Category: Uncategorized

Wow, spelling errors. I must make about 100 a day. You’d think that I’d get a clue and remember how to spell some of these words. Am I retarded? One thing, Blogger does not have any kind of spell checker. At least my little pumped up text editor could to a pretty good, fast spell check. Now, I have to read my stuff five days later and see that I’ve spelled a word incorrectly.

Well, as you can probably tell, I’ve finally submitted to the power of blogger. I must say that it sure beats editing this crap by hand. Thanks to Matt and all of the blogheads at Pyra. Even if they don’t have a solvent business model…

The weekend is finally over, whew. Number one son went to a yard sale on Saturday. He bought of all things a thighmaster, a archers trophy from 1986, and several misc. exercise contraptions. His siblings taunted him relentlessly. I felt kind of bad, but it was soooo funny. Hope he does well at his game tomorrow

I’m using this for a couple of days just to see how it goes. If I like it, I’ll use it for the main page instead of doing it by hand.

Yesterday was memorial day. A lot of people paused to think of loved ones. The holiday is meant to remember fallen veterans of foreign wars. To many, they think of and visit the graves of loved ones. There are the usual cook out functions, parades, even fireworks. Everyone is grateful for an extra day off.

I am really more concerned with veterans that are living. Not the ones like myself that are apathetic, resourceful, or lucky enough to put aside the things that they saw and did to get on with their lives. I’m much more concerned with the veterans who are not able to resume functioning as a result of the things that they did, or that happened to them. Injured men who saw and did things that would render many of us insane. Unfortunately, there are many of them that are in fact insane, homeless, and are not being cared for properly.

I’ve been to V.A. hospitals in Detroit, and other parts of the world. Frankly, they are terrifying. Only those who have no choice use them. The Clinton administration reformed a lot of health care laws that required disabled veterans to use those facilities for care related to a service connected injury. Subsequently, there has been an improvement due to that attrition. But, believe me those hospitals are absolute bedlam. There is very little that I can do to describe to you the despair that one feels in those places.

Only the desperate ones that can get there, enjoy those miserable places. Those that don’t have the mental or physical ability. Live on the streets. They are our winos and bums that we rush out of town. I feel that most don’t realize or care that these men deserve to be treated, cared for, and given safe warm homes by us. Not allowed to die of starvation or exposure under our noses.Who cares? Not congress, not your mayor, not your police. Everyone is saddened, no one dares to speak against them, everyone will tell you how terrible it is.

Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for making some nice observations and saying some things that made me feel a lot better. Thanks to Dave Elfving for starting me thinking about memorial day.

I finished cateraidinc.com Monday. I’m very proud of the amount of work that went into this site. It’s not the most striking site you’ve ever seen, but I think it’s clean and professional. I was trying for elegant. I’m not sure if I made it. Check it out if you care to. I haven’t had much feedback from the client, but what I have had is positive. They’ve been pretty busy recovering from a recent national culinary exhibition. I’m very fond of these guys, they were wonderful people that make a lot of amazing products. Being somewhat of a cook myself, I can tell you, there probably is no company producing this type of product at this level of quality that I am aware of. Bravo.

I’ve been in the process of building a new computer to add to paxtonland. We’ve got three running now, with various configs. We really need a big old “god box” here to help keep files and act as a server. The kids are wanting to play more current games, I need more mp3 storage space and just a bunch of other reasons. I’ve started with a case. My friends will laugh because I’ve had the new case for a long time, but have not done anything with it. I’ll make a new page here to document my progress. Anyway that case is probably the best case in the world. I’ve decided that it’s the closest thing to the good, solid, old full tower AT style cases that were once available in the late 80’s and early 90’s. This thing is a tank-like, bulletproof, monument to computing. A bit noisy for most with it’s 3 (up to 13) cooling fans, but this is what you get when you want the absolute best. More to come…

Please take the survey below. I only wanted 100 votes to call it off. Now, if I can just get 50, I’ll be happy.

Please take my stupid poll:

View
current results Discussion later.

I’m learning a lot about SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). I’m interested in this very much. Support for this will exist in Mozilla and does exist in a quirky, unpredictable 4/5.x browser plugin from Adobe. But, that’s about it. Oh there is an Illustrator 8.0 plug in available to export into SVG format, but… who the hell has time to do all that. Also, you’ll find some super beta, independently authored utilities and export tools, nothing substantial. Those developers will eventually all be hired by Microsoft, who will bastardize the standards, support, and implementation to their suit evil plan for world domination. Nothing good anyway, not at least until Photoshop can do the stuff. Anyway, the way it works with XML/Java/Javascript is quite promising and very functional. There are many behaviors and animation that this can do. I’d look for it to be able to do animation, movies, etc. very soon. I figure that one had better learn all that can be learned now. Yet another reason to learn the hell out of XML. God I wish I didn’t have to sleep… what a pain in the ass sleep is, oh well.

The 5k contest is over. The winners have been chosen. Some were amazing, some where hard to understand, some where not even describable. I must say that this collection of sites, pages, and in some cases, applications captured my attention for a long time. Please go and look at some of these entries, not just the winners. Also please visit gradfinder.com, who helped support this effort.

Web logs. Or, weblogs, or ‘blogs. Whatever you’d like to call them, they are here in spades. There are so many weblogs out there that there there are directories of weblogs and directories of directories of weblogs. I’m quite fond a a few of them, metafilter, camworld, and more… But, what exactly in the hell are they? Everyone has long and complicated definitions of what weblogs are and what they mean to the internet, since they are so very hip right now and all. I’ve actually had people refer to this site as my weblog. Now that’s a stretch…. (hehe) It could be easy call blogger the first “Killer App.” (god I hate that expression) of the year. But, what the hell exactly can one do with one of these:

1. Generate content? (yes… that’s good. there is far, far too little of that
   these days).
2. Document the web for posterity? (well, yes… but, why use your resources
   to store stuff, when you have the entire internet to store stuff, oh well…).
3. Update it frequently so as to promote constant updates, refreshing content,
   and reflect a current state of awareness? (yes, but it’s also cool for hooking
   visitors for return trips).
4. Build it so that there is user interaction? Like a BBS/USENET sytle, threaded
   discussion forum, or perhaps a mailing list? (sure, but the forums tend to
   be soap box, flame war grounds. There are a lot of people that seem to just
   talk to themselves, not one another.)

Oh yeah, one last thing. I like blogger an awful lot, but what the hell does it do that I can’t do with a text editor? Oh, hell usability enhancement… I keep forgetting about that. Oh well, enough said about that.

• I’ve been searching for a replacement for the typical I.M. (instant messenger) client. By that I mean programs like; ICQ, AIM, Yahoo’s thingy, and Hotmail/MSN’s thingy. So far, I’ve only come up with a couple, Boomerang SST and Jabber. Boomerang SST has a lot of features such as chat, messaging, and file transfer. Plus, it operates under automatic RSA encryption. This may not mean much to some, but for others it’s good news. Jabber looks promising. It’s open source, works on multiple O/S’s, and has transports for all of those other I.M. programs I mentioned. Keep you eye on this one. I’ll keep looking and let me know if you find one out there as well. Why? You ask. Well… it’s simple, ICQ sucks. It sucks less than the others, but all in all its really becoming a nightmare from a usability standpoint. Just look at all of these horrible buttons! (via Metafilter). Oh well, looks like we’re stuck with ICQ for a while longer.

Lastly, I spend quite some time over the holidays downloading and playing old arcade game “ROMS.” These are the actual game… not an close copy, but the real deal. I have working copies of titles like “Frogger, Defender, Donkey Kong,” and many more. You play them through an emulator. There are many of these available, all have ROM’s that they can run. The most popular “emulator/decoder” is MAME. MAME is freeware and supports about 500+ ROM’s. There are other emulators for NES, SNES, Genesis, even Playstation and Saturn. So, if you are yearning for the old days of your favorite console, stand up, or table top arcade game, check these places out: Arcade @ Home: Go here, download MAME, and install it. Then go back and download the Arcade @ Home front-end. From there, just download as many ROM’s as you can take. It’s great fun. Get a gamepad! Plasticman’s Emulation Zone: Is one of the best resources for NES/SNES/Genesis games. This site assumes a lot, so you’ll have to know what you are doing Emulation Net: Has all that you’ll need for NES/SNES. Like most of these sites, they are banner ad supported, so be careful. You may get sucked into a website that you don’t want to be in.

I’ve been testing Mozilla since they came out with a complied, workable version. Now, AOL and the Netscape brass have compiled M12 into a corporate version. Check it out for yourself. It’s a secret and highly unofficial leaked version. I like the way that things look so far…. Let’s hope they nail a good linux version. In related news, I’ve tried to watch the Netscape documentary, Code Rush, but to no avail. I simply can’t stay awake long enough. My PBS affiliate aired it three times after 2am. Finally, there is DocZilla from Citec Information. They are a Finnish company that is producing this Mozilla based XML multi-tool. Worth a look. More proof that everything is and always about the internet.

I’m working on a website, currently, for a company called “Cateraid.” They have a product line that consists of some of the finest gourmet deserts I’ve ever seen. Cheesecakes, tortes, cakes, tarts, even hors d’voures. Wonderful stuff. This site will have to be beautiful… which is a tall order from me. I’ll put a link here when I’m done.