IE8 product. IE8 Beta 1 for developers delivers better interoperability with other major browsers, addressing major pain points (e.g. floats and margins) from previous IE releases. We're not finished - there's much more to come in Beta 2."

Shortly after the release, it was confirmed that IE8 passed the Acid2 test. Acid2 is an image that, when rendered correctly by a browser, confirms that the browser follows W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications.

It's too soon to know for sure, but so far IE8 is shaping up to be a good thing for developers, web standards and Microsoft.

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