BunkBlog

I rearranged the Icons page, adding a frameset for ease of navigation. The pictures are still in the same places, but I plan to move them next week to subdirectories.
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Now, earlier I posted a note telling people who make userpics what to do and not to do.
Here’s some ideas for those who are making requests for userpics:

• 100 pixels and 40 kilobytes are smaller than you think. We can’t put an entire episode of Buffy in an icon.
• Know some of the terminology that you use: Flash is a file format, not an icon type, etc.
  • Corollary: The “ART” format is ugly and non-standard, do not attempt to post ART or BMP files on webpages.
• If you have a specific image or set of images in mind, point to them or send them
• Use proper capitalization in your requests
  • Corollary: use reasonable English skills
• Some of us are older than 12 and don’t know who the heck Justin et al are.
• Please stop asking for userpics of Nsync, Britney Spears and the cast of Buffy. There is no shortage of those damned things already.
• Be polite. Nobody owes you anything.
• Don’t claim a picture and then not use it. Someone else may have wanted it.

That about covers it for now. Anything I’ve missed?
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I think I’m going to be running out of paid bandwidth this month:

Can you tell when I put up the Icons page?
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I’d just like to say a few things about designing userpics, for those who want to try their hand at it.

• 100 pixels is smaller than you think
• If you need to put text on an image, make sure you can read the text before you deliver the final design
• They’re animated GIFs, not “flash icons.”
• Blurry is rarely a good thing
• Google Image search is your friend.
• Be polite and reasonable.
• Perhaps you should re-think hosting images on Fotki or Virtue.nu, since they seem to fail so regularly.
• Sometimes several people post a userpic simultaneously. It’s not an insult to you.

That is all I have to say. Good night.
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Just to check on the progress of ‘s meme project, I went to the meme tracker today.

Doesn’t look like a significant number of folks linked to Liz’s Site…
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Still popping out icons for folks over at . Want something for a userpic? I’m on a roll lately. If you’ve got a challenging morph, that would be fun…
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LizVang is a self-promoting doofus.

Not that I’ve ever enticed folks to vote for my tshirt or anything. hehe
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New Page of icons. Here’s a central place to view all the icons I’ve made for folks so far. I’m pretty sure the Strawberry Shortcake one was a request, but I can’t find for whom. The morphing Jack-to-Sally ones belong to as soon as she picks one of them.

Oh, and that page is freakishly slow to load on a dialup, since most of the icons are just barely under the 40k limit.
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In case you didn’t know, I’ve been volunteering over at lately, making a boatload of icons for folks. If you want something weird, let me know.

Here’s the ones I’ve made so far, but they’re all spoken for (except the Gwen Stefani one).
current_music: Outback – Camberwick Green
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WELL I had another conversation with someone about Microsoft V Linux
I would love to know why I get into some many conversations about it, it much be because I am willing to stand up for companies that many people put down Namely Microsoft.
I wish people would just realize that companies are not out there to give you everything you want on a silver plater.

Um, let’s see how many English errors we can count, and then subtract that from the level of seriousness with which to take the opinions expressed therein.

Again I say – If you want someone to take your opinions seriously, spellcheck, proofread and then re-think the entire posting. After you’ve thought about it and run it through “ispell” or some other such tool, then go ahead and post. Your views might still be stupid, but more people will listen to them anyway.
current_music: The Vandals – Christmas Time for my Penis

OK, as threatened earlier, the Andy Social Antisocial paraphenilia emporium is now open for business. So far, we’ve got three shirts, and that’s just because I’m on vacation prepping for my upcoming nuptials, so I’m away from keyboard bigger than shit this week.
current_mood: accomplished

According to the new stats page on my site, the most popular search term is Rachbomb, finally beating out “smallest penis ever seen”. Bunch of damned perverts, I swear…
current_mood: amused

Anyone have a good webhost suggestion? Mine (Virtualave) seems to be a little flaky at times. Currently, any externally linked file returns a 403 (Forbidden) error, although no such error was in evidence yesterday.

This may seem reasonable, if there were banner ads on my site that subsidized my bandwidth usage. There aren’t. I pay for my hosting, there are no ads that I’m circumventing by posting a picture of a cake on my LJ, and I even pay for excess bandwidth usage (3 bucks last month, a bit more this month).

So, I’m considering moving to a different host, if the spurious 403 error becomes a corporate policy instead of a bug. Let me know what’s a good, relatively cheap host. I’m paying about US$100/year now.

Update: Virtualave, with no email yet in response to my (quite bitchy) query into the reason for this random failure, has now resumed functioning normally with regard to external links. Whatever.
current_music: Tricia typing
current_mood: annoyed

New section on my site, which will soon be filled with cool stuff. Photo album

I’ve posted the latest and greatest statistics for my website this weekend. Big news: folks from C|Net downloads are hitting my site more lately than folks from LiveJournal. Hmmmm…

In other web-building news, I’ve added a new Random Meandering Thought, this one a little anecdote about a really ballsy guy I knew a while back.

Enjoy.
current_music: dead batteries in RioVolt
current_mood: bored

Even as the Microsoft breakup ruling has been nullified, MS still makes some entertaining news. One of the long-time Microsoft-backers, David Coursey of ZDNet, has been bitten by the registration bug/feature in Office XP, and now can’t even use the legal copy of Word he needs to do his journalist job. Love it.

So, working for DISA, the information systems folks for the military, we send many documents around for review to various bosses (I’ve got 8 bosses, Bob – Office Space).

These documents are 40 pages and longer, and we print them out single-sided and hustle them around via sneakernet throught this 5-acre compound. After we print a couple copies for different folks to review, we make more copies of the changes and then of the changes to the revisions to the updates ad nauseum.

Why aren’t we sending this by email? Because “it’s easier to mark it up on paper” they say. And these are the IS masters for DOD? Hi, I’m a revision mark and comment in Word…
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Friday –

There have been a series of articles on ZDNet (and therefore on Yahoo Tech) about Linux and Open Source vs. Windows and Shared Source.

I am still amazed, after so long using Linux and Windows (as well as Solaris and Xenix) that the two sides are so entrenched that they can’t even have a rational discussion.

The Linux fanatics (not users, just the fanatical ones) automatically associate anyone who doesn’t call Windows Windoze or Windoofs with the evil empire. Apparently it’s some sort of requirement to put dollar signs in all things MS-related in order to show one’s disdain for the company and their (obviously) inferior products.

Meanwhile, the Windows fanatics (same disclaimer) portray all Linux users as programming geeks, with some strange communist or socialist bent. They further seem to believe that Linux users are like children, and should be shown the error of their ways, since they obviously don’t understand how business works.

I think it’s all quite apparent. The two sides have nothing in common. I don’t mean that completely literally, since they obviously both are looking at the prevalence of their favorite operating system in the market (or community, depending on your bent). When I say they have nothing in common, I mean that they are approaching computing from two completely different philosophies, and neither set of fanatics is capable of seeing that there may be others who don’t find their views completely transparent as soon as they’ve been explained forcefully enough (preferably with cursing or semi-random spelling errors).  

Linux is a good OS, and it keeps getting better. It is stable, although not as stable as BSD. It is fast, and it has decent support for hardware and various filetypes. Its adherents are generally propellorheads, but not exclusively. They know it is a solid system, and it can do great server things and decent desktop things. They also are unconcerned with market share, because it fits their needs now, and they don’t care if grandma uses it or not. Basically, there is no desire to dominate the marketplace. To Linux adherents, there is no marketplace

Windows is a decent OS, with an amazing amount of cruft built up over the years of backward-compatibility. Linux does not need to be backward compatible, since it has no “market” to worry about, and there is no company running the show. Windows is slow and unstable, but supports every file format around, and is easy to use. The Windows zealots are sure that Linux is run by some secret communist cabal, and the sole purpose of any software is to own the market. The fact that Linux is not trying overtly to conquer the desktop market just means they don’t have the strength to do so yet.

Where it gets entertaining is when people talk about the “ease of installation” problems with Linux vs. Windows. HA! Linux takes me 30-45 minutes to install, and Windows 2 hours or more. The reason people can continue to get away with claiming Linux is a bear to install is because almost nobody outside of powerusing geeks ever installs Windows. It came on your machine, and it stays there.

But, you must install Linux on most machines, and so you can see how annoying installing an OS can be.

Other fun things to think about are when folks claim that there is no problem with GNU/Linux as an OS, the problems are all in poor support from hardware and software vendors. Sorry to tell you zealots, but that’s irrelevant to Joe User. If he can’t watch 405 the Movie on his system, he doesn’t care that the real blame lies in the patents behind the Sorenson codec. To him, Linux sucks.

That’s about all I can come up with today. Hope you enjoyed this short primer on Linux-vs-Windows.

Am I the only one for whom IE5.5 automatically resets to “Smaller” for font sizes at random times for no apparent reason?

Is this a bug or a really stupid feature? With Microsquishy, it’s a crap shoot.

OK, it looked like the RAM that came with the machine was at fault, and the new RAM I bought (from the same company) was fine and dandy, no crashes for a full day.

And then…

Now, when I hit the power button, I get a green power light, hear the drives spin up, and that’s it. No BIOS info on the monitor, nothing. Hell, the monitor is not registering a video signal from the machine at all. Six months old, still haven’t paid for it yet, and the machine appears to be a paperweight. Oh, I don’t think so.