My Addled Brain

Hat tip to Emily’s mom via MCG - what famous movie star does our good friend Darryl Sutter, head coach of the Calgary Flames, resemble? Click his grill for the answer.

House hunting sucks. Just had to get that off my chest.

Anybody see that footage of Al Gore going Howard Dean? Yeah, me neither. But I heard it was a hoot. Don’t ever confuse passion with rhetoric, people - it gets you nowhere except the front page of the Drudge Report and an hour on Glenn Beck.

I’m here to issue the heartbreaking news that Phish is breaking up. I know, I know - I was as shocked as you are when I heard. Now who am I going follow around the country when I get the urge to live out of my car for six months? I’m pretty sure I’d get beaten by a gaggle of drunk, inbred rednecks if I were to do that with Toby Keith, so that’s right out.

Because one person asked for it: Kill Bill Vol. 2.

Kill Bill 1 it ain’t.
And that’s not a bad thing. Eye
liked it. Get it? Eye?

Sometimes, I think some people watch a little too much Sci Fi channel. Witness the latest idea at protecting the Earth from deadly asteroids. Ok - so maybe they would have used the warp core to create a temporal flux would phase the asteroid into anothe dimension in Star Trek (or maybe not), but a fleet of drilling robots? That’s every geek’s wet dream. Well, ok, every geek’s wet dream would have a fleet of drilling robots with robot boobs, but still. I just look at the pictures and think about the rebels taking on the Death Star, and I start to feel all warm and tingly inside. And the name for the robots is sweeeeet.

Hey, if you don’t like my rigorous posting schedule, perhaps you should get your own blog.

It’s late, but she’s at the beach anyway, so she’ll never know it - congratulations to The Brat on surviving her Catholic school education, and joining the ranks of the few, the proud, the high school graduates. Well, actually, I should congratulate her on the sucessful bamboozlement of people in charge of enrollment at George Washington University, who seem to have accepted her despite the large scale letter writing campaign MCG and I had going to get her enrolled at a more appropriate school of higher learning. Hey, at least they won’t teach her to be a Communist there - although I’m willing to bet she doesn’t need a school to teach her that.

And yes, as Teh 1!!1 mentioned in the oft-perused comments section, we had ourselves a lovely partial power outage in the residence Monday night. But we got it all sorted out - eventually. At least the food in the fridge didn’t spoil, anyway.

Random linky goodness follows.

• A series of photo essays on modern ruins.
• For those of you who hate music and silence, some ambient sounds for your day.
• Run for your lives! The cicadas are here!!! AIIEEEEEEE!!
• Woman, where’s my SUPER SUIT?!?!

My apologies to anyone who doesn’t care about the following, which is approximately each and every one of you.

There is a special place in hell for whomever at Microsoft thought cross platform web compatability was a threat to their business model. I’d like to think that, when these people die, hopefully at the end of a long katana wielded by yours truly as I use my 733t ninja skills to carve a path of destruction through Redmond, Bride-style, that they will be condemned, for all eternity, to write Javascript event handlers that work in IE, Netscape 4, Mozilla, and Opera. And everytime they write “event.” anything, they receive a sulfuric acid enema.

You see, I’m trying, slowly but surely, to overhaul the internal web application our company uses. I want it to be standards-compliant, browser agnostic, and most importantly, pleasant to look at. I feel I’m accomplishing the first and third ones just fine, but trying to be browser agnostic is driving me batty. Now, I don’t have to be browser agnostic - in fact, everyone in the company is a straight up Microsoft Windows user, so I could easily just stick with IE-only events and scripting. But, being the broad-minded coder that I am, I refuse to take the easy way out. So, I end up writing scripts that should be only 5 or 6 lines but end up being 50, simply because I have to do browser detection routines, and then write a script that works in each browser, all so I can do something simple like get a pop-up window to appear with some explanation text when I hover the mouse over a link. Irritating beyond belief.

“But why blame Microsoft?” you may ask. Well, like I said, there are standards for how these behaviors should work - and Microsoft decided to make their own behaviors rather than follow these standards - standards that they themselves helped to come up with. Makes a man want to break down and cry - or enact revenge on those who tormented him so.

Somehow, this story has made me feel better - because as bad as things may get sometimes, there’s always someone who’s got it worse.

Tweaking continues. Still not totally happy, but at least the page renders in Firefox and other standards-compliant browsers (almost) correctly now. BTW - if you’re not using Firefox, then you’re missing out, d00d(ette). The rollover menu is probably next on the chopping block, unless someone talks me out of it.

A belated Happy Mother’s day to all you Mom’s out there; mine got some lovely flowers and should get the belated card any day now. Oh - and congratulations on the new job - be sure to pour some sugar in your jerk supervisor’s gas tank as you walk out the door of your old one…

All Your IP Are Belong To Us

I usually have mixed feelings about the goings down in Congress in general, but today I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Slap an R on movies just because someone smokes? “Hi, perhaps some of you in Congress don’t recognize me, I’m the First Amendment. I guarantee freedom of expression. Now, I know that you wacky politicians are always doing things in the name of kids, especially during an election year, but, c’mon now - get a life, people. Don’t you have some assault weapons to unban or something else constructive to do today?”

At least the proposed amendments to the DMCA are being heard today. Reestablish fair use? Mark copy protected CD’s as being such? This came from congressmen? I feel all giddy for some reason - maybe the information nazis aren’t out to get us after all! Actually, it’s more likely to get hung up in committee until the end of session, where it will join other discarded legislation on the Capitol steps.

You’ve heard the rest, now hear…me: Van Helsing.

It’s horrendously
overwritten. A special
effects bukkake.

I ranted about the issues I had about the movie this weekend, but I realized what I was bitching about (namely, everyone’s a damn psychic) didn’t matter a hill of beans to the film, so I guess it was all right. But damn, someone hand the guy who wrote the dialogue a Hemingway novel or something - Tarantino he ain’t.

This not only encapsulates my feelings toward computers and family, it also has my own little secret desire involving the zoo. Teh 1!!1 loves the zoo. I think it’s alright, personally, but to make it truly entertaining, I think they should randomly feed habitually offending child molesters to the lions. Not too often, but at least three times a year. Guarantees you more attendance, and it helps the lions get back to their roots as King of the Jungle - so they too can have it their way.

Speaking of tech support - ever do any in a Windows XP™/2000 environment? Have to deal with viruses/spyware? Does it make you curse your very existence, filling you with rage and the desire to mow down a schoolyard full of kids? Then try out this bad boy: Bart’s Preinstalled Environment, a bootable Windows XP™ environment, complete with GUI, antivirus wrappers, and a ton more. You’ll need a Genuine Windows XP™ disc to create the ISO, which I’m sure you can Torrent yourself (not that I know anything about that) - but it rocks.

From the “Look at the size of that thing!” dept:

Microsoft is projecting that ‘Longhorn’, their next generation operating system, will requre a PC that is easily twice as powerful as the most current high end system. More here and here. I, for one, am glad to see that Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballimer have both stopped taking their lithium.

Now, I know that Longhorn is a couple years off (thank goodness for WinXP Reloaded, an operating system I can make fun of not only due to the greed factor, but also because it has the single worst OS name EVAH), but dayum. I’ll be sure to pick that up when it comes out - after I hit the corner market to buy plutonium for my Delorean time machine.

Enjoyed some fine chinese buffet with the Madre and family. Well, I enjoyed it, but Teh 1!!1 thought it was…lacking. The only thing I found lacking was the quality of our fortunes. Teh 1!!1’s:

You have a yearning for perfection.

Mine:

You constantly struggle for self improvement.

Well, that’s good to know. I also caught a glimpse of a discarded fortune as I left - and if it’s to be believed, then that asshole can rot in the factory until he dies and is used to make the crab rangoon.