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.
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…
New iMacs are up
Pictures leaked courtesy of Time Magazine.
Should be easy to recognize these puppies on TV or magazine photos!
Weeks without posting and this is the best I could do
Apple’s announcing new product at next week’s Macworld Expo. My reliable insider sites have been saying things like “1.2 gigaherz G4 PowerMacs” and “cheaper, smaller, lighter iMacs with 15 inch LCD screens”, not to mention possible bugfixes to OS X.
This week, Apple’s put blurbs on their front page such as “Far Beyond The Rumor Sites”. This, of course, has the rumor sites whipped into even more of a frenzy. Here’s the latest: a Apple PDA to compete with all those Palm and Windows CE machines out there.
http://www.spymac.com posted this image, along with a video (which you have to register to see).
If Apple sold a PDA, and it was competitively priced against a Palm, I’d consider it. But it would start with no apps, probably be as expensive as all Apple hardware, and besides, that thing in the picture looks like a mockup to me. One dial to control a PDA?
Guess we’ll see next week…
Adventures in Operating Systems
Well, I finally took the plunge – this is being posted from the new installation of OS 10.1 on my machine. I’m still getting used to a lot of it – it takes me longer to find stuff at the moment; some of my favorite applications haven’t been “carbonized” to run under the new OS yet, while at least one game will run but insists on setting my monitor to a size it can’t handle (cheap monitor’s fault, not the OS), and there are other teething troubles. On the other hand, text looks really good and very readable on here; once I install X Windows, I can find a nice mailreader and read my mail directly off Elfie, bypassing Adelphia’s bogus servers; and, the best part about this installtion, is that it’s not Windows ME or XP. I fought with ME for hours this afternoon just trying to get it to acknowldge a LAN connection to the Internet; and I’m hearing so many bad things about XP right now that I’m glad I own some Apple stock. Wonder what RedHat stock’s going for right now? 🙂
It’s a weird Thursday night. I *still* don’t have the hang of Thursdays.
Open the iPod connection, Hal…
Apple introduces iPod, a FireWire-equipped digital audio player (MP3, MP2, more) with a 5GB hard drive (1000 songs). iPod is the size of a standard deck of playing cards, and includes: 20 minute skip protection; FireWire connection; a 10 hour lithium-polymer battery which charges in 1 hour; backlit LCD display; playlist support; ID3 tag support; a scroll wheel for fast song access.
iPod will ship November 10 for $399.
Here’s a look at it.
I really wanted one of these for about 15 minutes, until the price got posted. I can think of other things to do with $400. If this is the beginning of Apple’s move into consumer electronics – well, I have my doubts. It’s neat – and I do want one – but I can’t afford that price.
