Category: General

Here’s a little something I just got in the CNet newsletter. It’s a little old now, but pretty funny. In Dear IE, I’m Leaving You for Good, Robert Vamosi describes his unhappy breakup with old squeeze Internet Explorer. All I can say is, I hear you! Four years ago I was really excited about IE because it had all of these cool programming hooks, bells, and whistles. It really looked like a platform that a Windows programmer could build on, and to some extent that is still true. But once Netscape Navigator all but died, IE got all fat and lazy. No more sweet talk of new features, no more cool stuff, no more nothing!

Firefox is my browser of choice these days. I only use IE for Windows Update (because you have to) and testing web pages for compatibility.

After much on and off badgering, the good kind mind you, my lovely spouse has finally joined the blogosphere. Be sure to check out Willow Talk, and bring your brain, it’s a bit more intellectual than the fare you’ll usually find here or anywhere else! So welcome to the machine! I think the internet just became a better place.

Almost forgot the resolutions! First the usual stuff (which really doesn’t count because everyone says it), lose weight, spend less money, yadda yadda yadda… Now for the real deal!

1. Finish coding at least one game under development. This has been a bug in my butt for a long time now! 2005 will be the year!
2. Cut down on the mindless nocturnal web surfing that eats into the time needed to accomplish item 1.
3. Learn enough Chinese and Japanese to impress my Hong Kong inlaws and fanboys at anime conventions! Seriously, my Cantonese could be much much better if only I would study. And as for Japanese, I want to learn enough to play import games (including RPGs and ren ai), get the gist of most J-Pop songs, and read background text and sound effects in manga.

I think these are all reachable goals and something positive to aspire to. Not only that, I think the effort will be a lot of fun! 🙂

As 2004 winds down, I feel compelled to write something. I’m still feeling rather overwhelmed by the news of the Indian Ocean tsunami (津波) that claimed so many lives on Dec 26. Like many, I just wonder why things like this have to happen.

Then I remember so many disasters that humankind has created on its own. So many of us die for such useless, preventable reasons at our own hands that maybe we shouldn’t be so amazed when an act of nature claims us en masse. But I think the real wonder and heartache such a great natural tragedy is that it feels like God no longer loves us and has chosen to smack us down just to show us who’s boss. I remember growing up that the worst thing that could happen was getting on the wrong side of daddy, which is something I try to remember when I get mad at my own kids.

Well, I believe that God still loves us, because if He really didn’t, none of us would escape destruction. So with that faith I’ll lift my glass and welcome the new year. Besides, what else can I do?

Oh, I did give money to Unicef, click here and you can too!

This is the coolest thing of the day! My youngest daughter’s kindergarten class recently created self portraits in Picasso’s cubist style.

This is also up on the Artsonia web site where you can get t-shirts, mugs, etc., with your kid’s artwork on them. Part of the proceeds go to a fund for school art supplies. I’ve definitely got to get this on a t-shirt! One of these days I’ve got to get that girl to make some game art for me! 🙂

http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=439450

Well we knew it was coming, but once again the cold of winter is descending on Chicago and once again I totally dressed wrong for it this morning! Though I was nearly as wrong as two young ladies I saw on Michigan during my very late lunch (more on that later). Anyway, they looked like Japanese tourist and one was dressed in a very short tan plaid skirt while the other had rather short capri style pants. Neither had a coat, just light sweaters. Just the sight of that made me quickly forget about my nearly frozen ungloved hands and the short sleeved shirt I was wearing under my leather jacket. As cold as I was, they were definitely colder (and hot too! 😉 )

Now why was I out for a late late lunch at 3pm? Well blame it on Windows and stupidity. Never never start computer stuff just before lunch! I’d been trying to find updated drivers for my Dell docking stations without any luck. God, I hate looking for things on Dell’s web site! It is very painfully disorganized and very ugly. Well I didn’t find anything, so I tried installing the NT 4.0 era drivers on the XP box. Baddddd move! Worse move was uninstalling and then rebooting. Yep, dead Windows, couldn’t even run in safe mode. So I had to do a repair install and then SP2 all over again. It took a little over 2 hours which is actually not too bad in Windows world. Fortunately, I’d finished my most important work before that and had another computer I could work on. So on my left I reinstalled Windows and on my right I worked through a web based human subject certification exam I’m required to take each year. So my goof up didn’t really cost me much productivity. I’m pretty lucky that way.

Well it looks like Pfizer is in trouble with the FDA. They’ve been asked to pull their Wild Thing Viagra ads because they failed to air warnings of possible side-effects and because the ads apparently make unsubstantiated claims regarding the return of sexual desire. Hmm, I guess it’s a slow Monday for the FDA! The warnings angle is fair enough, but the other stuff is a bit of a stretch.

All of the impotence drug ads imply that not only will you be able to have sex again, but that it will be better sex, especially if you use their product rather than their competitors. The ads are generally well made and feature attractive middle aged actors. Now whether most of the people using these drugs are anything like that is anyone’s guess, but I remember that when Viagra first came out, there were a lot of stories about really old guys running out trying the boink everything in sight, which wasn’t good for some of their hearts, or wives who were often left out of the aforementioned boinking!

I say caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Sex may return with Viagra, but honestly, it probably won’t be any better than before. And I’d imagine that walking around with a h*rd *n with nowhere to go, cannot be any fun. But remember, as Viagra competitor Cialis (I think) says in their ads, erections lasting more than 4 hours are dangerous and you should seek immediate medical attention…Yeah riiiiiiiiight!

For the past couple of weeks, iTunes and I have not been seeing eye to eye….yeah…. I’ve hugged, kissed, and sweet talked, so to speak, but the b**** just wouldn’t burn any of my playlists! First I’d get an error dialog that said the playlist was too long no matter how many songs were in the list and then if I click the audio cd button on that dialog to span multiple CDs, it would say that it couldn’t burn any of the songs on the list.

To make a long and frustrating story short, it was the IDE drivers. I’d changed to an Nvidia nForce 2 based motherboard, but had not installed the motherboard drivers. Why? Because the first time I tried this from the enclosed CD, it froze up the system. Everything else worked fine with the stock Windows XP SP2 drivers. So I wasn’t in a rush to check for newer drivers since I didn’t need the onboard audio and ethernet anyway. After trying everything else to solve the problem, I downloaded the nForce 2 drivers from Mach Speed’s web site, held my breath and installed them (after creating a restore point of course).

Now iTunes is happy again, and so am I! 🙂

A while back I was wondering why certain stories kept getting negative karma points, other than genuinely sucking big time. Well, I think I’ve found the reason, Googlebots! Googlebots are Google’s web crawlers, and for some reason they seem to have been hitting the negative karma link a little more than the positive link on this site. In any case, what the bots think isn’t important to me!

Like Captain Kirk, I take full responsibility for the actions of my crew. This blog isn’t in the root of the webserver which is where a bot will be looking for the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file that is there didn’t have the exclusion directive needed to tell the bot not to assign karma points. I’ve fixed this now, so by tomorrow the spurious negative karma points should be a thing of the past, unless of course this stuff really sucks!:)

When I first saw this book on the shelf at Borders, the title so intrigued me that I could not help but pick it up and take a look. After flipping through a few pages, I decided that I’d come back in a few days and buy it after finishing a few other books (mostly manga ;)) that I was reading. Well, you snooze you lose! I couldn’t find it the next time I looked, so I ended up ordering it from Amazon.

Anyway, once Hackers and Painters arrived in my office, I couldn’t put it down. This is a really good read that will encourage one to think in a new way, or in my case, validate some of the strange thoughts I was already having! Paul Graham’s audience for this book is primarily hackers, but I think that general audiences will find this interesting as well. As I told my wife, even the notes at the back are cool! After reading it through I suddenly have a desire to learn Lisp and rule the world!

Yeah, I know, as a book review this really sucks and lacks depth. But I just wanted to say that I really liked the book and it is a worthy read. Graham writes about technology and society in a way that will resonate with hackers and has really inspired my work over the past week or so. Check it out!

I’ve had my iPod for about a year now. It’s a second generation model and while I’ve heard of issues with declining battery life with age, I haven’t noticed anything like that with mine just yet. Nevertheless, I was very happy to read that now for about $40 you can get a replacement battery for 1st or 2nd generation iPods that will last up to 20 hours on a full charge. Click here for the full story. The battery can be purchased from Other World Computing, a long time Mac specialist that I’ve had good dealings with in the past. According to the story, installing the battery is fairly straight forward.

I walked to my nearby Border’s at lunch time today and found that just in time for Halloween, it’s Wicca Season! There was a whole little Wicca section prominently displayed at the top of the escalator. Hey! When did Wicca become mainstream? Here are the books for sale.

The Earth Path

Evolutionary Witchcraft

Hex Appeal

The Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft

Magical Almanac

Pagan Pride

Wicca for One

Since I didn’t have pen and paper, I decided to record a voice note of the titles on my cell phone. After doing this I felt I must have looked like some fanatic outraged by Wicca. I’m sure some of my more conservative Christian friends would probably be put off by this, along with Halloween as well. My feelings about Wicca are neutral. Flipping through one of the books I got the impression that Wicca is another largely harmless form of spiritualism. While I myself am a Christian, I believe that anything that can get you closer to God is a good thing. If Jesus taught us anything at all, it is that God wants us to get to know him personally and the form this will take will depend on the individual.

I was trained as an experimentalist, so in that spirit, this post is an experiment. I’ve been noticing that anything that I post with words like "Iraq", "Army", or "Navy" gets negative karma points, but never any comments. Now I don’t really care what people think of what I write here, well not too much…;) But I am curious. I suspect that W’s minions, official and otherwise, have bots scouring sites with criticism and doing what they can. No, I don’t go for conspiracy theories, but I do believe in experiment. So let’s see what this gets!

Iraq, blah blah blah, Iraq! Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines…blah blah blah. Iraq, W, sucks! Blah blah blah, yadda, yadda, yadda…. No more war! More war! Four more years, Iraq! Blah, blah, blah, George Bush, Iraq, blah blah blah… John Kerry, Dick Dick Cheney blah blah blah. It’s the economy Iraq!

Heh heh, let’s see what that gets! Now seriously, if the Internet has an ass, then this blog is the pimple on the pimple of that ass. So I don’t consider this to be all that important. IRAQ!!!!

I usually don’t do these online polls, but I’ll make an exception this time because it’s funny with a bit of truth…maybe…. Click the image to take it yourself.

Which OS are You?

Okay, now I’ve seen everything. Sex Advice From Cosplayers is just what it says, sex and relationship advice from people who like to cosplay, that is, dress up as their favorite anime, manga, and video game characters. All of that aside, it is actually a pretty nice piece, so check it out. I especially like this one

"Tips for using restraints in bed?
Make sure that it’s not rape. Then it’s just a matter of finding the materials."

For an interesting set of comments click here for Megatokyo. If you want to laugh your a*s off click here for F*CKIN’ OTAKU.

What do I think of cosplayers? Well, I actually like them. They seem to be having a lot of fun. I keep trying to talk my wife into joining me as Roger Smith and Dorothy from Big O. But, as the more sensible of the two of us, she has thusfar declined.