I'm off.
I’m shutting down my computer and leaving for Cornerstone music festival now. I’ll see y’all next week.
Monday - 06.30.03
Friday - 06.27.03
I'm a super tire populator.
I just scored 1436 in Population Tire. I can now go to bed a happy man.
MintHosting launches.
MintHosting, the web hosting devision of MintChaos has officially launched. Feel free to take a look around, order a hosting account and recommend it to all your friends and family.
Thursday - 06.26.03
Wednesday - 06.25.03
Happy days!
A great big happy birthday to my sister Meg. Who is now even more older than me. ;) We loves ya!
Also to Ann’s dad Fred. He hit the big 60 today. Whoot!
Population Tire.
The Homestar folks have pumped out a new flash based 8 bit style hyper addictive game. Population Tire. My high score so far is 322.
Updates — New high scores:
- 372
- 407
- 554
- 590!
I am bubs.
You are Bubs. You are the disco dancing king. People like you because you sell them food. Actually you eat most of the food yourself, that’s probably why you’re fat. It doesn’t matter though, cuz your voice is awesome!
What HomeStarRunner Character are you?(pictures) brought to you by Quizilla
Friday - 06.20.03
Free Giffy!
Unisys’ 20 year patent on the gif compression formula expired yesterday. At least in the US. Kuro5hin has all the details.
Un-rubikizer.
Eric Dietz has an impressive little Rubik’s Cube solver. Just input your cube’s configuation and it spits out step-by-step instructions. Nifty! Makes me wish I had one. Doesn’t seem to work in Safari. Works in Firebird though.
Flashy.
Michael Pick has an interesting write up about the state of Flash on the web today.
bq(http://www.mikepick.com/news/archives/000097.html). I have done the full-Flash treatment for sites in the past myself, but I believe the time for that has passed, and that Flash is now better suited as another element, like an image or a block of text. A nice example of that strategy is Todd Dominey’s Senior PGA Championship site - the work behind it is detailed here. Here the Flash is unobtrusive and neatly fitted into standard HTML content. The menus are XML-driven, which allows for easy updating, and the text is sharp and easy to read. The animation is a set of simple fades which are unobtrusive and CPU-light.
He does however forget to mention Homestar Runner.
CommonTerri
Please welcome Terri Reynolds to the blogosphere. She took what blog gave her and made lemonade.
Chicago Apple store to open June 27.
The new North Michigan Avenue Chicago Apple Store is having it’s grand opening in one week.
bq(http://www.apple.com/retail/nmichiganave/). More Than a Store — We’ve taken everything that we learned from our other stores and designed the ultimate Apple Store especially for you. The store is filled with the full range of Apple products and accessories, including the entire iPod family and a selection of digital cameras, camcorders and other products. We even put in the first-ever Apple Store Internet Café with 16 computers for you to check your email and experience the Mac at your own pace.
The G5: Dear lord that's fast.
Apple has apparently screwed up and posted tech specs for the new G5 tower machines on their online store. The G5s are new 64bit processors that are actually IBM’s ppc970 chip. They are expected to be officially announced Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference.
For the past couple of years Apple hasn’t really been able to compete speed wise. Their computers have been fast enough to get work done but if you were only after speed Intel and AMD had better offerings. Apple has been milking everything they can out of the aging G4 platform but the underlying architecture has been getting in the way. Anyway, on with the specs:
- 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz, or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 processors
- Up to 1GHz processor bus1
- Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM
- Fast Serial ATA hard drives2
- AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI
- Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots
- Three USB 2.0 ports
- One FireWire 800 and two FireWire 400 ports
- Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme ready
- Optical and analog audio in and out.
These machines are going to be fast. Very very fast.
Industry analysts have predicting that if Apple was going to use the PPC970 their first machines would be in the 1.2ghz to 1.6ghz range and would not appear til atleast Q1 2004. But here we are. :)
The G5 chips are 64bit chips and the current OS X is a 32bit system. A single processor G5 should be on par speed-wise as a dual G4 system at the same clock speed when processing 32bit code. The G5s will get a significant performace boost when the new 64bit enhanced version of OS X (code named Panther) comes out in Septemeber.
Apple is also expected to announce a G5 powered 15” powerbook Monday. Which is the computer I’ve been waiting for. I’m giving myself until september to save up.
We’ll see how this all actually works out next week. I’m excited.
1: The system bus speed is how fast all of the internal components of a computer can talk to each other. The current fastest G4s have a 167mhz system bus while the fastest Pentium 4s have a 533mhz system bus.
2: Tom’s Hardware Guide has the skinny on Serial ATA
Thursday - 06.19.03
My Harry Potter release party can kick your Harry Potter release party's ass.
We went out and pre-ordered our copy of Harry Potter the Oder of the Phoenix today. Which means that tomorrow night we’ll get to stand in the very long line waiting to pick ours up instead of the very long line waiting to buy it.
Also very cool is that a large section of town is going to turn into Diagon Ally for the night tomorrow. It’s apparently a very big deal. They are expecting thousands of people from 10 different states to show up. I doubt they’ll have enough books to go around. Ann has all the information and pertinent links.
Yes. That must be it.
It’s only 10:30am and I’ve already eaten four times. Maybe I’m pregnant.
Eventually I'll stop with the matrix links.
The Joy of Tech: The Matrix-ological Cycle.
Wednesday - 06.18.03
CSS roundup.
Uberlink CSS Rollovers details the process of turning an ordinary HTML list into a very attractive menu.
From footnotes to sidenotes shows us a method for turing inline footnotes into sidenotes that appear when needed. It also shows us how much better the world would be if all browser supported CSS well. It only works in Mozilla based browsers and Safari. Although it does degrade acceptably in others.
Matrix Reloaded: Abridged.
The Editing Room has a very amusing rewrite of The Matrix Reloaded. Warning: Spoilers aplenty. Watch the movie first. It wouldn’t be funny if you havn’t seen it anyway.
I especially like the dialog between Neo and “The Explainer”.
Tuesday - 06.17.03
Picking on the rich people.
Martha’s New Digs. A PhotoShop contest exploring the bounds of good taste. Literally.
Monday - 06.16.03
Friends lost.
I was going through my weblog archives and I was reminded of a time a year or so ago when there was a split among my friends. Some silly squabble that left me in a position where I had to pick sides. I didn’t want to. I tried not to. But the choice really wasn’t mine. I lost a friend (and others through him) because I refused to attack another. It hit me harder than I expected. Made me sad. I don’t like losing friends. I put a lot of effort in to keeping them. I emailed him a few weeks back, just to say hey and wish him happy birthday. He never wrote back… He’s gone. Probably forever. I would make some stupid typographical face thing, but there isn’t an emoticon that actually coveys inner pain well. I don’t really understand loss or grief. There are others who have much more intimate encounters with internal pain. Things are different now. Better in a lot of ways. I’m closer to many of my other friends. But still…
I also found this while perusing the archives. It’s my first and only flash experiment ever. And it is happy. I leave you with it.
Glorious trunk.
I found the coolest old trunk out by the dumpster this morning. It’s this old black thing. Squarish with old metal trim. It’s like 16 cubit feet. I loves it!
Ann has just got up. She will be wondering into the dining room soon. Lets wait for her reaction:
Her: “Excuse me… Come here for a minute.”
Me: “um… just a sec” (types quickly)
Her: “No. Now.”
Let’s see where this goes!
Her: “What is this?”
Me: “A cool old trunk.”
Her: “Where did you find it? In the dumpster?”
Me: “Well not in the dumpster…”
Her: “How’d you get it up here?”
Me: “I’m a professional.” (More properly, was a professional.)
Her: “Hmmm… OK then.”
Me: ” Man.. I’m blogging this in real-time, I was hoping for something more interesting than this. sigh.”
Oh well. Not very exciting. She likes it and will let me keep it as long as I clean it up. :)
New web-comic obsession.
Scary go round by John Allison is stealing more of my time than it should. Bad web-comic. Bad! Well actually it’s a good web-comic, but that is why it’s a bad web-comic. Err… Right then. Carry on.
Update: Scary Go Round on art school.
Update two: I have defeated SGRs ability to waste my time by cleverly reading all of the back comics. I can now safely ignore it again for a while. Disaster averted.
Friday - 06.13.03
My early morning thought process.
So I was in the kitchen making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, making a sandwich and thinking. Then I noticed the clock and my thoughts went something like this:
“its six am…” (Note: I don’t think with proper grammar at 6:00am.)
“in michigan it would be seven now… i guess it’s friday…”
“justin is coming to visit today… i should get some sleep”’
“Crap! It’s seven am in Michigan right now!” (My early morning grammar improves when startled.)
At this point in the story it should be noted that our VGA Planets1 host machine processes our turns at seven am on fridays and it lives in Michigan. It should also be noted that I had yet to play my turn.
“Maybe if I hurry!”
I ran to the computer and started giving my little-green-dot ships orders to attack the evil-little-red-dot ships. And told the other little-green-dot ships to sweep the massive-evil-pink minefields that are making my life difficult. I finished.
Subliminal thoughts to the host machine: “Please don’t run yet! Please don’t run yet!”
“I remember that the host waits a couple of minutes to see if late turns come in. I think. I hope.”
I got my “GOOD TRN” message at 7:24am. I got the new processed RST file at 7:25am. Insert sighs of relief here.
Someday, I will get things done on time. Maybe.
1 VGA Planets is a play-by-email multi player turn based strategy game. We run an average of 3-4 turns per week. It is a very involved game. More so for me as I am currently in the middle of destroying my closest neighboring race. So missing a turn would be very bad.
More Matrix than Neo could shake an Agent Smith at.
Jason Kottke’s blog entry about the Matrix Reloaded is playing host to a nice small (613 comments so far) discussion about the movie. I’m to tired and busy to have any of my own thoughts right now, but there is a lot going on over there.
Monday - 06.09.03
Sunday - 06.08.03
PhotoStack.
Note to self: When everything else cools down I need to take some time to replace my photo gallery (which is currently running on Gallery) with one running PhotoStack It’s nice, clean, outputs xhtml/css by default and has easy to mangle templates.
The Golden Mean.
Douglas Bowman has written up an interesting article about his creative process he used when designing his CSS Zen Garden Submission, The Golden Mean. He also has an acompanying blog entry about some of the technical CSS issues and how he solved them.
Saturday - 06.07.03
I can't win.
My wife, who has said for years that guys shouldn’t be embarrassed by feminine hygiene products. Has declared me “just like every other guy” who “doesn’t understand” simply because I’m less embarrassed about them than she is. So dear, just because I love you. I will try to stop saying tampon & maxi-pad loudly in front of other people. But I can’t promise I’ll do a good job. ;)
Friday - 06.06.03
mintBloggers.append("andrea")
Andrea has misplaced her confomity from the lose-lose combination of geocities & blogspot to her new home here at MintChaos. Welcome!
Sigh. IE is mostly useless it seems.
Things are still screwing up in Win IE. I‘ll get them fixed soon. In the meantime, I apologize to those of you who are having problems with it. While I’m getting things worked out you may want to consider getting a better browser. Or this one if you’d like another option.
I don't hate how it looks anymore.
Fixed the site up a bit. I decided to go with full alpha channel .pngs this time. Going on faith that this bit of JavaScript madness actually makes Win IE play nice with them. If you have access to Win IE 5.5+ please let me know how things look.
Background image is a modified one from SquidFinger’s pattern collection.
Also got WebDav working on the server. I’m gonna get used that real quick.
Wednesday - 06.04.03
I didn't even notice.
It seems the main transformer at the RackShack data center blew up monday night. The entire place has been running on generators and battery back up ever since. And will continue to do so until they get everything put back together (probably sometime tomorrow).
None of the many thousands of servers hosted there, including this one, experienced any downtime.
I think I’m happy with my new server’s home. :)