My Acoustic Research HC6 system came in today. The box contains a pair of white gloves with the manual, presumably to keep one from marring the glossy piano black finish of the speakers on installation.
The Bachelor Cookbook - an amusing link sent to me by an old college buddy. I'm not sure why one would want to semi-make chili vs. canned chili unless there was some special recipe. Here, btw is the one semi-real meal in my personal cookbook.
Yesterday, one of my new co-workers (he just started work about two weeks after I did; he's been programming forever and was a founding member of the now defunct WaSP) tells me about HTML-Kit. Now, last night, while reading the /. discussion on RMS's "We can put an end to Word attachments" editorial, I noticed a reference to HTML-Kit on a thread about demoronizing Word generated HTML (something that we were also discussing at work the a few days prior). Hmm, there's no point to that, really, but I wanted to say that HTML-Kit kicks so much ass it's not funny. The cool thing is that I don't have to re-install HomeSite now. Screw you Macromedia!
BTW, the best suggestions about Word alternatives is using RTF (one of the suggestions was something I actually did while I was at Xerox; instead of paying for an ASP DOC/XLS writer COM module, I actually just generated HTML and gave them the proper MIME/extension type to the client-browser. Vióla! Instant Office compatibility). Also, there's a nice little solution on how to make people use RTF.
Now, TextEdit on OSX is a great little application for reading and generating RTF's, which is the one thing that's missing from both UltraEdit and HTML-Kit.
Peculiar sidenote: Quite a few /. discussions have been uncannily relevant this past week. A short list:
It's weird. Sometimes /. just gets in this awesome groove, and sometimes it's, I dunno, posts on Aibos.
This reminds me of when I locked my keys in my car three times in one week in Novemeber. I had honestly, never, ever, ever done it once in my life prior to that, and then when I was looking for apartments, I did it once, and then twice, and then three times that week. I'm on number two with accidentally closing the blogger window. OK, this time I'm serious about the typing in a separate editor.
I've given up trying to figure out how the height is calculated for absolutely positioned CSS2 blocks and have tweaked the design to accomodate for my utter failure to be able understand the spec.
As Bill Keller says, good riddance to Mr. T., Mr. G. and Mr. H. They and many others in our government blacken and disgrace us more than any outside force can.
Hmm, I have to stop mulling over this stuff, it's rather pointless and just gets me all moody. I mean, things aren't all bad. I've got a desk, broadband, my blog back up, and having been getting oodles of cool music: Sigur Rós, more Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, India Arie, The Gloria Record... As you can tell, I'm still going through my whole post-emo indie rock consumption phase (I bought like the whole Post-Parlo library a few weeks ago, hopefully I'll be getting that soon; a former co-worker was drummer for two bands, Subset and Silver Scooter), and also getting into some shoegaze as it's apparently called, and just some random stuff.
So it's early Saturday morning now, and I've been surfing around, catching up on reading and thinking about how there are all these people who are way more talented than I (or at the very least, way way more accomplished) who are suddenly looking for work and it's sorta weird. It's one thing for your pals to be out of work, but actually I don't know what I'm saying, it's just weird and different and time flies and it's 2002, not 1998 and... It's late. The economy sucks.
On a lighter note, here's an article on a way to scientifically recreate The One Ring using modern technology. The result? The One Humvee.
Another part of my monster post, was that I did some thinking on how I got my "world news." Although I try to keep up, I'm not really a news junkie, and I'm politically aware and active, but I wouldn't mind not having to deal with all that if I could just sort of be left alone [Give me the ability to work and make a decent living, the freedom to do what I want, balanced against the rights of others to do what they want, and you can have the rest. I have the former now, but the latter seems to be causing such a fuss].
In any case, as my dream world does not exist, I'm left having to keep up with what's going on. I probably should read the EFF headlines more than I do (same w/ the ACLU), but in any case, most of my initial views of news is filtered, ususally through blogs or lists (Politech, Crypto-Gram, etc.)I read, or /., or k5 or occasionally mefi. When the spirit moves me, or when something interesting goes down, I will go to places like the IMC, Disinfo, Alternewswire, and Cryptome to balance off anything in the mainstream media (The Guardian, IHT, BBC, NYT, Yahoo, and if need be, MSNBC and CNN). There are also some magazines that I try to keep up on: The Economist, Salon (not nearly as much as I used to), The Nation.
In any case, there's not nearly enough time to keep up on all of this, especially since my primary interests lie elsewhere. But I try not to depend on any single source of information but rather try to get some different viewpoints, dig on my own for anything that catches my eye. Hmm, okay, more than enought unneccesary typing for the day.
Oh, one thing worth retyping at least some of are my summaries of some reading material. I know I've posted some of this over the years before, but hey, here's some good stuff:
Oh my Goodness. I now understand why people prefer pen and paper. I just wrote a huge tract on the Separation of Church and state, how crappy WorldNetDaily is, and I just lost it all by clicking close on the wrong window. My CMS is definitely going to have an autosave function. And a confirmation popup on-close when there's unsaved text in the entry area.
I cannot believe what I just did. I am practically in a state of shock. I had literally been typing for... more than an hour on this (w/ my wrist splints and Vioxx). I am a moron - and from now on I type my blogger posts in UltraEdit.
Anyway, read this thread, extrapolate what I would have said. Because all my comments relating to the actual topic at hand on the Seperation of Church and State were ignored, I'm no longer going to reply, obviously it's a lost cause having intelligent political discussions with some people. Life's too short.
NewsForge has a review of OEone's new AIO Internet Computer. It's a bit pricy, but the software is pretty slick - it consists of an online portal framework/components and then the entire desktop side is actually built on top of Mozilla. There's a cheezy flash demo that runs through its features.
I've done a number of tweaks to make this page slightly less problematic. I abandoned the whole absolute positioning from the right idea. It just doesn't work. I tweaked the min-width and max-widths. Also, I've fixed the IE alpha filter problem; apparently, it had trouble w/ transparency on a nested element within the absoutely positioned container. It seems to work now.
oh yeah, *yawn*: B9 d++ t++ k s u f i o+ x e+ l- c-
I can't even think of anything snarky to say (actually I could, and I have, but in this case it just doesn't fit,) because this is totally messed up.
As far as I can tell, the worst thing about it is that there are no witnesses that came forward yet and no one who stepped in to stop what seems like a pretty one-sided beating (resisting urge to comment on engineers getting beat up). Sure it's shady that the annoying people weren't removed from the theater when they started causing trouble earlier in the screening, but that's pretty much the expected service level at most movie theaters. One thing that piqued my interest, "[the parents] had arrived late for the showing on Saturday night and began drinking cans of lager." Either movie theatres (w00t! British spellling) in the UK are just way cooler than in the US, or the place was a frickin' dive. I'm tending to think towards the latter.
(look up Social Psychology junk, groups helping people, tangential: response to authority, etc.)
I'm using these wacky wrist splints that I'm wearing until I get checked up by a specialist.
It seems to be tendonitis (I have soreness and inflammation, but besides tingling once or twice, my carpal box seems to be unaffected, ie, my grip strength and sensitivity seems to be ok) - I had a minor case of tendonitis 4 years ago - this time it's worse, so I'm going to be taking it easy until I get this looked at by the specialist.
Now this is interesting. due to some network funkiness, pings to Yahoo were taking up to over 30 seconds. Yowza.
PING www.yahoo.akadns.net (216.115.102.77): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=60 ttl=243 time=24310.9 ms 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=53 ttl=243 time=31329.2 ms 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=78 ttl=243 time=6011.04 ms 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=68 ttl=243 time=16207.8 ms 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=55 ttl=243 time=29377.5 ms 64 bytes from 216.115.102.77: icmp_seq=72 ttl=243 time=12239 ms
How about SXSW, New for 2002: extra retardedness.
Due to increased security measures in effect for SXSW 2002, every registrant's badge will include their photo. You can have this photo made when you arrive in Austin for SXSW Registration, or you can submit a passport photo (2"x2" or 5cmx5cm) before March 1 (to avoid the dreaded "drivers license photo" syndrome).
This must be a recognizable, full-face photo -- no joke photos or baby pictures, please.
...
If you have any questions email: reg@sxsw.com. Or phone: 512-467-7979.
Here's my question... What's this supposed to do, stop all those web-developing Al Qaeda terrorists? Or is this all just a convenient excuse, like the Patriot Act? Lawrence Lessig is speaking, maybe he'll have an opinion.
I've been tailing my logs a bit since I'm trying to keep track of browser usage w/o any log anaylsis software set up yet. As an aside; I've yet to test this new in-between design (it all validates though) with Netscape 4.x, but I probably should, especially since I'm getting some hits from some Sun boxen running nutscrape (I can't comment on how Mozilla runs on Solaris, but it can't be worse than NS 4.x, can it? Well, maybe. I can't use Mozilla on OSX because the 0.9.7 milestone build always crashes at the most inopportune time). Anyway, if there are major problems, I may just do some server-side browser-sniffing to not include the CSS. It's all rather moot right now, of course [re: yesterday]
Back to my original story... I saw a referer from blogdex - looking for kottke of course, yeah, so I took a peek at my blogdex entry (of course I'm there, I'm old skool).
blogdex has certainly come a long way from it's early days. I noticed, that it uses ASP though. A quick lynx -head http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ shows that yay verily, it is running IIS:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 19:10:57 GMT Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 19890 Content-Type: text/html Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQQGGGXCQ=IDHLEGBAHGAHLBHGAEGGDAKK; path=/ Cache-control: private
BAD MIT MEDIA LAB. BAD, BAD, BAD MIT MEDIA LAB.
MIT Computing Services apparently supports Solaris, IRIX, BSD, and LINUX. Well, I guess NT/IIS just has too many "remote management features" for *NIX to compete with. Why, news ones come out practically every week.
Random pre-bedtime observation: Blogger wasn't the only one getting hit hard yesterday. cwis was running with a load above 60 yesterday.
The load on my machine sits right about 0.00 currently - not that there's anything wrong with that. Or with currently having more spiders and robots crawling around than real live people.
Exercises may prevent carpal tunnel syndrome
Anonymous, via Scripting News: "I watched the Steve Jobs show today at my local Apple dealer's showroom. The buyer noticed three new SKUs in Distributors' catalog without descriptions. Only pricing. We think there is more to come at CES."
Personally, with all the hype, I was hoping for more. (Gigawire? 802.11a? OSX.2? G5? Digital Tablet?) Hopefully there's more, because conceptually, Microsoft's new hardware beats out the iLamp IMO. Of course, I'd be gaga over the new iMac if it say, had a teardropped base, an completely brushed aluminum or chromed finish, and decked out in pure art deco glory. As I was saying to some friends, the white plastic is played out. So 2001. (like Cameron Crowe, I like my own lines so much I need to repeat them over and over).
"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."
So, I took a bit more time off then I was planning to, but I had a few things to take care of, like getting some motivation, and a job, and a place to live, and an Internet connection, and a table to type from, and a system to type to. And well, I pretty much have all of that set up now. (Just spent the past hour compiling and configuring proftp [uploading w/ a /bin/false/ account of course, can't be too careful]).
Sure, I have lots to post about (don't worry, nothing important), but it's late, my wrists have been acting up (hopefully nothing more serious) and I have work in the morning. (Pretty cool stuff, right now I'm working on research and analysis on QA/Analysis tools, web-based Workflow/Groupware solutions, and accessibility standards, as well as production work on some random sites, and getting started working with a fairly well thought out ASPed CMS system.
Hmm, speaking of which, the sooner I get my K/CMS up and running the more interesting this place will be... I've basically ended up writing the beginnings of a multi-user web-application framework, but I'm left wondering if I'd be better off taking a look at what's already out there before going whole hog.