BunkBlog

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
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Who but the Soviets would have created a class of power generators based on the waste heat from radioactive decay?

This story details the contraptions, which are abandoned throughout the former Soviet Union, many of them misplaced or stolen.
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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
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There are good months and bad months. This is a good one.

• I’m still married to a wonderful sexy woman who puts up with me with minimal complaint.
• The boy is still as cute as ever, and proving to a smart little boy.
• I’ve made record time on writing reports and such, despite two of the reviewers sucking up half of my alloted time just sitting on the documents.
• The IRS check showed up at the same time as my bonus from work, which was just in time to help with the closing costs on the house.
• As a friend needs some financial assistance to help with hospital costs, the VA finally comes through with the money they’ve owed me since October, which makes it easy to give away 2 grand without screwing up my own family.
• Same day I drop the check in the mail to pay my Amex corporate card, I get the settlement from the company for that trip.
• I’ve been told I may go to Hawaii on a business trip in August. Better than Omaha in February, you betcha!

That about sums it up. Go me!
current_music: Prince – Kiss
current_mood: happy

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

The Bush administration plans to ask Congress next week to remove all restrictions on U.S. military aid to Colombia, including those that limit assistance to counter-narcotics efforts, impose human rights standards on the Colombian military and cap the number of U.S. military personnel in the country, administration and congressional sources said.

The plan, which also seeks to ward off restrictions on any future aid, is included in legislation that the administration expects to submit to Congress asking for additional funds for global and domestic anti-terrorism efforts this year.

The White House put aside a similar Colombia proposal barely two weeks ago on grounds that Congress might not support a significant broadening of the U.S. military mission there to assist the government of President Andres Pastrana in its fight against leftist guerrillas. The Pentagon, backed by some officials in other departments, had proposed including Colombia in the global war on terrorism.

Full Story

So, under the guise of fighting terrorism, let’s re-instate the foreign policies of the Cold War. Remember them? We didn’t care how evil the dictator was, nor how bad he beat his own people, so long as he wasn’t Communist. Now, we’re going to let Colombia off the hook for human rights because they’re not terrorists? Geez.
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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

If you want to see what a pink house looks like on the inside, check out our photo album. The latest page includes photos of the new digs, the backyard, and a few of Alex being cute. Pretty much never going to escape those Boy pics.

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

This story is just too funny. Beyond the fact that a company named Virgin is talking about porn, they want to allow their cell phone users to view smut on their phones! Oh, yeah, that’s what people are looking for: a 3 cm square of nudity on a phone. Who comes up with these business ideas?
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Settling in for another long day of doing nothing while waiting for one of my eight bosses to do his job. Good thing I’ve got that Dashiell Hammett story on the Palm…
current_music: Texas – Say What You Want ( Rae & Chri
current_mood: frustrated

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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Welcome my little sister, , to Livejournal land! The first of my family to figure out how to enter a username and password when I sent them an invite code.

Now, start updating, girl.
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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 think this would have been very messy. Have you any idea the caliber of machine gun mounted on an A-10?

“About 100 to 200 al Qaeda ran out of the caves, probably thinking we were going to bomb them inside,” the official said. “We rolled in on them with A-10s” – attack planes designed for striking tank columns.

current_music: Prince – Family Name
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By popular request (OK, so it was one person but I thought it was cool), I’ve added another design to my retail experiment.

This one I’ve not yet integrated into my main page and may never bother to do so, as the store is so inherently time-limited.

That’s right, I’m capitalizing on the stress of others. Well, they asked me to! Camp Xray has opened. I’ll probably do up a Camp Xray2 for another design I’m working on, but figured I’d get this one up quickly. Hope you poor schmucks down in Cuba enjoy flipping off authority. Yep, thought you did.
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current_mood: sleepy