fine whine

So I posted nothing yesterday; I hope that nobody has died from forsaking food and drink to continually refresh my page over and over again in fervent anticipation of further blathering nonsense. I have been busy, but that is no excuse, really. This is my blog, though, and I make the rules—I can post whenever I want. So there.

Anyway I have been doing a whole bunch of stereotypically nerdy things, at least the way I see nerds. Yesterday night I was up late, much later than my bedtime, banging out a new layout for this blog including the now cliched left top corner piece of stock photography. I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation, as I am doing mine to be cool and not kitschy or post-hip. Alas, in doing so I am hitting the wall of every burgeoning web designer, that of browser incompatibility. I developed the somewhat difficult (though simple looking) layout using Safari on the Mac, and as soon as I was happy enough with it I tried loading the same in Internet Explorer, which was a spectacular failure. Nothing lined up and the image, that for which this whole exercise had begun, was nowhere to be found. I was crushed. Expecting no better I loaded it up in Opera, which, true to form for being a sleek and efficient browser, crashed and burned before even trying to show the page. Par for the course. It loaded okay but not as perfectly in the browsers on my PC, but I'm not happy having it look bad on a bunch of systems. That said I could likely poll all three of my readers and find out what they're using and hack my CSS accordingly. So that was that.

Yesterday I also finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform (well, the excellent English translation thereof) but that it not in line with the rest of this entry so I will have to talk about that brilliant, yet disturbing book some other time. Go read it, though, it's very literary. Today I began a book based on an offhand recommendation from a website (well, boingboing) so that's pretty geeky, right? It's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and it's really pretty interesting so far, my bias against women science fiction authors notwithstanding.

I mean no offense by it, but it seems that men write better science fiction as far as I have read. I know that there are good science fiction authors that happen to be women out there, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. I have of course run through many a bad male author, so really the problem is of bad SF in general and not gender at all. So it is with pleasant surprise that I am enjoying this book.

I am not enjoying having had another flat tire, but that too is outside the realm of this narrative and I will only talk about it once it all has been resolved. So stay tuned... but do make sure that you are properly stocked with food and water, please.

My geekiness continues with today's playing of an hour or so's worth of collectible card games and then three solid hours at the local Gameworks, which is something like Chuck-E-Cheese's for adults but they kept skee-ball. Jessica was stuck to the skee-ball and other ticket-producing machines for the whole time, but I was making the best of my company's holiday hospitality by playing all of the otherwise expensive arcade games. Generally I can only play things that involve shooting or driving, and they had numerous options for both. They had every iteration of both the Time crisis and House of the dead series so I got in a lot of shooting. I even was able to monopolize both sides of Time Crisis 2 and House of the dead once or twice so I could live out my double pistol John Woo dreams. To play both sides of TC2, including the ducking with the pedals, is truly an experience to, er, experience. Especially when somebody else is picking up the credits. Beating them brought the same satisfaction and relief I had remembered. I fared a little worse on the driving games, but my heart wasn't in them after losing a four-lap Indianapolis "500" on the last leg of the last lap. Before the party was over I also got to do several minutes of a rollercoaster simulator which was really cool but the picture was blurry, though that didn't detract from the thrill. What did, somewhat, detract was the ride's inclusion of fake "danger" elements, like a swinging blade and other pointy things just outside of where safety ends. Those didn't really add anything for me, but hey, it was free. The last game I played was called something along the lines of "vertical reality" and though it too had focus troubles it was very fun. The game is played on lifting chairs that rise and fall up to some ten or twenty feet (oh, the wonders of pneumatics!) and the premise was something about popping hot air balloons. I had never played it but nevertheless triumphed over the two small girls and one guy who played with me. I beat him by the total of the other two combined, I think, and had a blast once I got the hang of the game. That one I might pay to play, sometime. And the whole time Gauntlet legends: dark legacy sat in the corner, unplayed. Sadly, I too did not play it but really should have, as I have long enjoyed pumping quarters endlessly into the Gauntlet games in all their incarnations.

That's really not that geeky, in toto, just CCGing, going to the arcade and playing with HTML. Round that out with a bunch of Dynasty warriors 3 on the PS2 and Grand theft auto: Vice city on the PC and what do you have? Me and my long winded account of why I haven't blathered on about anything else the last couple days.

Oh, and I've been correcting my spelling a lot more lately. Between this and the book it has been atrocious lately, so bear with me if that bothers you. I will not stoop to spellchecking these entries, though I know at least one MT plugin supports that.

Yesterday I talked about the sadness brought on by a badly designed ATM. Well, just past sadness is the land of Irk. Many technologies worse than that ATM have the potential to irk me.

Very irksome is the now common percent key on desktop calculators. Somebody now can hit 100 and then plus and then 5 and then percent and equals and it will spit out 105 (I am using deliberately simple numbers to make my point all the more straightforward). This bothers me. While it is a neat trick, using the percent key means that a whole bunch of people who have come to depend on these calculators do not understand percentages. While that may not bother you it doesn't sit well with me. I don't even know if any of my calculators has a percent key because I would never use it. To consider it a shortcut for the mental two digit shift is a telling sign of the continuing dumbing-down of the calculator dependant. To do the calculation I mentioned before, I (and most people who know what they are doing) would merely multiply 100 by 1.05, or if need be multiply 100 times 105 and then divide by 100, which sounds ridiculous from my choice of numbers, but it would work all the same. Then again, I can always calculate a fifteen percent tip (drop a decimal place and then add half of that result) whereas others are hampered by less useful shortcuts such as doubling the tax. So I'm not the same as other people, I guess.

It is far easier to differentiate oneself from others than to show similarities. Yesterday I flipped through the most recent PC Magazine and found myself even further distanced from their readership than usual. Unlike one columnist, I don't have thousands of digital pictures and documents needing to be backed up, nor am I bothered by the lack of PDF copies of my online bills. Moreover I would never consider scanning my other documents, such as tax records and (eventual) kids' homework. What does this guy have against paper, especially considering he pays for his expensive digital habits by contributing to a dead tree publication? Also throwing his hat in the columnists' ring is John Dvorak, who insists everybody should go out and buy a $2300 laptop to show off and start conversations. I'm sorry, John, but when I have a laptop with me it's to get something done, not to spur a geek pissing contest. Also in the magazine can be found an overview of IM slang, and within those confines listings of smilies and common chat acronyms. I myself don't use abbreviations those that they mention, and as usual had never heard of most of them. I'm no newbie to the whole chat world, having haunted IRC rooms and BBSes before them, but somehow I have always survived sacrificing typing efficiency for modest eloquence. Again, I'm not really the sort of reader they're gearing toward.

But as distanced as I find myself from their intended targets, I cannot get away completely. In the same Dvorak rant I notice that he's completely unaware of the strains of Linux that run on (mostly Mac but not exclusively) PowerPC systems, as he assumes that Microsoft is threatening to move to that architecture for future generations to stop people from hacking X-boxes to run the free operating system. Moreover I find issue later in the magazine with a sidebar describing memes. According to them, manipulated images boasting "All your base are belong to us" predated the whole Bert is Evil phenomena, which is false. Admittedly a news photo showing, on extreme closeup, a picture of Bert and Osama in a collage post-dated the AYB boom, but the Bert and Osama picture was older than that news photo and in fact had its roots in a website available to all back in the late nineties. So how can I think myself below their radar and yet look down on them? I can only give them props. as it were, for pointing out that Bert's appearance in these pictures was Zelig-like, though Gump-like might be more appropriate. They tried, and that is what matters.

Yesterday I heard a newly coined word, and for once I liked it. I'm not a great fan of "earworm" in particular for reasons I cannot articulate, and I still have not warmed to the term "blogger" despite apparently being one. The way that words like "authentic" and "new" have been shanghaied grates on me and I will likely forever be against the wholesale verbing of utterly inappropriate nouns. Yet as much as I am against these "evolved" contributions to language, I find myself liking "emblemish", mentally bookmarked from an NPR feature about some violinist who takes liberties with classical pieces. I'm sure that idea gets some people as aghast as I do when I hear something like "innovationeering", but nothing in the segment stood out until some mention of the producer making a distinction between embellishment and emblemishments, and I've been trying to come up with a way to co-opt it into my regular speech.

For the meaning I mentally assign it I can find a great many examples of things of which I am not fond. To me an emblemishment is unnecessary and superfluous additions something, such as excessive body cladding and a rear spoiler for a front-engined commuter car. It's what some people call feature creep, the addition of unnecessary features to something that was already perfectly usable. If Word had ever been useful (I didn't use it in its early days so I cannot say) then Clippy and his ilk are emblemishments. The Crayola crap and bubbly interface of the default Windows XP interface are likewise emblemishments. The logos for formats and manufacture and model names all emblemish my DVD player, just as dealer's license plate frames and bold lettering for ABS and engine sizes emblemish the majority of cars on the roads. The CZ "diamonds" ringing the face of so-called bling bling watches on ebay are very much emblemishment. And they're gaudy, too.

Bah. More negativity. I can't wait until spring. Spring always makes me happy.

I feel like a colossal boob. This morning I needed to call the help desk for (gasp!) an Outlook problem. A folder that I stored messages needing a response had somehow disappeared. Baffled, I made a cursory glance over all of the other folders and things (for lack of a better word like "features") in Outlook's left pane, and then, wearily, dialed the help desk. I spent more time on hold, listening to "Play" by Jennifer Lopez for almost its entire run length, and then somebody "logged on" to my PC (i.e. they took control, but I guess to call it such is too sinister) and within seconds had found my wayward folder in the deleted items of my archives. I was at once shamed and befuddled. I hadn't moved it there, had I? How does one go about deleting a folder? For not checking in there I felt like a total jackass, but really I can't beat myself up too much because there is no reason for the deleted items folder to exist, let alone for mine to have appeared there.

Something else that I noticed this morning is that the local ATM asks for users to "Please insert or swipe card", though it only has a receptacle to insert one. Would it kill somebody to determine just that and leave the other off of the screen? I understand the desire for generic universality, but still that just smacks of slapdash laziness. Contrast that with this mini PC that knows with way is up (the guy made two different cases, one for Linux and one for Windows) and boots the appropriate OS automatically. Can't we make an ATM that smart, with all of the professionals and designers behind it? Don't the people who build the machines communicate with the people who make the software that runs on them? I doubt it, and this saddens me, me with my engineering degree.

On an unrelated note, it is with great reservation that I am reserving (oops, used same word stem twice in the same sentence) Paul Davidson's Consumer Joe on boingboing's recommendation. I'd run across the title a number of weeks ago but I have been burned in the past by similar books of crank letters. The standard to which I hold all of them is the Lazlo Toth canon, written by former SNL funnyman Don Novello, and few so far have stood up to those letters. Others left such a slight impact on me as to have made me forget their titles and authors, though I remember one had a brown cover and another had an introduction by Jerry Seinfeld. Know this: I usually do not forget books. Maybe I am just reading too many. I admire Scott's resolve to read all of his books before buying or borrowing any new ones, but I can't logistically do that since many of my books are a two hour drive away. And when I had tried such a system with my CDs and DVDs it failed miserably. I still haven't caught myself up on the DVDs, and I haven't bought one in months, but that's what a well-stocked library system does to me.

And holy shit, Blogshares is gone. *Poof* and I am free of that monkey(x) on my back. I had a decent run, became a virtual hundred millionaire, was twelfth best player one month and even managed to break the rules and have both accounts open at once. I only wish I had kept my portfolio somewhere so that I could finally get around to visiting the hundred or so sites in which I was part "owner". Or complete owner, as in jwz's journal, a coup that netted me nine million virtual bucks for a cool hundred thousand. Oh well, I never paid them anything so I cannot complain that they picked up shop and went away.

First of all, let me get this out of the way. This link is for shareblogging. So the other day I carried a 19" monitor half a mile in the sweltering heat wearing jeans and a 100% polyester polo shirt. Literally half a mile. And when I finally picked it back up (I drove the last quarter mile to my place) I weighed it — 48 pounds. But it works, and my arms aren't sore anymore. It's better than all of my others, even displaying the grey Apple OS X loading screen.

The odd thing is that this is the second 19" monitor I've dumpster dove. Dumpster dived? Got from an alleyway.

So I've got a beige G3 now, one of the last Macs before they started to look colorful and/or cool. For a machine running only at 266 MHz I'm still quite impressed, but that may be my PC bias where processing power is heroin: most people get some, want more, and can't really give a good reason why. Anyway, impressed as I was with MacOS 9.2.2, the real purpose of this experiment was to get my copy of Jaguar up and running, and I was led to believe it would be an arduous sort of experience.

It was, but it shouldn't have been.

I suppose I should point out that I'm using a Gateway 2000 monitor with a little adaptor. The "2000" on the monitor betrays how behind the times I am with some of my PC kit as well, it seems, but it works okay for my Athlon box, the G3 running 9.2.2, and presumably would do so for 10.2. Except that every time I tried to boot the installation CD, the monitor would snap to attention and then turn itself off. I tried it again: boot, blank screen. This is what I would call a major setback.

I must've tried it thirty times, putting the CD in, holding down all manner of startup keystroke combinations, and still my monitor stayed blank. So I played with 9.2.2 some more, attempting to update my SCSI firmware and knock out any other "obvious" hurdles. Once downloaded, most were unnecessary, and merely time-consuming. I had more frustration with windows internet connection sharing, which also wasted a lot of my time when I didn't properly diagnose what was wrong. Basically, it wasn't working.

When I say "it wasn't working", I mean, it wasn't working in Windows either. Rather than presenting me with some sort of error message saying "Sorry, but despite the existence of a perfectly good LAN connection, Windows has decided to only pretend that it's sharing the connection. Banging your head on the keyboard a couple times may help" the computer just trucked on as if nothing were wrong. Finally I fixed it with some arcane magic and alchemy, and the Mac was ready for the web. So I read up on Beige G3 Jaguar experiences.

Most were pretty bad. I knew I was in for trouble having only 96 megabytes of RAM to throw around and only an old PC monitor to look at, but I wasn't yet interested enough to sink any money into the experiment. I did manage to hunt down a monitor from a Performa, and only confirmed my blank-screen difficulties. So I tried the install a couple more times with no success. Then I stumbled across XPostFacto, and thought that my troubles were solved.

They weren't. I had the same troubles with the blank screen. Frustrated, I tried one last time, jamming down the return key and leaving it running, hard drive churning away. Twenty minutes later, the installer appeared. I had the next three hours to contemplate what I'd done wrong. And also to ponder the reason I needed localized files for Brazil, China and (I think) Klingon.

So what was wrong? I think the installer would've worked right away, though I cannot be sure. I had at some point removed jumpers to give my hard drive SCSI ID 0 which might have helped, but it was the patience that really did it. You see, my monitor can't handle the new startup screen with the grey apple logo and the little spinning thing, so it turns itself off. The old Performa monitor also had trouble with said grey screen, but I excused it for being old. And it doesn't matter now, since everything works.

So I'm posting this with Safari. Whee!

As I try to catch myself up on ketchup I encounter (or rather, don't encounter) sites I remember that have since gone away. A few have officially closed, like Jeffrey Huston's Believe-me, the only movie review site I thought I'd ever need, but most just disappear, such as Impropaganda, F-u-F-me, and HQ2O. I understand that time erodes the humor or poignancy of some content, but I would prefer to make that judgment myself, dammit. It's annoying, moreover, to see "Page loading..." in the status bar, only to be disappointed by a search-portal and numerous pop-up windows. Clearly somebody is aware of "hot" addresses and buys them up chock-a-block, preying on the foolish few still expecting the site they recall or seek. I can only wonder if, undaunted, they click on some of the new links presented, eager to click on something and proceed.

I was once a music reviewer for 181.4 Degrees From The Norm. Now the address points to a site entirely void of music reviews. What gives? Am I asking too much to demand to have every site ever created always remain? I've kept my site up for a number of years without a hiccup or significant damage to my wallet, and I guess I expect the same from everybody else. The closest analogue I can envision is the spontaneous combustion of books on a library shelf. There and readable one minute, gone the next.

True, spontaneous library book combustion would have one upside: it would make room for more books. The internet isn't constrained by shelf space. It is supposed to be a dynamic medium, unlike books which are static, unchanging, dead. And a lot of sites do wear out their welcome, such as those for the oncoming-millennial-party/apocalypse and every movie made in the last three years, but the idea of their content disappearing makes me uneasy somehow. Websites are supposed to be there for me whenever I want them, not just as long as somebody keeps paying for them. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive, I guess.

Until they too pick up shop and move on, of course.