I happened to be strolling around Circuit City yesterday afternoon when I stumbled across a 160 GB Western Digital hard drive that was on sale for $70! After rebate, naturally, but still that’s something like 44 cents per gig. Storage really is dirt cheap these days, and I love it. My justification for picking it up was for use in my long talked about but little worked on TiVo-esque machine. This brings me up to 428 GB of total storage between all my drives. After getting the hard drive I figured there wasn’t really any point in sitting around talking about it anymore so I ordered this power supply from NewEgg. When that gets in I should finally have everything I need.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-06-06 20:20:53 +0000

Pretty soon you won’t need an apartment, you’ll just be able to store your furniture on one of your hard drives.

😛

Brett’s recent post on the horrors of spam and the need for advanced filtering tools reminded me that I’d been meaning to mention my own spam filtering set up that I switched to several weeks ago. I’ve been using Popfile in addition to Outclass (which integrates it into Outlook 2002) and I love it. Previously I’d been using SpamFighter, which was decent but no longer had a free version, at least not one without ads. Popfile uses Bayesian filtering which definitely seems to be the way to go. It wasn’t too bad right after installing it, but after training it by reclassifying what it missed for a while it’s become nearly unstoppable. I’d say that I average maybe 20-30 pieces of spam per day and out of that maybe 1 per week makes it through. False positives were a bit of a problem, but again its gotten much much better by learning. Unfortunately, no matter how reliable a filter is with false positives I still feel the need to scan my junk folder from time to time just to check, which sort of defeats the purpose a little.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2004-06-04 07:59:13 +0000

Have you tried Mozilla Thunderbird yet? I really like it a lot, and it has some nice spam filtering built in.

Comment by Will on 2004-06-05 09:19:56 +0000

No, I haven’t tried that yet. Does it use Bayesian filtering? I’m all about the Bayesians.

Comment by Neal on 2004-06-05 10:13:27 +0000

Thunderbird does have bayesian filtering, although I can’t compare it performance-wise to popfile’s because I don’t get any spam anyway. I do know that it is a lot simpler in both good and bad ways. (It just does spam/not spam, but it’s easier to use and set up (there is no set-up) and everything).

Probably not worth switching, since you already have popfile set up nice (unless you wanted to cast off the taint of Microsoft).

Firefox/Thunderbird are all about the clean UIs and lack of confusing options, but they still manage to pack some powerful features. Personally I don’t think you can find more friendly software outside of Mac-land.

I predict the imminent death of email, instant messaging, faxes, and phones of all kinds. Someone working for HP Labs has developed a robotic helium blimp to deliever messages (in post-it note form) throughout an office. With something that cool, why would you need any other form of communication.? The way I see it, this might even replace talking. The coolest thing is that this wasn’t even part of his job, he just did it in his free time. I wish I still had the motivation to work on cool personal projects. Be sure to check out this video of the blimp in action. The best part is at the end when guy receiving the message acts suprised and gives the blimp a big hug. Good job, robotic blimp!

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-26 23:46:44 +0000

Lol … thats funny … but I don’t see how it could be useful. I mean, it’s slow and only one person could really use it at a time.

But it’s cute. 😀

Comment by Tobin on 2004-05-27 07:49:07 +0000

That’s actually been around a while. I saw this page quite a while ago, at least a year ago. Not to say I’m better than you.

I mean, I guess I’m kind of inferring it.

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-27 10:15:47 +0000

Communication by robotic blimp isn’t far-fetched at all if you consider how these blimps (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5025388/) could replace communication sattelites.

Comment by Will on 2004-05-27 11:34:37 +0000

Tobin – Oh, sure. Everybody just make fun of the guy who found out about the robotic blimp a year late. I see how you are! Where were you a year ago to tell me about this and keep me from making a fool of myself now?

Neal – Wow, those blimps sound pretty cool. But how are you going to be able to read the post-it notes if they’re at 100,000 feet?

Comment by Kimmee on 2004-05-27 12:20:03 +0000

I LOVE YOU ROBOTIC BLIMP!! <3 <3

Ok, my math’s been a little rusty since I left school but it looks like ²⁄₄ The Promise Ring + ¹⁄₄ The Dismemberment Plan = Maritime. I’m not sure though, I keep thinking Planck’s constant should be in there somewhere. Whatever the formula, this is Eric Axelson’s (bass player of the Dismemberment Plan) new effort after the break up of the D-Plan. I didn’t know what to think at first since Davey von Bohlen’s (formerly of The Promise Ring) voice has always been kind of a love/hate deal with me, but I just listened to several songs on their site and he’s much better than I remember. It sounds like some good, good stuff; Hooky, melodic pop driven by bouncy bass lines.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-22 17:32:58 +0000

I see what you mean about the lead singer’s voice … I liked it on “Adios” but I wanted to smother him on “Someone Has to Die”.

Hm, I really like “King of Doves”.

Good music, cool website design.

Comment by Will on 2004-05-22 20:42:13 +0000

See, that’s funny. I liked “Someone Has to Die” best, but because of the melody (which I can’t get out of my head) and in spite of the vocals. I think my years of Promise Ring listening has just given me a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

Ok, I’ve been having CSS issues for some time and I’ve decided they need to be resolved since its bugging the crap out of me. I don’t know if any of you using IE have noticed an issue where the text in the entries seems to disappear but will reappear if you highlight it or scroll the page. It’s as if the background color is being drawn on top of the text randomly. Doesn’t seem to happen when viewing with FireFox, so I’m thinking its one of those Microsoft related CSS inconsistencies. I just can’t seem to find out what. Anybody out there ever run into a problem like this with your stylesheets? Any suggestions? (Other than switching to Mozilla/FireFox/Opera full time. I’d still like the page to render right in IE regardless of what browser I personally use.)

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-05-18 01:41:10 +0000

I’ve been noticing this since the day you switched to Moveable type, man. If you can solve this, you will be my personal hero (that is, if you aren’t already… I can’t remember…).

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-18 01:51:43 +0000

I’ve never had a problem like this on any site I’ve used stylesheets on — and your site is the only site I’ve seen this happen to … hm.

I looked at your CSS file and it looks fine to me, so it must be a browser thing — and I’ve noticed that the text doesn’t disappear on my Mac at work (which I run IE on).

So, I just typed a whole lot and didn’t really help.

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-18 07:32:40 +0000

Sounds like the IE Peekaboo bug. Check out http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html for details on it as well as all the other major known IE fubars. Apparently the Holly Hack (detailed in the 3px jog page) will magically keep it away.

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-18 10:47:13 +0000

I copied your site to my desktop so I could play with your css. I added the following hack to the end of your styles-site.css file and it seemed to do the trick:

/* Hide from IE5-mac. \*/

• html .blogbody {
  

height: 1%;

}

/* Unhide */

Win and Mac IE are the only browsers that would pay attention to a * html rule because only they think that the html node has a parent. IE Win has a bug where it ignores heights if they would cause blocks to be too short to hold their contents, but IE Mac doesn’t have that bug so we have to exploit a parsing bug in IE Mac to hide the rule from that browser.

I didn’t discover all these cool hacks myself, of course (unless you count reading about them in various weblogs and CSS mailing lists).

Comment by Will on 2004-05-18 12:39:23 +0000

Thanks Neal! That did the trick. j00 r uB3r-1337. I had looked at the Peekaboo bug info before I left for work, I didn’t know if that hack would work since I wasn’t using any floats anywhere but I was going to try it out later. Then you just came along and fixed it for me. Rock on! I wasn’t aware of that list of MS CSS bugs and their related hacks, but that’s just ridiculous. I’m usually pretty forgiving of Microsoft crap but I don’t think I’d realized how bad things were in this case. Geez.

Comment by Phil on 2004-05-18 13:46:58 +0000

Rock on, Neal!

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-18 22:07:49 +0000

Neal: Computer Guy Extrordinaire!

Comment by Neal on 2004-05-19 19:16:38 +0000

Smart smart smart, I am so smart. S-M-R-T – I mean…

It’s no secret that IE/Win can give you fits when you’re trying to do pure CSS layouts with clean, compliant code. And we all (unfortunatly) have to support IE/Win 5+ because those three browsers make up about 90% of web users. So many people run into those nasty IE bugs and give up on W3C-standard-compliant web design (and never get to realize the wonderful benefits of following said standards). Thankfully, for those of us in the know, there are a handful of near-magical hacks that can whip those IEs into line without muddying up the code that more compliant browsers (and coders) love so much. There are even style-sheet/javascript combos that you can drop in to enable non-link CSS hover effects on IE 5.0+ and full translucent PNG support on IE 5.5+ (with GIF fallbacks for IE 5.0). Include them inside some of IE’s conditional comments and only your IE users will need to download them.

The most amazing thing is how much effort the development community puts into hacking Microsoft products into doing what they’re already supposed to do. If Microsoft even had a few coders studying all these third-party fixes, they could fix the known issues in IE in weeks. But they don’t have any reason to fix their products because they know that every extra development hour a company throws at making their solutions work with MS products will likely be taken out of the budget for making sure it works for everyone else. That factor is what I hate most about MS dominance in the marketplace.

If you had told me prior to last night that a movie featuring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken could be so completely and thoroughly mediocre as Envy, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. But, as Jolayne and I found out last night, I’d be wrong and you’d be right. It had a few scattered bits of moderate funny, but mostly in just a quick gag or two. Nothing about the plot or characters was really that memorable or funny and in the last 5 minutes or so seemed to stop trying entirely. As a side note, I don’t know why all movies with Christopher Walken don’t contain the credit “…and starring Christopher Walken as himself” because let’s face it that’s pretty much what he does. Not that I don’t appreciate it. The bright side of the whole thing is that we saw a trailer for Napoleon Dynamite that we pretty much laughed straight through. That looks like its going to be the most friggin’ sweet nerd movie ever.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-16 18:42:12 +0000

Yay! I can’t wait to see Napoleon Dynamite!

Hm … seems like we should wait for video to check out Envy.

The developer release of MovableType 3.0 was announced today and it looks like there’s been a good deal of fallout about it, primarily around the new licensing structure. The new model would only still be free if you were limited to one author and 3 weblogs. Anything beyond that starts costing $$$. I’ve only got 1 author and 2 weblogs right now, so I could upgrade to 3.0 for free, but I don’t know if I want to. I don’t have any plans to do any multi-author stuff or to create more blogs but its good to know that I could if I wanted to. Unlimited use is a pretty powerful draw, even if you don’t plan on really using that. Also, I don’t really have any complaints with version 2.661 aside from comment spamming which hasn’t been too bad so far. If that gets a lot worse, it might prompt me to upgrade. And if the plugin architecture for the new revision is as good as its supposed to be and a ton of awesome plugins start coming out, that could maybe pull me in as well. I don’t have a problem with the fact that they’re charging now, it makes sense to me. However, the pricing seems a little steep, so if I did upgrade I’d definitely be staying within the 1 author/3 blogs limit.

Comments

Comment by Dan on 2004-05-17 11:59:12 +0000

Brad Choate has a good entry talking about the new MT license. Basically, if you’re using multiple blogs to power one site, you’re in the clear.

http://bradchoate.com/weblog/2004/05/15/mt3

Comment by Will on 2004-05-17 18:39:53 +0000

Thanks Dan, that’s good to know! So it’s less restrictive than I initially thought, but I still like the thought of being able to add authors for friends or family members, or even maybe host a blog for them. Going to MT3 would definitely limit me from doing that. Are you planning on upgrading?

.kkrieger is a pretty graphically impressive and very short on plot or explanation first person shooter game. Apparently plot is one of those things that you sacrifice to fit the game into 96 KILOBYTES!!!!!. Holy crap. The average FPS almost certainly has single textures bigger than 96KB, and here they’ve put the whole game in that amount of space. It does take a really long time to load up, so I’m guessing they must be pregenerating just about every texture on the fly. I can’t really think of any other way they’d accomplish that. It’s a bit demanding on system resources, but worth checking out at least once. Besides, it’s not like waiting for a 96KB download is that bad anyway.

Comments

Comment by Dan on 2004-05-12 00:15:35 +0000

I read about that a while ago. They’re pregenerating the textures at runtime using those fancy math things… what’er they called? Ah yeah.. formulas.

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-13 01:31:32 +0000

I know how they did it: magic. And wizards.

Yup.

I bought this case, slightly used, from a guy at work this week, for a little less than half of what it goes for new on NewEgg. Probably should have tried to talk him a little lower, but oh well. It’s a slick looking case and will make a fine body for my TV recording/game console emulating entertainment machine. The front usb ports should be perfect for hooking up game controllers. The only pieces I have left to get are a power supply and possibly a hard drive. I probably don’t really need another hard drive, I should just take one out of my current box but you know how I am about storage. Also, I need to invest in some kind of super-remote control that can be used to launch and switch between programs. If such a device exists, then I’m set.

I picked up lunch today at Taco Bell to, you know, celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Below is the complete text of the email I sent to Taco Bell’s customer service department immediately following that. Based on a true story.

“Today I placed an order at this location that included a Taco Supreme. When I got back to work, I found that I had only been given a regular Taco, not Supreme. And this on Cinco de Mayo of all days. For shame. I would like restitution for the difference between a regular and Supreme taco, or to have a portion of sour cream and chopped tomato with a market value equivalent to that sum delivered to me. I have always been a loyal customer and would like to continue to Make a Run for the Border or Think Outside the Bun or whatever the current expression is, but this matter needs to be resolved. I trust that you will see to this. Thank you.”

I’m hoping to get a taco coupon or something out of it, but I think it would be awesome if they actually sent me sour cream and tomatoes. At the very least I hope that a customer service droid experienced a mild flash of amusement upon reading this. Immediately followed by a deep sense of regret. They did ruin my Cinco de Mayo after all.

Comments

Comment by Carrie on 2004-05-05 23:50:36 +0000

You’re like, King of the Smartasses.

I bow to thee, my liege.

Comment by Sarah on 2004-05-06 13:57:08 +0000

Couln’t they see your pain from your monitor dying? And then they had the nerve to deny you the sour cream ant tomatoes that could ease your grief, that you had rightfully paid for? I am going to boycott Taco Bell for at least a week in your honor. Just as I was thinking of going there again too.