BunkBlog

Somehow Microsoft has allowed viruses even in their “MSNTV” system. hehe

Best part? It calls 911 from your house. Oh, it’s great.
current_music:
current_mood: arrogant

I added a new page of photos to the site, this time from my trip to Biosphere2. There are only a few photos up right now, but more will follow as I resize them and get a round tuit.
current_music: Roxy Music – Take A Chance With Me
current_mood: accomplished

I updated the Andy Social Emporium and the Camp XRay stores with new stuff. Frisbees and wallclocks are the order of the day.

Checking my site logs today, I noticed that IE’s share of hits has actually increased, despite the high-profile launches of Opera 6 and Netscape 6, not to mention the attention that Mozilla has been getting.

In May 2002, Internet Explorer (all versions) had 90% of the hits on my site. In July 2001 (earliest stats I have online), they only had 83% of the hits. And this is while more attention in the media is being placed on alternative browsers. It’s inconceivable!

I guess it just goes to show what I’ve said all along – The average person is an idiot.

Thank you, please drive through.

OK, I was inspired by DarkMoon‘s post about this special period in the online evolution.

When I first got online, I was 14, it was 1984, and I was on my second computer, a Commodore 64. My first had been a VIC-20 when I was 10. The C64 had a great modularity to it, so I started with a $200 machine hooked to an old TV and using a cassette deck for its storage medium. I gradually added various $200 components, including a monitor, 270k floppy drive, 300 baud modem (that may have been $100), later a 1200 baud modem, an inkjet printer that sucked, a dotmatrix printer with the unlikely name Gorilla Banana, and so on.

The online world of 1984 was disconnected, and polite. If people were rude, they were banned by the owner of the BBS. Nobody owns the internet, so nobody gets banned anymore. We all typed our messages and waited until the following day to get a response. Constrast that with the folks on IconRequests who insist on a response within minutes sometimes.

I went to a couple BBS parties. They did not in any way resemble the LA LJ Bash, of course. One was in a park, and it was for the biggest C64 pirate warez board in L.A. county, River Conditions. RC had a massive 20 megabyte hard drive to store all those ill-gotten games. Another party I went to was at RoundTable Pizza, and was for a chat/forum BBS. I printed out several months worth of conversations to share with the table. I was sitting next to one woman with whom I’d had great conversations about life and the universe, and she was in her 40s – I was 17. We were peers.

Amazing to think of the liberating power of the online medium, when people don’t know the person on the other end of the line is supposed to be young and stupid.
current_mood: nostalgic

It’s becoming harder to find the Keirsey temperament profile for free. Apparently Dr. Keirsey has been requesting people to remove it from their sites, but there are still a few out there. Anyway, here’s my latest results. I seem to waffle between INFP and INTP from year to year. This year, I’m INFP, the Healer. The INTP character is the Architect, so I apparently am idealistic and arrogant. I’ve been INFP more frequently through the years, so I’m gonna stick with that one. It sounds better anyhow. 🙂

I check my home email from a laptop at work, to bypass the LAN nazis by logging into Earthlink instead of using the corporate LAN. Using Endymion’s mailman demo, I can check and send mail without a problem. So, today, I see something that has a subject line mentioning a meeting of some kind. I try to open it in MailMan and it kicks me out of the mail client. Bizarre.

I get home and check my email with Eudora, and that message pops up and immediately I get some weird-ass window on my computer that looks like a spreadsheet. When I close it, it comes back three times until I reset the computer in disgust.

After rebooting, there is no trace of anything wrong, and I just updated my virus definitions today. Maybe it was a wacky popup? Eudora does use MSIE for HTML parsing…

Anyone else seen this, or is it some anomaly of my system for the day?
current_music: Alex saying, “I’m myself cleaning up.”
current_mood: confused

To commemorate the posting of E-Text #5000 on Project Gutenberg, I’m beginning the task of mirroring the PG archives (minus the Human Genome Project stuff – why would I want that?) on my local hard drive. Is that weird?

Always meant to read the Odyssey, now I can put it on my Palm… Well, I could if I had a Palm with more memory. Damn, who knew that the old piece of papyrus held 800,000 characters?!? Of course, Shakespeare’s First Folio is nearly 5 megabytes, so I guess old Homey wasn’t as loquacious as Billy Boy…
current_music: The Afghan Whigs – Gentlemen
current_mood: disrespectful

Yet another example of Microsoft sucking giant donkey balls.

I bought Tax Cut and MS Money together, in order to take advantage of the bizarre set of rebates that allowed me to get them both for free after rebate. Tax Cut’s rebate showed up a month ago.

Today, I get a letter from Microsoft

1. They say that I did not send them a receipt which showed Money, but only Tax Cut. That’s false.
2. They say I need to send them a proof of purchase from MS Money 2002. Of course, since I already have, I no longer have any proof of purchase.
3. They require that I refer to the rebate coupon, which of course has been sent to them and I no longer have to refer to.

Therefore, Microsoft sucks ass. I intended to get Money without paying for it, and I ended up paying full price for it. I probably would have bought it anyway (I was using Money99), but this is bullshit. This is the same kind of crap that smarmy legal teams always pull: prove something we don’t agree with, and do it after we’ve hidden all the evidence. Fuck me in the goat ass.
current_music: Throbbing vein in temple
current_mood: annoyed

It’s been a long time since I’ve update the Random Meandering Thoughts page, and this one is truly random and meandering. Things that aren’t just throw-away comments get put on my site, while more ephemeral stuff goes here.
current_music: Prince – Peach
current_mood: optimistic

I’m sure that her LJ design looks great on BlooJanuary‘s machine, but darned if I know how.


I normally browse in Opera, so I thought it might have been something peculiar to that browser. Although Opera adheres very closely to the HTML 4.0 standards, most design programs don’t.
So, I checked out IE 6 and looked at the site…

Still impossible to read… Well, how about Netscape 6.2?

Yep, still crappy.

So, girl, what in the world are your computer settings that make that page legible? Must be a Mac thing… Good thing you’re on my friends list, so I never actually go to your LJ directly. 🙂
current_mood: tired

An anonymous moron recently took me to task for my “trampling on copywrite law” (if you can’t spell it your opinion is pretty worthless anyway) with regard to my Camp Xray Store, which was actually created by request of the sailors at Camp Xray, and was not my idea at all.

Anyway, the image in question follows.

If this is infringing on someone’s copyright, I’d be amazed. The only resemblence to the famous Watterson strip that it is similar to is the kid’s spikey hair. That’s hardly congruent enough to be considered infringement. Different clothes, different face, and all-around different context. I would not attempt to defend this as a parody, because it obviously is not. I didn’t attempt to copy Bill Watterson, I just sketched out a kid peeing. Doesn’t make it a famous Belgian fountain either…

Besides, this is similar to the designs I see on half the pickups in the Southwest. Someone is selling stickers with a kid that looks substantially more like Calvin than this little soldier does. I assume that Mr. Watterson has not gone after the “Piss on Ford” and “Piss on Chevy” stickers because he doesn’t care much and because he’s loathe to associate his life’s work with such insignificance. Considering I’ve not made a dime off any of my Cafepress stores yet, I’m pretty damned insignificant. 🙂
current_mood: curious

I’m going to take some time off from making userpics to work on a long-delayed project: userpic tutorials.

Almost every day, someone posts a query on this community asking how to make animations. Well, I’m working on it. I’ll be posting the work in progress on my site, so if you want to see it as it is now or send me some advice, feel free to check it out. For that matter, if you’re a designer and have some time and writing ability, please contribute. I rarely use Animation Shop, so if someone wants to help with some A.S. tutorials, that would be great.
current_music: Moby – We Are All Made of Stars

<rant>
Seriously folks, if you don’t know what you want, or you can’t be bothered to explain yourself clearly and completely, don’t get mad at me because I make a picture that you ask for, but not what you want.

This goes far beyond the poor girl who misspelled a four-letter word. About 70% of the userpic requests I get, even from folks who seem to be professional icon-requestors, make no sense.

If you want something specific, use specific language. If you say, “Make it cool” then you’ll get whatever the designer thinks is cool, not necessarily what you think is cool.

</rant>
current_mood: annoyed

From the RFC 686, written in 1975:

Moral #1: Security freaks are pretty wierd.
Moral #2: If you have a secret don’t keep it on the ARPAnet.

ARPAnet became the internet, and it still applies…

Well, I now understand why the web app I mentioned previously sucks ass – it uses Microsoft’s .Net framework. This sure doesn’t bode well for their future endeavors. I can’t even load the main application today.
current_music: Cake – Short Skirt – Long Jacket
current_mood:

Just nuked my slowly-accrued MP3 directory at work and copied some new tunes into it. Now, instead of 30+ hours of music, I’m down to a mere 16 hours. Of course, I only went through about half of my MP3 CDs to grab tunes and didn’t snag all the ones I wanted, just so I’d have to listen to some of the lesser-played albums I’ve gotten in the past 2 years.
current_music: Colin James – Just Came Back
current_mood: happy

As I mentioned last week, the Camp Xray Store is open for business. If you know someone who’s stuck down in Cuba playing prison guard, they may appreciate a commemorative shirt or trivet. Can’t get enough trivets.

And, when the next set of orders is complete, I’ll get my first-ever commission check from Cafepress. Woohoo!
current_music: Prince – The Future
current_mood:

Short piece about the recent Microsoft Vs. Lindows case. Lindows is being sued by MS to get them to stop using a name which could be “confused” with Windows. Is anyone so slow they would confuse Lindows and Windows?

Anyway, the judge said that there are serious questions about whether MS should have ever been granted a trademark on the GENERIC word Windows in the first place. Not like MS uses generic words for trademarked things elsewhere, like Word or Project… You’d think they could have seen this coming. Nobody is allowed to trademark the word “computer” why should MS be allowed to trademark “Windows”? Wouldn’t the obvious assumption then be that Anderson Windows has to pay MS a fee for use of the trademark on their glass products? heh
current_music: Prince – 18 & Over
current_mood: amused

A followup to an earlier entry.

After more experimentation, I have determined that all three major browsers (MSIE, Opera and Navigator) handle the <acronym> tag in a reasonable way. It’s amazing, but true – standards compliance is a good thing.

The only reason I’d not seen it before is because the only place I use the Acronym tag is at work, and we use ancient browsers there. But, NN6 shows the tags as a dotted underline, making it obvious what acronyms have meanings linked to them. The other two browsers handle the Acronym tag like they do the ID tag. In IE, it shows up as a tooltip, in Opera, it shows up in the status bar. But, without the underlining, how would a reader know which acronyms are linked? HTML 4.0 recommends commenting the first instance of each acronym, so you’d have to pay attention while reading. I kind of like Netscape’s approach best, except the underlines show up when you print.

I know, I’m a geek.
current_music: Prince – Peach
current_mood: entertained