BunkBlog

I’m always cold at work. I have had nothing to do since June. Someone entertain me. And bring a jacket.

<sarcasm>Figured I hadn’t posted often enough today.</sarcasm>

Well, I’m now #25 on the T shirt Countdown. Get me higher tomorrow, will ya? Vote over on my site if you have a few seconds to spare.

Tired, hoping to get that last Eric Clapton song from Reptile tonight. Guess I’ll wait till morning.
current_mood: tired

Before you jump to conclusions and snap someone’s head off like a hungry mantis, pause. Think. Calmly consider what the other person is saying, disconnected from any emotional overtones.
current_mood: tired

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of the browser Opera, but I use all three of the mainstream browsers (Mozilla and Konqueror fans please don’t yell at me): Netscape 6.2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Opera 5.12. It’s always entertaining to see the differences in how each of them renders the same exact page, especially when a page is valid HTML 4.0.

This one, though, is different. PNG files, although a standard, are handled funny depending on the browser. Like GIF files, they have an optional “interlaced” mode, which is actually implemented much better than the GIF system. When looking at this on the three browsers, something weird happened. First, I discovered that Quicktime had hijacked the MIME type in Netscape.

After getting it set so Netscape loaded PNGs natively, I ended up with two basic PNG handling systems. The Opera and Netscape browsers both rendered the file at “actual size” and so I had to scroll a tiny bit to see the whole image. IE 6, however, seems to have added a cool new image-handling feature: autozoom. When you open an image by itself (not embedded in an HTML file), the browser will shrink it to fit into the window by default. You still have the option of clicking one button and seeing it at full size, but it’s a pretty cool new feature. You know it’s tough for me to compliment Microsoft for something, but there ya go.

Yes, I have too much time on my hands on occasion.

As promised here, here’s the artwork I used on the shortlived attempt at a goodwill-based proof of concept LJ Bash Shirt Store.

If interested in the original Photoshop file, let me know.

Apparently tact, good manners, and common courtesy are completely optional online. Oh, and I could use a really big dose of sarcastic insult, too.

Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune be damned.

It’s a new month, and the stats for the T Shirt Countdown have been reset (belatedly I noted). So, time to go vote for your favorite geek’s shirts!

I almost got into the Top Ten last month. Oh, and the Cafepress guys are setting up some new holiday stuff, so keep an eye out for shirt-wearing teddy bears and such.

Although I rarely read my friends’ pages directly, relying on the wonder of the Friends Page instead, I notice some things when I peruse new potential “friends” on LJ.

Here’s one: if you go to ‘s journal using Netscape or MSIE, it looks just fine. If you go there with Opera, you get black text on a dark blue background, rendering the text invisible. My quest: discover the source of this discrepency. And, thanks to the wonder of the CSS Validator over at the WWW Consortium, I have. Apparently, the wonderful Klee has mistyped a color in her setup, rendering “C02768” as “CO2768″ instead. While this is an illegal color, I’m amazed at the ability of the two mainstream browsers to actually display the desired (amazingly bright) pink shade without error. Things that make you go hmmm…

Money is the root of all marital troubles.

Anyone declared bankruptcy? What did that do to your life?
current_mood: cold

So, Microsoft and the DOJ finally reached a settlement, which does nothing. So far as I can tell, this is no more than the Consent Decree which Microsoft agreed to in 1994 and violated numerous times over the subsequent years.

Now, the new settlement says that MS will stop doing bad things, and the Department of Justice will keep an eye on them for five years. After five years, if the DOJ determines that MS is still a naughty monopolist, they’ll extend the monitoring another two years.

You will play well with others, or we will taunt you a third time!

Your tax dollars at work (well, except you Canucks).

Update: Apparently the state prosecutors are not willing to give Microsoft the leeway that the federal government is. According to this article, the settlement is unpalatable to the states, which are showing a lot more sense than the DoJ, in my opinion. Why trust MS now, when they have broken decrees in the past with such impunity?
current_music: Nickelback – Woke Up This Morning
current_mood: tired

Hello, LJ team? Wakie wakie! The Status page says nobody is awake yet, and is marked as being updated at 1pm EST, which is 10 am in California. Damn, you guys sleep late.
current_music: Linkin Park – Papercut

So, riddle me this: Why do some folks start a second (or more) journal on LJ, and cease using their old one? Would it not be easier to delete old entries or make posts friends-only, depending on what you’re attempting to accomplish?

For that matter, why do so many people monitor their “Friend of” list and get offended when someone they’ve never met has stopped reading their journal for reasons not stated?

Just random rants. Please continue with what you were doing.

A great big hug goes out to , my best friend and least loquacious LJ user. I’d like to reiterate, “We’re not old, dammit!”
current_mood: chipper

OK, all you Wesley Crusher fans, the “Ask Wil Wheaton Anything” answers are up at SlashDot. Go nuts, you silly girls.

Favorite quote:

I think he used the money to buy rugs. Not drugs, rugs. My brother has had a rug habit for years. Persians, throws, areas, even Berber carpets. Sad thing is, he can’t admit he has a problem. He’s probably at Carpeteria right now.

I must evangelize for a band that has not yet attained the level of critical acclaim they deserve: Cracker. That’s not Uncle Kracker, mind you, but a cool bluesy band with a new album, Forever, coming out in January. It is, of course, available on the newsgroups. They are fronted by David Lowery, from Camper Van Beethoven.

Here’s a great lyric:

You are so beautiful, you should be guarded by monkeys.

Now, where else can you get something like that, outside a Barenaked Ladies album perhaps? And, they sell their records at the wonderfully named Pitch a Tent. Gotta love it. Dandy Warhols meet John Lee Hooker…
current_music: Cracker – What You’re Missing
current_mood: giddy

_Thursday_

Ah, the big day has arrived. Yes, boys and girls, Microsoft is finally releasing their new OS, almost on schedule for a change even. This is unlike their X-Box, the great hope of MS for achieving dominance in the game console arena. The X-Box shipped in limited quantities two weeks after its original launch date, and has been underwhelming to all who have seen it. Imagine, if you will, a game console with the stability of Windows ME. Yeah, that’s great. About half the demos that MS has held didn’t work, and the reports from retailers are that about 25% of the X-Box consoles are operational, straight out of the box. heh.

But, back to Windows XP. There are plenty of reasons to avoid this beastie. For starters, the upgrade price has actually gone up while implementing “anti-piracy” measures that should reduce the price. And, those anti-piracy measures are entertaining as hell also. If you’re a business, you just install the OS as usual, although there has been some controversy about “imaging” drives (standard practice in large organizations but apparently prohibited now). If you’re a home user, not only do you pay more per machine than a business does (about 3 times more on average), you have to deal with the dreaded Windows Product Activation system. This thing has been the focus of more hostility than anything in recent memory, and the crackers and warez d00dz have already posted the corporate version on Usenet. So, if you don’t want to deal with WPA, you can grab the pirated corporate version and avoid it. Yep, great anti-piracy measure, Bill.

Then, there’s the push towards .Net… The whole concept behind .Net is vague at best, but it centers around some internet-centric view of computing. When Sun and Oracle attempted such things (Network Computer sound familiar?), they were rightly mocked. When Microsoft restarts a bad idea like this, the media start clamoring that it is the best idea ever and will revitalize the industry. No wonder paranoids think tech journalists are MS hacks. Regardless, if you’re thinking of running programs across the internet, you’re smoking crack. Seriously, have you noticed the lack of broadband access across the nation? If you have broadband, would you consider running MS Word across a network connection? Of course not, that would be stupid. A 100 gigabyte hard drive costs less than $300 nowadays, and memory is less than 50 cents per meg. The computer sitting on the shelf at your local Office Max can look for ET while downloading music and editing photos, and you’d consider giving up control of your machine to Microsoft, of all organizations? Ha!

<rant>
As I peruse random LJ users, often linked from another of my “friends”, I notice something. Those who tend to espouse highly extreme viewpoints do so with very poor English skills. I’m willing to give a lot of slack to folks for whom English is not their primary language, of course, but a frightening number of Americans seem incapable of remembering something as simple as, “I before E except after C.”

Honestly, if you’re going to try to convince others (or the world at large) of the correctness of your views, doing so in language that would make a sixth-grade teacher cry is not a good way to do it. I have a very difficult time believing that you are capable of forming an informed opinion on a subject if you can’t spell “which” for example. Since so few of these people will listen to opposing views, no matter how simply and logically explicated, I assume this rant will fall on deaf ears. So be it.
</rant>
current_mood: bored

OK, so here are some of the ways in which San Angelo is better than Sierra Vista. If I’ve missed any, let me know.

There are more restaurants, more and better parks, more people and thus the concomittant increase in other options.
The housing is cheaper, by an astounding amount.
We’ll have a whole mess of babysitting options.

Most importantly, they have two broadband internet options for reasonable prices, while Sierra Vista has none.
Gotta have priorities.

According to my stats page, the 4th most popular place to go is the store. In fact, if you add up the 3 different entries, that area gets bumped up to second place in my list of popular pages. YET, nobody buys anything. Oh, well, nobody has bought any books from Amazon via my Books page in the past couple years, either.

Maybe I should be a camwhore and start auctioning off my underwear or bed or something on eBay. hehe

Oh, very damned funny, T Shirt Countdown weasel! Because of the unprecedented (and therefore highly suspicious) jump to 3rd place, I’ve been unceremoniously dropped to like 1000th place, stripping me of all my legally gained votes and leaving me with a measly 28 votes. I had over 300 legitimate votes, darnit! Grr…

Oh, well, silly things to do. What else shall I do to be completely random?
current_mood: amused