I’m not usually into these things, but here we go anyway: You Are Rowlf the Dog Mellow and serious, you enjoy time alone cultivating your talents. You’re a cool dog, and you always present a relaxed vibe. A talented pianist, you can play almost anything - especially songs by Beethoven. “My bark is worse than my bite, and my piano playing beats ’em both.” The Muppet Personality Test
NewsForge | Switching art students to GNU/Linux: Yeah, great idea. Because what we want to learn in college is how to use a nice 3rd-party operating system, and free software like GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of things that will actually help in a career once we get out of school. Punditry is all well and good, and truth be told I use a Linux distribution at home on my workstation and web server. but if I were a professional in the art or design industries, you can bet your ass I’ll be using Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Dreamweaver, and a bunch of other software that runs on OS X or Windows instead of a linux box with what is, despite all the loud claims to the contrary, software that isn’t as good. ...
I was going to write something here about how great my weekend’s been going, but instead I’ve been sidetracked. I was just at Central Market (the HEB near my house was out of both “frozen veg med” and puff pastry sheets), and they had this ugly display with a sign that said “get on the bunny train”. Obviously, it was an ad for Easter. Now, I’m not going to be sidetracked here into a discussion of how the Catholic church stole Easter from the “pagans”; if you really want to read something, try wikipedia: Eostre, Easter (particularly the " Easter Controversies" section). ...
Wow, that didn’t take long at all. I don’t know why (i.e., I can’t really narrow down the reason to anything specific), but I really didn’t like using Mail.app for my work email. I don’t know; maybe it was the lack of a simple and quick solution to the “mark mailbox read” problem, maybe it was how slow some of the filters took to apply. But in any case, I’m back to using Thunderbird for my work email; it just seems to work better. ...
Oh, boy! I decided to see if Mail.app 2.0 is cool enough to handle all the email I get at work (about a thousand messages a day). I’ve been using Thunderbird exclusively for my work account for about the last 2 years, so it should be interesting to see how quickly I can adapt. I’m already missing a few features that I really liked having in Thunderbird, chief among them the “mark mailbox as read”. I know I can do that with applescript, and can even set a keyboard shortcut for it. It’s just a pain that although the function exists in Mail.app, it doesn’t have a shortcut by default. ...
Just in case you were curious what the OS X Tiger Dashboard picture for “freezing rain” was:
I’ve been having an issue for the last week or two, where articles that I post to the site with ecto (or, more likely, anything that uses the XMLRPC interface) have a correct timestamp, but are going into the “future posts” section. On further investigation, it turned out that the post_date_gmt was wrong, by a factor that was exactly the same as my TZ offset (i.e., the post was scheduled to go up 6 hours in the future). I narrowed it down to either a timezone problem on my system, or a problem with wordpress itself. A lot of digging later, I’ve got the solution. ...
Mario Kart DS has this nifty feature where you can “locate” your friends online for internet-based multiplayer. It’s pretty neat, but Nintendo pretty much requires you to distrubute your friend codes by word-of-mouth; there’s no central repository for friend codes on their site, and they’ve even specifically banned the discussion of trading these codes on their forums. So it’s the old-fashioned way for now, until some enterprising individual decides to make up a site for sharing codes. ...
So mere hours after hearing that Wordpress 2.0 (beta) was available, I’m up and running with it. Looks nice, although none of the changes really show up on the “public” side. The admin area is now skinned in a slightly more appealing way. Upgrade was pretty much painless. Maybe some time soon I’ll see the changelog so I can figure out exactly what changed. Update: It appears ecto can’t post successfully to WP2 yet. I’m sure it’ll be updated soon, but for now I guess I’ll just post updates the “old-fashioned” way via the admin page. ...
Not all webcomics, mind. Just some of the older ones on my list. User Friendly: I’m pretty sure UF is the first webcomic that I read on a regular basis. It’s on my old static bookmarks page, which I haven’t used in a very long time. But recently, even with the new AJ/Miranda thing, it’s just getting old. Yeah, I get it. Microsoft is bad, Linux is good. Can we get some more inventive plots? ...