BunkBlog

I downloaded and installed Netscape 6.2.1 at work this morning. I can still use NS4.7 if I want to feel in pain, and IE-crippled edition is still around too. Now I can see my LiveJournal pages as they were intended, DIV tags and all. Woohoo!

Meanwhile, as I was checking some HTML pages I was editing at work, I noticed a cool feature of NS6 – acronym highlighting. As part of my efforts to improve “accessibility” to the web pages I make, I follow many of the Section 508 requirements and recommendations. One is to break out acronyms with the <acronym> tag. Cool feature, and screen readers can be set to voice them for people. However, they are invisible to the normal browser. Except NS6. Hover over an underlined acronym and BAM! A popup tooltip shows what that acronym means. Combine that with the support for alternate stylesheets, and NS6 is shaping up to be a pretty damned good browser, now that they’ve killed the showstopping bugs in version 6.0.

I think I’ll stick with Opera at home, though – I have grown accustomed to the MDI interface.
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current_mood: geeky

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my organization has both Netscape 4.7 and MSIE 5.5 loaded. Netscape 4.7 is a horribly old piece of technology, and I notice a large number of folks upstairs who have installed Netscape 6.2 as well, just to have a browser that doesn’t suck at CSS and such. The MSIE browser has had every piece of vulnerable technology turned off, which means it’s a braindead piece of software that can’t render the simplest Javascript correctly.

So, what do we have in our inboxes today, but a message that we all must go to a particular intranet site, which must be accessed with Internet Explorer. This site is a “web app,” one of those things any geek has heard of but few have actually seen in use. You would think, since DISA has mandated that Netscape 4.7 is the standard browser, the web app would work in Netscape. Go figure.

I actually attempted to go to the site with Netscape and ran into authentication problems. Wonder if it would work with NS 6.2…

This is not the point behind web applications. The idea is that any web app should be accessible with any browser of reasonable vintage. NS4.7 is not so old that it should be completely nonoperational with this spanking new application.

Ah, progress..
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3 years after buying Netscape, AOL may finally be integrating it into their ugly-ass useless software, which is inexplicably popular. Although AOL-mail will still be some weird proprietary system that doesn’t play well with others, the browser currently being tested by AOL subsidiary Compuserve is based on Mozilla/Netscape. A Microsoft spokesman was philosophical and condescending: “The real losers will be AOL users who will now be using inferior technology.” Gee, how many AOL users are there? That’s got to be a big chunk of the online market, albeit the clueless part of the market.

Sorry if I sound down on AOL, but it sucks ass. ART files that nobody else can see, email that can’t handle attachments rationally, some strange belief that AOL is the internet…

Can’t wait to see what MS comes up with in response to this. Nobody wants to use MSN, so that hasn’t been a good thing for them.
current_music: Queen & David Bowie – Under Pressure
current_mood: amused

Can I have one? Please? I’ve been very good this year, and my birthday is in just 4 months!

High-res color Palm-based organizer, with a camera, MP3 player, and keyboard. Total gadget lust!
current_music: The Kinks – Lola
current_mood: hopeful

Just in case someone wanted a userpic that I made more than a month ago: I erased them. They’re an ethereal art form, and if you wanted it you really should have downloaded it when you claimed it. 🙂

I still have plenty of unclaimed orphans up, as well as my gallery of userpics I particularly am proud of.
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MICROSOFT EMBARRASSED BY XBOX PROBLEMS IN JAPAN

Microsoft has told Japanese buyers of its Xbox video games that it will
repair or replace machines that scratch DVD and CD games, but the company
is not issuing a general recall of the devices. An Xbox marketing director
said about the problem, “This is a miniscule issue. The key point it that
this is not going to affect the Japan launch and it is not going to affect
the Europe launch.” Microsoft shipped 250,000 units to Japan, and sold
125,000 in the first three days after its January launch; in comparison,
Sony sold 720,000 PlayStation2 units within the first three days of product
launch two years ago. (Financial Times 7 Mar 2002)

current_music: Marilyn Manson – Rock Is Dead
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I’ve updated the Andy Social Emporium with some new limited-edition items that Cafepress is offering. I really like the ceramic trivet and the mini basketball hoops. Might get myself one of those.

Thanks to those who have bought (or attempted to buy) stuff from the Emporium. I never actually expect to make anything off of it, but it’s interesting to see how many folks want a “Friends Don’t Let Friends Reenlist” shirt. Only one “Army Girl” shirt sold so far, though.
current_music: Linkin Park – Holding You
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It’s entertaining to read the debate on ZDNet regarding whether Windows is great or whether it sucks ass. What’s especially great is that I’m working in a Unix-only environment this week. The systems are SGI Irix boxes, Sun Enterprise servers, and so on. They all work seamlessly together, and not a one of them has been rebooted for as long as anyone can remember. The purpose of my visit to Omaha – observe an upgrade to a critical information node on this intelligence system. During this upgrade, the system was up and running non-stop and only the applications being updated were shut down. When the upgrade was complete (1.5 hours), the system was not rebooted, but just had one script run which restarted all the programs that were shut down. The queue of work was waiting, the system got to work, and everything continued as before. When a bug was discovered, the system continued to work on its vital national intelligence while the programmers fixed the bug, restarted the one program which was affected, and the users never saw a blip.

Imagine doing that with Windows. Ha!

We had a discussion about the DoD and Windows versions. For some reason (they claim its cheaper but TCO has to be higher), the Defense Department has decided that all non-critical systems use Windows NT. Naturally, the critical systems use Unix. Those non-critical systems use NT 4.51 for the most part. Many sites are beginning test installations of Windows 2000, while XP is the new standard in the normal consumer world. DoD doesn’t want to trust their information to XP for years yet. hehe
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I’ve got two file boxes full of comic books, many (but not most) bagged. I’ve been carting these things around the past 15 years, and haven’t opened the boxes in nearly a decade. Thinking this is silly, we began considering selling the darned things. I have a large number of 10-14 year old Punisher, Batman, and Manhunter. I also have some other books that I’m not getting rid of, like the Akira books (1-29 only for some reason).

Then comes the hard part: finding out how much they’re worth. There is no comprehensive online resource we’ve found for this. You’d think comic books and computers would be made for each other – both the province of geeks. Oh, well. Anyone want a couple copies of “Death in the Family” original 4-book print run? How about “Black Orchid” – what Neil Gaiman did before Sandman?
current_music: Barenaked Ladies – The Flag
current_mood: tired

This week is busy, next week I’m out of town. I don’t plan on creating any userpics during the next couple weeks, so if you want one, ask another volunteer. is a great animation guy, very creative.
current_music: Barenaked Ladies – If I Had $1000000
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Just for fun, I added a Google Search box to my site. Google says they have 110 pages indexed on AndySocial.com. Guess I’ve been around long enough to be archived on the Wayback Machine as far back as Oct 1999, so I shouldn’t be too surprised. My old Geocities site was archived even earlier!
current_music: STP – Sour Girl westlake remix
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So, I had a few minutes to kill (ok, more like hours) and I hit the Random LJ button. Here’s the pithy post I perused in my perambulations:

so yesterdai i wuz doin mai spanish project thingamahoosit n part of it wuz to write an obituary. i wuz gunna write dat one of mai frendz died, lyke mebbe joe or sumthin [lol no offense] buh den winnie IMs me n she tellz me dat shez killing justin timberlake. so den i decide to kill sum1 famous.

Does that make anyone else’s head hurt? Why would you purposely type like that (or even lyke dat)? Ugh.
current_music: Cracker – Sweet Magdalena
current_mood: annoyed

I seem to have lost some fonts. When I open a publication I made 4 years ago, it claims I used some fonts in it that I can’t find on my system or in my archives anymore. Does anyone have the fonts “Tennessee SF” or “Gill Sans” that I could snag from you? I thought all my fonts came from public sources or the Corel Gallery CD, but those two I can’t find. Very frustrating to have hundreds of fonts but not the ones you’re looking for. 🙂
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OK, OK. We get it. In browsers that are rather lenient with color names, they’ll parse any string of characters as a color. That’s wonderful.

For those of us using Opera or Lynx, it’s a non-issue. Lynx is not a very colorful browser, being text-only. Opera doesn’t allow non-standard colors, so all your funny-colored words are plain, normal paragraph colored. Sorry, it’s a bug not a feature.
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Although it was originally on a public website, and I only archived it because LJ didn’t support threading and the page was enormous in December of 2000, the Naked XXXMas Archive has outlived its usefulness. Rather than being an entertaining glimpse of a single goofy day in LiveJournal history, it’s become a point of contention. It is one of the most viewed things on my website, which saddens me since it has nothing to do with my website other than I hosted it here. There are increasing numbers of people who would prefer that they be removed. I’ve respected a few requests for such removals in the past 13 months, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s any point to keeping the archive.

The mood on much of LJ has turned more introverted and frightened. The open, fun feeling that prompted the whole thing is gone. Hell, I haven’t even been one of ‘s “friends” in at least 6 months, for reasons never stated to me. Some of the big players in the exhibition-fest are now offline or friends-only (I miss , who also doesn’t consider me a friend), others have changed LJ user IDs so often they appear schizophrenic. There are people that think they’re being stalked online (how that is even possible defies the imagination), and other folks who are having LJ feuds that encompass half my friends page.

So, without further ado, farewell to Lianna’s Nekkid XXXmas.
current_music: Prince – Cream (NPG Mix)
current_mood: sad

If the extra effort required to hit the shift key is too much for you, if the extra keystrokes necessary to spell out words instead of abbreviating them in random ways and using numerals in place of words is too tough, perhaps you shouldn’t be using a medium of discourse that requires typing and a reasonable ability to express oneself in English?

Just a thought before I crash.
current_music: Prince – Computer Blue
current_mood: cranky

Although many people have remarked in the past on my predilection for rather unusual watches, generally including lots of buttons or more modes than anyone needs, this watch takes the cake.

This thing tells time in either the standard way, or in binary notation. Imagine trying to tell someone that it is already half past 110011! This is even weirder than “Swatch beats” that attempted to become a new time standard a couple years ago.
current_music: Prince – Sleep Around
current_mood: amused

Now, this is unexpected. For the first time in over a year, the “Lianna” directory isn’t getting the most traffic on my site. While I have a directory dedicated to storing the pictures of naked people from last Christmas, that only got 3.29% of the traffic in the past 2 weeks. The directory holding the userpics I’ve designed for and , on the other hand, has served up 36.61% of the bytes this fortnight.

Who would have thought: people want animated pictures of Gwen Stefani more than they want nekkid boobies. Amazing!
current_music: Prince – Pope
current_mood: surprised

Darnit! While looking for new effects to play with, I ran into Relique’s Brushy, a great site devoted to brushes for Photoshop. I only grabbed two of the packs, and went back today to find the dreaded “Bandwidth Exceeded” error. Hope the site returns tomorrow…
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I realize I can sometimes be a bit short in my speech. This is due to my belief that one should not waste words if what you have to say is simple. With this in mind, I’m occasionally told I’m being rude when I am just getting to the point.

An example is here, and I’d like my “friends” opinions. Was my original reply angry or otherwise containing some tone I can’t detect? Seriously, I thought I was just pointing out some other resources. Free country and all that rot.
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