November 2001

I spent last night installing Netscape 6.2 and Mozilla 0.9.6 onto the iMac running Mac OS 9.2. Both browsers have come a long way, and I think it's time to move the female off of Netscape 4.x and let her experience the glory of the lizard... Now if we could just get everyone at the office off of Netscape 4.x (in some cases 4.08!) we'd be much, much, much better off. Especially those of us creating in-house browser-based apps... argh...

I just got the rebate check from the KVM I ordered in August. Still awaiting at least one other rebate check from the Motorola radios I ordered in September. What's the deal with having to wait so damn long for rebate checks?

I also worked on audio editing last night, and we're very close to uploading a bunch of MP3s to this site. Stay tuned...

we saw Monster's Inc. last week, it was great in all of it's greatness. I kept muttering 'the fur, the fur...' Maddy actually fell asleep on the way there and slept through the first 45 minutes (she got in free anyway) when she woke up she didn't know where she was or what was going on. That pretty much describes me most of the time too...

I was Mr. Mom for 3 days last week, that was exciting. I took Emma to school, Maddy to therapy, and did as much housework and home improvements as I could, while the female was out earning the dough (since The Company shut down last week for 3 days without pay.) I managed to keep the kids from injuring themselves too bad, and no major structural damage was done to the house. It was a pretty successful stint. I'll be doing it again in late December. If all goes well, perhaps I should consider a career as a stay-at-home Dad... hmmm?

Last week I went to Taco Bell and was surprised to see elderly (is that the proper term?) people working there. I'm used to seeing disrepectful youths working at fast food joints but Taco Bell had a staff of friendly grandmothers. They even offer Senior Discount Cards there. Do elderly people really like Taco Bell? I left when about 15 or so young whippersnappers came in for lunch from the local high school. Ruined the mood. The other two people there didn't seem to mind though. I thought it odd that at 12:30 on a weekday there were only three customers though...

Last night I tried out Fire under OS X, and ended up IM'ing with saucemaster. During the course of the event I ended up switching to using AIM under Classic and then we both switched to using Jabber. Conclusions: Jabber is still a bit difficult to set up and use (depends on the client you use as well) and all IM software should use a standard protocol, which is sort of Jabber's goal... anyway, once I remember all of my IM usernames I'll post them here.

I really don't spell as bad as it sometimes appears here... really!

We had our Tofurky for Thanksgiving, it was delicious.

I went to Emma's school Thursday, what a blast! I showed up for lunch, and made the kids laugh (they're an easy crowd) at one point I had about 5 kids trying to tickle me. After lunch we went out for recess, after having a race with Gage (I lost) I got caught in a game of tag, which got somewhat stopped when I got yelled at (there's no running on the wood chips) so I then had kids try to climb on my back, I had 4 of em off the ground at one point. I then implemented a 'pick you up high' thing where I would lift each kid up high and the put them down, after doing this about 30 times I stopped, and we just kind of hung out. I asked some kids if they wanted to skip out and go see Monster's Inc., but none took me up on it. All in all a good day, much better that sitting at some boring old desk in some boring old office somewhere...

Users are funny creatures. The way the approach things fascinates me. It's really no wonder the open source community/movement is well known for having developers who create software with the main intention of making it useful for themselves. For as I've found, when you try to create software for others to use, you're entering into a world of pain. User says "Why isn't feature X implemented?" (Actually, used don't use terms like 'implemented' only developers do.) and you go through the explanation again... and again... You test and test and test, and still some user will find a way to do something that breaks your code the day you release it. Bug reports, feature requests, weird configurations you need to support, whining and complaining. Who needs it! Build software for yourself, and don't release it, ok, you should release it with the clause that it is completely unsupported and you will have nothing to do with it. Or something like that... I'm only saying this because it's one of those days... and I'm in the middle of one of those projects... ignore me.

I'm working on a sitcom based on my own life and my family, it's called 'Everybody Loves Ramen' I'm hoping All You Can Eat is available for the theme song...

See, the kids love Ramen. Well, Maddy really loves ramen, she wants it for breakfast, she wants it for lunch, sometimes she even wants it for dinner. If we make it for her and she doesn't eat it (which happens occasionally) we scream "You just wasted 23 cents!!!" Ok, we don't really do that, but it's just some of the wackyness that'll happen in the sitcom. Is there a show on the air yet that has a character that suffers from sensory integration? Actually, the whole family suffers from sensory integration.

It's got 'Laugh-Riot' written all over it...

or something like that...

I'm getting a brick wall installed in my cube so I can bang my head against it without having to inconvenience myself by going for a short walk.

Co-op day was yesterday, and that means we've got lots of Blue Sky, and our Tofurkey arrived!

Comdex is going on, I caught some footage from The Screen Savers where they showed a 1 GB USB Drive. Wow! The cheapest one right now is the 16 MB at $39.95, which ain't too bad. If the prices drop a bit, I might give up using Zip disks for the work/home file transfers... (Of course I'd buy one from a company that supports their product under Mac OS X... at some point I hope to stop having to add that disclaimer at the end of everything...)

Time to check out allUSB again...

Bob, the cartooning fanatic gave me some info on The Tick:

It's spelled "Die Fledermaus," which is German for "The Bat" (or, literally, "The Flying Mouse"). It's also the title of a popular German comic opera.

As I understand it, Fox bought the rights for the Tick comic book from Ben Edlund in order to produce the new TV series. Since American Maid and Die Fledermaus were created for the cartoon and never appeared in the comic book, then Fox doesn't have the right to use them, so they created Captain Liberty and Bat-Manuel. They would have to renegotiate with the studio that produced the animated series if they wanted to use the original names.

Well, thanks for clearing that up Bob...

I wish I could make enough money selling plasma to quit my job...

Ugh, it's been one of those days... of course it's a Tuesday... security, what's that? It's 2:06 and I'm finally eating lunch, I can leave in about 3 hours (yay!) though the work I'm doing probably still won't be done (nay!) this is not good...

My disposition at work, as well as my productivity, would most likely be greatly improved if I did a few things, the first thing I'd do is smash (or at least permanently disconnect) the flourescent lights above my head, the second would be to build some sort of roof for the cube, just something simple to keep the light out. It's so damn bright in here I can't even hear myself think. I feel like I'm being interrogated. Somebody, please, turn off the lights!

"You got nuthin' on me copper, I'm just a part-time electrician!" (To paraphrase he who bombs at midnight.)

There may be more Tick fans out there than I realized... there's hope!

Classic 'Windows' guy, sez things like "They are all Macintosh." When's the last time Apple sold a 'Macintosh' anyway...? I think they only sell PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iBooks, iMacs, and the like. Even before that, they sold Quadras... Maybe I'll start calling the Windows boxes 'DOS' machines...

Sez Pogue: "You and your Macintosh may go for months without ever witnessing a system crash..." Sooo, when will this happen? I see plenty of occurrences in Mac OS X 10.1 where apps or the system just won't respond, and some sort of reboot is needed. I've also had times when I try to shutdown and it never does, so I either need to reboot the shutdown, or pull the plug (if it's 2 AM and I don't feel like waiting for a restart...) Ok, one of these days I really will do a complete reinstall and see if my problems go away... I really hope they do.

As long as were on the subject of Mac OS X, I'll give an update. I got my Umax scanner working fine, but I do need to use Classic, still I was a little surprised it worked at all, being that the drivers need to load under Classic. (From what I've read I doubt Umax will release OS X drivers...) I got the Griffin iMic working fine, so I can do the USB audio in/out stuff as needed. This just worked, nothing special to install or set up, ahhh, the way it should be. The Keyspan USB hub I got seems ok, though the LaCie external USB hard drive doesn't seem to work with it, which is odd, since the LaCie drive worked fine when plugged into the KVM USB hub, I'll need to investigate more. So, not to shabby, things are working out ok. I do still need to use my old Mac with 8.6 and a serial connection to sync my Palm, I don't do that too often, but if I did, I can see how it would get really annoying fast... Anyway, I don't have a USB/Palm connection to worry about...

What do you call the Dad that is outside playing with his kids instead of sitting on the couch watching football and swearing? I hope you call him a good Dad...

My parents came over and helped me rake and clean up the yard. It took most of the morning. I like the trees, I hate the trees... Wait, I like the trees, I hate the leaves... or something like that. We're hoping it's the last raking party of the season, cross those fingers...

Saturday Emma and I went down to the lake to watch the sunset, we brought the video camera along to capture the moment. Ahhh, memories... While sitting on the pier she wanted to hold the camera, I said "Sure... as soon as we get back on land!" If I had one of those fancy Firewire cameras I could upload some video or stills, alas I do not... Perhaps an analog to digital video adapter would be a fine gift... (as long as it works under Mac OS X, of course...)

And the sign said... Requirements: Proficiency in Quark Express... Hmmm, we'll I used to be proficient in QuarkXPress many years ago, but I've only seen this 'Quark Express' mentioned by people who generally don't know what they are talking about...

I wish I had the songs from Diddly Squat's Crippled for Cash 7" in MP3 format... since I have to listen to iTunes playing stuff randomly today just to drown out the lame music coming from a few cubes over.... arrrggghhhhh.......

So did you watch The Tick last night? Are you the type of person who would rather see The Tick than any of the other crap they managed to get on the air Thursday night? Yes, of course you are! I'm still not sure why they don't have American Maid and Deflater Mouse but instead have similar-characters... (I have no clue how to spell Deflater, isn't there some German word?) Anyway, I plan to watch The Tick for the next 5 weeks, until they cancel it...

It's been so long since I've seen The Tick that I forgot the phrase "Gravity is a harsh mistress" came from the Tick and not me. I think the female was convinced for a long time that I invented that saying, and I started to think that myself...

SPOON!

I started to learn how to make Mozilla/Netscape6 sidebar tabs, I'm sure I'll put the knowledge to no-good use...

While I continue to love perl, and hopefully always will, I do feel like I need someone to drop an anvil on my head, because I think I would find it more enjoyable that quickly trying to decipher someone else's code and make it do what I want. The problem word there is quickly, for really, if I had enough time I would not be so concerned... but I don't... and it's a Thursday!

Hooray for techtv! My intern kept telling me about The Screen Savers during the summer, and now my cable provider is actually providing me with techtv so I can watch it for myself. Though I do find the coverage too Windows-centric, but then again, I tend to find the world Windows-centric. Of course I've only seen a few shows on techtv so far, one of which looked at laptops and had no mention of the iBook or TiBook... hmmm...

If I really want to push the limits after the kids go to bed, I can catch The Screen Savers, and then Star Trek: TNG - now that's living!

Unfortunately my cable provider seems to be headed downhill, they must be in trouble, they just made a pact with Satan...

I'm confused by Zeldman's use of the term 'veggie chicken' - is he referring to something like 'chiken' which would be a non-meat substitute for chicken? Did he order the chicken meal without the chicken in it? It just doesn't make sense... When I eat a vegetarian meal, it obviously won't have any chicken, fish, cow, lizard, human - or any other kind of 'meat' in it... isn't 'veggie chicken' which I'm taking to mean 'vegetarian chicken' a contradiction?

Mmmmm, Thanksgiving is coming up, that means it's almost time for Tofurkey!

If in Milwaukee, you can try to get Tofu Terkey, and of course if you search Google, what do you get?

Still waiting for some of the niche Mac OS X apps I really could use...

And speaking of Mac OS X, I pretty much have to do at least one reboot almost every day lately. Where's the stability and reliability? I'm blaming iTunes right now, maybe once I do the update and wipe my second drive clean things will work better.

Hey, my week of vacation is coming up, cool! What, I'll only get paid for 2 days, not so cool...

Today is NOV 06, and I'm drinking a Dean's milk chug CHOCOLATE LOWFAT MILK that expires on NOV 06! Lookout! Don't try to stop me! I'm CRAAAZZZYY!!! Outta my way! Grrr....

If you're out Xmas shopping for RasterWeb, we really could use a digital camera this year...

It's just one of those days... a Tuesday... (bad day for developers...)

Management says we should delete all old voicemail messages to free up space in the system, and if we don't we could experience a 'complete loss' of the voicemail system. Translation: if we lose voicemail, I'll have less people bugging me about support issues...

The Price of Freedom addresses the things you should really think about before deciding that a free/open source solution is best...

Which brings up another interesting point... My brother was saying that the reason there are so many security holes in products is because people want things easy. Get an email attachment, double click on it, open the file. Oops! That's a malicious virus you just launched! I guess I agree somewhat, the problem is that people want things easy, but are not willing to pay the price of freedom, which is eternal vigilance, or $49.99 - depending on who you ask. So we need to fix the problem, and convince people that they don't want things easy, right? If I get a package in the mail, and it smells funny and ticks, I might not open it. Do I open email attachements? Some of them I do, some I don't... If you find a briefcase full of cash on your front porch, it's pretty easy to start using that cash to pay for things, but is it a good idea? I don't trust most applications to store my password, I don't trust most web sites to store all of my billing information, I don't want Microsoft knowing anything about me. If that makes some things harder for me, then so be it. I don't mind. Privacy, security, and freedom aren't easy things... that should be evident to more people than ever in recent times...

Have I plugged StimpSoft recently? How can you not admire an application like SnapperHead or YADA? And just look at the other product offerings!

As soon as the U.S kills 100,000 in Afghanistan, Born Against can start writing some new material... (If you understand that reference, you are obviously the target audience of RasterWeb!)

New slogan: RasterWeb! - the best thing to happen to Whitewater since freshman girls! (Ok, it's a work in progress...)

I finally pulled all of the images off of my Palm, it took about 120 or so screen shots in the Palm OS Emulator to do it, but soon I should have a nice little gallery of all of the Palm Art! (Some of it's already here.)

Need more Palm Art? See pocketpig.

In about 1 day of testing I've found k-meleon to be pretty damn usable. I'm using it on the Win32 machine whenever I can. It's like Mozilla-Lite... Hmmm, maybe they should make a Mozilla-Lite, because personally it's not very often I need Mozilla to be a news reader or irc client, and I never need it to be a mail client... and I'm sure Mozilla does 10 other things I, and the majority of people looking to Mozilla to be a good web browser don't need it to do...

As far as my current browser usage, I almost exclusively use Mozilla under Mac OS X. Under the old Classic Mac OS (at the office) I use Netscape 4.7 because I have to support other people, MSIE 5.0 for pretty much the same reason, Netscape 6 when I want to test things, and Mozilla pretty often, though not every day. (I might if I had more RAM so I could keep all three running at the same time as my other apps.) Under Win32 I use Mozilla occasionally, Netscape 4.7 when I have to test things, MSIE 6.0 almost everyday (hmmm, it does seem to work well under Windows, go figure!) though I'd prefer not to, and now I'm using k-meleon... I of course use Lynx when I telnet into the Linux box, does that count?

One additional note on MSIE 6.0 under Windows, because I work in a company and don't have total contol, I rebooted my machine and found that I no longer had MSIE 5.0, I now have 6.0! Yay! Right? No... Gone is my chance to test for bugs in MSIE 5.0... ah well, I did hear one Windows-weenie say that the nice thing about the Mac (as compared to Windows) is that you can have multiple versions of MSIEand other browsers nstalled. You mean you Windows people can't do that? Silly Microsoft...

Microsoft knows streaming.

Can't decide between Mac OS X or Windows XP? XP rhymes with Poopy... X rhymes with Sex. You decide...

Since I'm on a Microsoft kick, I should mention this bit I heard on the radio: Bill Gates has hired an acting coach to help him prepare for an upcoming episode of Fraser where he will play - himself! Yes, he needs help playing himself... Maybe he can use the same acting coach Microsoft used for their court appearances...

I might be in NY next week, so lookout East Coast!

October Updates