When sampled songs attack

“Legend of a Cowgirl” is a much cooler song than “Sunshine Superman”, which I can’t stand.

However, “You’re so Vain” was fine the way it was and didn’t need sampling, thank you.

Pre-lunchtime thoughts

The Macintosh SE gathering dust in my office is currently worth about $15 bucks on the open market. It was a $3700 system when it came out (thank Ghu I didn’t pay that.)

To prove my geek credentials, I got the Tron 20th Anniversary DVD a couple weeks ago. If that movie had nothing else (and many would say that it did have nothing else), it had great visuals that drew you in when the ‘story’ and ‘acting’ couldn’t. The art director for the film makes an interesting comment on the DVD, claiming “If we’d had the technology then to produce the realistic effects we can now, I’m not sure that the visual style would have been as memorable.”

Sometimes artistic beauty springs from limitations.

I’m also amused that the Light Cycle contest, a sequence took weeks of pre-rendering at the time, can now be rendered on the fly as a playable game by any competent desktop computer.

glTron screenshot

Ahhh… the technology curve.

So, I sent wave after wave of my own men at the killbots…

According to GotFuturama.com, Futurama has been put on production hiatus next season. Apparently, the show’s been pre-empted so much by sporting events, that they have a season’s worth of unseen episodes to air. The problem is, this amounts to cancelling the show next year, as the cast and production crew will all need to find other work next season to pay the bills, and probably won’t be available when Fox gets around to ordering new episodes.

There’s an online petition with about 35,000 signatures pleading with Fox to rethink their decision. I guess we’ll wait and see…

The Vulcan databases have no such record…

Woohoo! I’m in the top 15 members of the SETI @ VTSFFC project!

If I’m the first to find E.T., I’ll introduce him to all of you. 🙂

I am going to rant now.

A friend of mine has a website she updates once a week. I have been visiting and enjoying this site for two years, chatted with her about it on Yahoo! Messenger, and corresponded with her by e-mail, We’ve exchanged pictures of spouses and (in her case) child, and get along pretty well. But she has other things to do besides learn HTML, so she has a friend build her site with updates she passes along.

And now I can’t get in her site. Why? Because her webmaster has fallen in love with the nonstandard JavaScript tricks available to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

I use a Macintosh. I don’t apologize for that, I love it. It’s not perfect, I can point out some of the issues involved long before any Windows user can, but it’s a solid machine that I can get all my work done on. Just about the only thing I haven’t been able to do with my Mac is play “Half-Life”, and even that’s been ported to the PlayStation 2 now.

So I write politely to the webmaster, pointing out that the latest IE I can access is 5.1, and suggesting that he might want to design a more flexible site. Heck, with JavaScript you can ask the browser who it is and reconfigure on the fly.

What do I hear back? “Can’t be bothered. Your machine sucks. Why don’t you buy a PC?”

I gently point out that there are still plenty of users out there who don’t use Windows. Heck, some of the Windows users I know won’t install IE 6 ’cause (I’m told) it’s a buggy, bloated piece of work that rewrites half your system when you install it. Does he want to block every one of those users from his sites?

Response? “Don’t care. Buy a PC so you can look at my site. If Macs were so great, they could handle IE 6 JavaScript.”

At this point, I realized, I was talking to a brick wall. I’m not bothering to respond by telling him that I can, if I want, run a more cutting edge version of MS Office than he can and get great framerate in Quake III at the same time. But I have to miss out on a friend’s website because he’s some l33t idiot who figures, “The hell with standards; it’s from Redmond, so it’s perfection and the wave of the future!”

I’m done now. I wish to point out here that in no part of this rant have I been rude about the general capabilities of PCs as hardware, or of Windows as an operating system.

T-con guest bio (finally)

This note is mainly for kittenchan, but anyone else who wants to take a look and comment may do so. I’ve only procrastinated about it for appoximately 10 months, but my bio information for Technicon 19 Fan Guest of Honor is ready. You can find it here: Fan GOH Bio. I hope it’s still of some use to you!

Now, all I have to do is figure out what my panel will be. The chocolate pudding wrestling is probably out…

Sometimes my job amuses me

Here’s the ad I’m building right now:

“Viacream is a natural topical cream for women that enhances intimacy & sexual pleasure. Call (deleted) or email to: (deleted). Please specify amount of product desired. Product will ship within one week of receipt. Mention this ad and receive free audio cassette – Screaming women don?t lie anymore. Lexxus independent distributor”

Reminds me of the job of the main character in Sabrina Online – a naive graphic artist who ended up designing boxes for porn videos. Except I’m slightly less naive. Slightly.

I’m back, and I brought links!

After 6 years, I have finally updated my website. Now Rain no longer needs to be mad at me that she’s not even mentioned, but my last cat was.

The web site is:http://elfie.org/~mikail/

Please take a look, and if you find any dead links, or stuff that doesn’t work, let me know. I write my HTML by hand in a text editor (“In six feet of snow! Uphill! BOTH WAYS!!”) so sometimes weird things occur. I know a couple of links (to “In progress” pages) are dead ’cause I haven’t put anything there yet.

I apologize for being behind on comments to people’s postings – well, this is why. The sad thing is, I’m already looking at the site design and thinking about ways I’d change it if I was starting over…

Well, the sorting hat put me in…

Ravenclaws value intellect — you like things which challenge your mind, whether it be math, art, history, or all of the above and more! You might be somewhat withdrawn, or your intellect might make you a bit mysterious to others.
Get Sorted!

Protected: Same Bantha Poodoo, Different Day

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