Vista Happy Dance

Today, all my Firefox bookmarks went away. I don't know why, but the good news is that under Vista Firefox apparently has a bug that causes the actual content area of the browser to bounce up and down like an ATV with a broken suspension driving over a sea of boulders and land mines. It's OK though -- I backed up my bookmarks before installing Vista, just in case it deleted everything to make room for itself.

So far today, Windows Explorer has crashed 6 - 8 times. I was trying to copy a file... I finally had to use the command line.

Perhaps "Vista" means "the view out onto things that won't be broken as badly in the next version: Windows Apology."

Maybe things will go in the more abstract direction, like when we went from Windows ME to Windows XPerience, clearly denoting transcendence... Windows Unsatisfying Hallucination.

Windows Vista

By "Vista" Microsoft seems to have been referring to the glowing brimstone fields of Hell, but I may be jumping to conclusions...

As my calloused blood and dirt stained hands type this blog, my computer sits, churing through the first of it's 250 GB-worth ScanDisk operations. Don't fret, I haven't lost any data (that I know of, so far), but I'm nervous and I'm taking precautions.

You see, today I'm down 1 and 6/8ths power supplies. 6/8ths, you ask? Well, one of them lost all of it's magic smoke, so it's definitely a gonner. But the other is newer, and I think it runs on pixie blood, which as we all know comes in little crystalized pellets, so it can't get out like the magic smoke can... but it can apparently go stale, 'cause that PSU isn't working either, and nothing got out of it as far as I know.

But what does all this have to do with Vista? Well, therein lies the rub: I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it's just a coincidence that the day after I installed Vista my computer decided it was time to start igniting parts of itself. Maybe the "Deep Sleep" power saving mode of Vista really is Deep Sleep and this kind of ir-reversable shut-down state is the intended result. But there was some strange, possibly coincidental voodoo at work that made damn sure that after Vista tucked my computer in, it wasn't going to be getting up any time soon.

I wouldn't normally blame a piece of software (even from M$) for catastropic hardware failure, but we are talking about a sub-one-year-old 580 watt, top-of-the-line, modular power supply here, and we are talking about Vista.

The good news is, I'm enough of a geek to have had not one, but two spare PSUs lying around. Of course, my computer is limping along at 300W right now, but it should be enough to hold me over until a replacement arrives in the mail.

The question I'm grappling with is: What PSU do I replace the 580W one with? It's under warrenty, so I could get a replacement. But of course, if the PSU failed on its own after less than a year, I think it's time to switch brands. Then again, if Vista really did contribute to this atrocity I'd have to go wiping everything down and re-installing XP Pro. After the marathon of installing Vista, I'm not keen to downgrade unless I can find some real evidence that Vista sucks like hardware-killing bad.

Seriously: I think I'm about one really bad PC failure away from switching to a Mac. That makes ya think.

AJAX Ho!

I was playing Zelda Classic this weekend when a realization struck me...

Perhaps it came to me because of all my recent fiddling around with the Google maps API, 37 Signals' Basecamp and Backpack, the Dojo Toolkit, and all other manner of Ajax goodness.

Perhaps I was just very bored and lulled into a strange state of super-consciousness by the endlessly looping Zelda theme.

Regardless, it occurred to me that there is no reason I couldn't play Zelda in a browser nowadays. PNGs would do a fine job of displaying sprites, and things like Google Maps have demonstrated that you could certainly scroll around a massive overworld map pretty smoothly, and JavaScript has really come of age lately with object-oriented-ness and all that jazz.

Ok, so the control scheme might be annoying, being that browsers so far don't seem to have very strong joystick / gamepad support.

I bet there are still lots of games you could play in browser though. In fact, ironically, a modern rogue-like would be pretty nifty and is certainly suited for a heavy-weight server, light-weight client arrangement -- sort of getting back to the roots of it all, really.

Perhaps with the addition of fully-functional SVG (we're not quite there yet) the wave of "Web 2.0" JavaScript-ness and Ajax-iousity will finally pound the first chinks into the armor of the mighty giant Flash...?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Joint Pain

For some reason I keep seeing these terrible commercials for products that are supposed to help "lubricate my joints".

I think my favorite one is the one with the Native American medicine man peddling joint pills.

But today, I want to highlight the following quotation:
"...I don't hear any more cracking or grinding sounds from my joints"

CRACKING OR GRINDING sounds...

If you hear cracking or grinding just coming out of your knee, you should probably go to the doctor. Joint pills aren't going fix that. The reason he doesn't hear any more cracking or grinding is probably just that he's worn down all the bone in his joint to a fine paste. Two or three days after they shot that commercial, I bet he just fell over when his knee-paste gave out.

Opportunity Cost

So far, I recall learning one thing in the course of my entire college career. I learned it in my Economics class. I learned what "opportunity cost" is.

Opportunity cost is simply the value of the "next-best-thing" you could be doing, if you weren't doing whatever it is you're doing now (more or less).

My opportunity cost for sitting in my classes on an average class day is $90. That's what my time would yield if I spent it working, instead of listening to professors say "Ummmmmmm..." and watching "Refer Madness".

My classes meet twice a week for 14 weeks. That's 28 days. $2520.

I also have a night class one day a week that runs for 3 solid hours. $60 per week. $840 over 14 weeks.

The opportunity cost of this semester of college is $3,360.
4 months rent.
Or, 7 months worth of food.
Or, 56 video games.
Or, some 220 large-size paper back books.
Or, more than 1000 gallons of gas.

Or, somewhat ironically, more than 30 textbooks.

It's taken me about 10 semesters to finish all my degree requirements, but lets be optimistic: let's call it 8 semesters. At half the above per semester value. That's still $13,440.

Of course, this is in addition to tuition and fees, books (which I generally didn't use), supplies, transportation, and -- honest to God -- medication to deal with it all!

But nevermind all that for now. The optimistic opportunity cost alone of my education, excluding time spent writing papers, doing research, finishing homework, traveling to and from class, and spending time on campus between classes, is greater than the poverty-line income per annum for a family of two.

It's not that I begrudge the need for education -- I just which I had gotten one for my $13,440 premium, plus tutition and expenses. Or that somebody would just give me the $13 grand back.

Hey, Imohotep, can you shake this guy's head for me?

Do you hear any brain rattling around?

...seriously, if you were an ancient Egyptian priest prepping a body for mummification and you were slicing up the brain and pulling it out through the nose... how would you known when you had it all? Did it matter if you got it all out?

Almond Cookie

Mmmm... tasty

2 parts creme de cacao
1 part Bailey's Irish cream
1 part Frangelico

Layer.

My grandmother never made Scottish oats

I'm eating a bowl of Scottish-style oatmeal (I don't know what exactly makes it Scottish, so don't ask!) for my mid-morning meal (I'm working really hard to eat six small meals a day, but so far all I've managed is to eat six large meals a day, which is not helping my weight go down). The oatmeal is good, and all, but here's the thing:

The ... cylinder ... it comes it says "Like Grandma Used To Make". But my grandmother never made Scottish Oats. In fact, I don't think I ever saw my grandmother make "American" oats. So, what does this slogan mean for me??

All it really does is conjure up creepy images of chubby little old ladies with vaguely Scottish accents poodle-ing around a dimly lit kitchen stirring giant vats of thick oatmeal.

My grandmother did make cream of wheat though. I have some cream of wheat. The box (that comes in a box, not a cylinder -- I don't know why oatmeal comes in cylinders -- does anybody know? Leave a comment if you figure it out.) for that says -- get ready for it -- "Just Like Mother Used To Make".

What the fuck??

Ok, so maybe my mother did make cream of wheat once in a while, but my grandmother definitely had it more often. How do these bastards who churn out food products decide which relative cooked what foods? Do they do some kind of survey or poll? Am I the screwed up one (again!)? Maybe my mother was supposed to make cream of wheat and my grandmother was supposed to be the one making Scottish oatmeal! Is my family a failure? Did we miss out on the great traditional roles of breakfast making? HOW CAN I RECLAIM MY BROKEN CHILDHOOD?!

::quiet sobbing::

12 of 12 / A+ / 100

Thank goodness I spent those 3.5 minutes preparing my oral presentation for this morning. I just barely squeaked by with a passing grade of 100%.

Maybe I'll make the Dean's List... Then I'll be King of the Moment!!!

Type Nicely

Ok, here's a point of order: we, as a race, are not at war with our keyboards. There is no need what-so-ever to slam on them like they were covered with roaches.

Hitting the keys harder does not make you type faster, nor better, nor does it impress anyone around you. All it does is give you a repetitive strain injury (thank god) and me a headache. And I get the headache even if I'm not nearby, I think -- so anytime, anywhere you bash on a keyboard, you're actually giving me a headache. I don't understand it either, all I know is I get a lot of headaches and it's your fault.

The keyboard is your friend, not your 101+ keyed punching bag.

Oral Aversion

You know, aversion -- in contrast to "fixation", I suppose. I have the personal delight of giving an "oral presentation" (which is not to exceed 5 minutes under any circumstances) in my History of Theatre class. (Yes, it is astonishing how little real work I'm doing at school this semester.) It gets a little better: it's a presentation on The Count of Monte Cristo. Wait, you say, The Count of Monte Cristo is literature not theatre -- it was a book, dammit! Indeed. Nevertheless it was adapted into a series of 3 plays by Dumas. Never fear, then, you say -- we're talking about the plays! Huzzah! It is theatre.

...no, it's Rhode Island College, baka! We're talking about the 2002 movie adaptation of the book. Yes, that's right, the loose, modern cinematographic re-interpretation of the English version of a French book is indeed the focus of the current section of my History of Theatre class.

No matter, though. It's a fine movie, a good story, and (supposedly) a great book -- I haven't read it all, yet.

Except that there's this chess piece. It's a king. Dantes and Fernand toss this chess piece back and forth as they become "king of the moment" in their exploits. They do not include the blinking, neon "Symbolic Plot Device" sign that accompanies the chess piece, as it would be too large and gaudy to throw around. Instead Napolean Bonepart (why not, right?) says to Dantes "We are all either kings or paws in this life." If you cross you eyes like when you're looking at those stereograms during that scene you can see that in the distance a giant Greek statue is holding the big neon sign.

Anyway, that's what I'll be talking about. No, not the Greek statue. The chess piece. As a cheap meta-device. Meta-device, I say? That's right: the chess not only works as all sorts of hero-villain banter-replacement and revenge symbology, it's also squarely situated in the possession of whichever character is currently dictating events in the film. Fernand has it (and notably keeps it even when Dantes announces his upcoming marriage) when he prepares to setup Dantes. Dantes receives it on his way to prison where he becomes the man plotting revenge. Fernand gets it back at the moment of Dantes' revenge only to become the force that controls the final outcome of the movie. It's almost like whoever has the king is manipulating everyone else in the story... as if they were some kind of... pawns or something.

This, my friends, loyal readers, disloyal skimmers, assorted surfers (if any), and people not yet avenged by my ever-building wrath, is deep shit. Behold the subtlety of modern cinema and despair.

With enough eyes all bugs...

Apparently succumb to that obscure phenomenon "diffusion of responsibility". At least, that seems to be the case with OSCommerce, a very useful and functional open-source shopping cart solution. Unfortunately, it's also clunky, messy, and somewhat out-dated from a code and usability point of view.

In the era of "Web 2.0" the constant reloading for every tiny change in the admin area is unconscionable and the table-based layout of the entire thing is astounding. Where's my AJAX-based admin tools that never reload a page? Where's the elegant, 100% CSS-based page layouts that I can change with the flick of a JavaScript-wired drop-down list? Why, o-why, are there single lines in the source code that are 500 characters long???

According to the OSCommerce website, there are also nearly 4,000 "contributions" (read: plugins that don't plug in very easily)... but they don't seem to be finding their way into the trunk of the OSCommerce build any time soon. Really, would anybody mind if tracking quantity by product attribute was a default option? Or customizing meta-tags?

The whole situation isn't helped by the fact that there isn't a plugin architecture of any kind. Installing a "contribution" amounts to following a long list of steps like

around line 220 of the products_info.php file find the following code: ... and replace it with ...

That's a real hoot when there are 20 steps and a dozen files to modify for a relatively small update.

And I know the whole thing is open source, so I could shut-up and do something about it; the problem is the whole thing needs a total re-write, and that's just not a one-person job.

Why does Firefox leak like a sieve?

I like Firefox... I like Firefox a lot. But: it leaks memory like a sieve. Either that, or ... get ready for it ... GOOGLE leaks memory like a sieve. Go ahead and leave your GMail or Google Homepage open for the better part of a day and watch the memory usage for FF climb.

I can get a way with it for a good long while... 60 MB, ok... 100 MB, ::sigh:: ok... 200 MB, getting clunky... 300 MB, time to restart my browser.

I'm very suspicious of the XMLHttpRequest situation. I have a feeling Googles creating an awful lot of extra request objects and FF isn't garbage collecting them. I seem to think I've run into this problem before, so it's not some baseless insight into the inner workings of FF. I also seem to think IE handled the situation a little more gracefully. At last, IE gets one point, I guess.

And on the topic of places getting one point: I'm not sorry I switched my blog away from MySpace, but I do miss the little emoticons a bit. Blogger lets me insert any image I want... but it's a big, complicated form and I just don't want to draw a smiley face for every emotion I need to express (...shut up, it's more than 2). Maybe there's an emoticon drop-down in beta over at Google... with some really fancy emoticons in it... SMART emoticons.

Hmmm... squishy

All right -- the truth is MySpace is crap. It's a terribly, clunky, badly broken site written in a language that never really matured (ColdFusion) on a collection of servers that was never really designed to scale up to uber-billions of hits per second. I just don't like blogging there.

I also don't like Blogger. It's clunky and hitting publish is a pain -- waiting for the uploads and the yada-yada, configuring FTP if I want to host my blog on another site. Meh.

So here I was today looking at the blogger page again (just thinking about hating MySpace) and the "New Blogger" is out of beta (Google seems to be getting in on the joke about their betas -- they left "beta" under the name and just crossed it out. Frankly I might not use a Google product if it didn't have "Beta" in the name somewhere now) and the whole thing seems a little more AJAX-y and all.

They added the all important ability to tag posts now too. All I need is some way to put a symbol (anybody up for [W[sometext]]) around some text and make links to Wikipedia automatically. [W[AJAX]] ... awwww crap. Maybe the next version of blogger will get this right.

Anyway, the blog, such as it is, lives here now, until somebody else gets it "more right" than Google has.