The Textism guru writes:
”[I] had no clue just how fucking ugly XP is. It’s like living inside a perpetual Powerpoint presentation, with sham friendliness pelting down everywhere. Someone really ought to repeatedly sky-write the word RESTRAINT over Redmond.”
Barber: [looking at my hair] This is wrong! I don’t know who cut your hair before you came here?!
Me: He did. [points to his colleague]
For any designer without access to a Mac, “Through the eyes of a Mac browser” offers screencaps of your pages as rendered in the Safari browser. Kinda limited? Sure, but a hell of a lot better than nada. Via Photodude.
Maciej shares a captivating account of his recent nine-hour layover in Iceland, en route to Amsterdam. Kind of makes you want to visit.
Murphy has struck. As of 11:14 this morning I’ve been issued my first ever “parking tag” — as the City of Calgary calls it.
Getting out of the car, shortly before my 11am group meeting, I realized that I didn’t have coins for the meter. So I calculated my chances. Factoring in the effort that would be required to get change for a $20 and the seeming unlikelihood of a ticketing officer doing their rounds in the freezing weather, I opted to forego the $2/hour for only the second time this semester.
Unfortunately, the donut store must have been clean out of pastries, because I now have a $41 ‘voluntary payment’ due to the City — roughly a third of what I’ve already spent on an evening parking permit and meter fees.
Need some album cover art? Fret not. Spare yourself endless hassle, use this search. Thank Michael Heilemann for sharing.
The ‘weblogs’ and ‘photography’ sections on the links page have been updated. I culled any broken links, modified the ones that needed modifying, and added the ones I’ve collected in the last short while.
Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin for blocking comment spam is now installed. There haven’t been any glaring comment spams on this blog yet, but at the rate things are developing even this little corner of the web will have to deal with this nuisance at some stage.
The only item broken or damaged in the goods that were shipped from Virginia was also the most difficult to replace, a glass shade from one of the bedside table lamps. The lamps, bigger versions of this one, are quite distinctive and I don’t have a use for just one.
On Tuesday I visited IKEA’s Calgary outlet to try find the same lamp. Unfortunately, they only have the smaller version. I just happened to explain my situation to the right sales associate though, and he went out of his way to see what could be done. After following the guy around for 10 minutes, he found the exact glass shade I needed somehere in the dark recesses of the store. Pleased just to have the shade in my hand, knowing that I wouldn’t have to hunt for a new pair of lamps, I was at a loss for words when the associate told me that I could have it for free! Thanks again buddy.
Would anyone care to suggest a decent firewall application for use with WinXP Pro? I’m using Zone Alarm Pro now, but vsmon.exe gradually annexes all available memory and you need to shut down and restart the service every few hours or have your system slow to a crawl. What are the Windows users in the audience using?
As the new kid on the block, quite literally in fact, it’s my sworn duty to be ‘uppity’ when it comes to shovelling snow. As such, our driveway and sidewalk has been the first on the street to be cleaned each and every morning this past week.
I might have frozen my hands off the first two mornings, until I found my gloves hidden inside a poster-tube in my stuff from the USA, and I might not have been as fast (from start to finish) as the old veteran two houses down with the snowblower — cheater — but I sure as hell make the most damn racket at 7am with the help of the ice-chipper and metal snow shovel a friend gave us. Now all I need is a giant yellow chicken costume and I’ve got this neighbourhood beat.
A degree in advanced quantum chromodynamics was never a requirment to understand that the compact disc would eventually become just as useless as the infamous floppy. We’re not there yet, but the day is fast approaching.
I whiled away a third of my day filling up a whole spindle of 50 CDs with the movies, music, and applications that I’ve downloaded since Thursday night. That’s 35Gb, give or take a few hundred Mb. I don’t think this technology is cutting it. I hope Santa brings me one of these, and a whole bunch of these too, for Christmas.
Hot diggity! We’re back online. The SHAW technician was here late yesterday afternoon to activate our cable services. Data is flowing smoothly and speedily to and from my laptop — that’s all that I ask for.
Not that anything needed to be setup on the laptop, or that I’d need any help in doing so, but as part of their operating procedure, the Shaw technicians need to insert a registry entry and also verify that your browser/email is working. So the guy seemed quite confused when he couldn’t find an Internet Explorer shortcut anywhere on the desktop or start menu (he didn’t know the run command for it either), so after an awkward silence I launched Firebird for him. Hehe!
Thanks for bearing with me over the last two weeks. It’s been a madhouse here, with commitments left, right, and centre.
We had snowfall here Tuesday and Wednesday, so we’ve already had our first taste of iced roads and freezing wind chill. It was my first time driving in these kinds of conditions, which I happened to manage without incident, but boy did I see a few other people pull some bonehead moves out there.
The furnishings from my US apartment arrived yesterday afternoon, and we unloaded them at house last night. So we’re checking out of the hotel this morning — Yay! I won’t have a connection set up until mid-week, so I’ll see you all then.
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