I don’t get terribly excited about new browsers very often. If it loads most pages, that’s probably enough for me. But the new version of Firefox is just amazing. It is multiple times faster than anything I’ve used, and the plugins Just Work without any tweaking. Apparently it went out on my system and found plugins to use. I’m impressed.
This business of renaming it seems very odd, but, frankly, I don’t care enough to think about it much more than to say that it’s odd.
I refuse to forward these sorts of things in email, but I don’t mind putting the on my web site.
On Saturday morning, Sarah and I made some little clay thingies, and had about as much fun as it’s possible to have. I think I may have found my hidden skill.
And, for those of you who are unfamiliar with how art with little people works, I’ve compiled a short list of ways to squash your young artist’s joy.
Having been going to Kid’s Club at Michaels for a couple years now (10-noon, every Saturday, at your local Michael’s. Just $2), I was fortunate enough to learn these little tips a long time ago, and I thought it would be useful to pass them on. They’re little things that you don’t think about at the time, but make an enormous difference between art being fun or being a task that they need to accomplish to win your approval. YKMV (Your Kid May Vary.)
Between being sick on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and being generally lethargic on Saturday, I movie binged this week, seeing:
* The Mission
* The Black Cauldron
* Dead Man Walking
* Shocked
* Leap of Faith
* Cast Away
I think I *might* have seen “Shocked” before, many years ago, but I’m not certain. The rest of them, this was the first time to see. And, also with the exception of “Shocked”, they were all movies thave have been on my list for a while. I tend to be rather selective when I go to rent movies, and seldom get things by whim.
“Black Cauldron” was a book that I read when I was young, and was, I believe, my introduction to the Tolkein-esque genre. Although I may have already read, or had read to me, The Hobbit, by then. It is unabashedly derivative. And the movie, almost as though to mock this, has the same illustrator for the kid as did arthur in “Sword in the Stone” and the same illustratof for the pig as did the pig in Charlotte’s Web. I don’t know either of these for certain, but the drawing is so exactly the same, that I don’t see how it could not be.
“The MIssion” was very interesting. The footage of Iguacu was pretty amazing. And the history lessons about Paraguay were helpful in understanding some of the Jesuit buildings that we saw in the area. Shame so many things have to be politically motivated in the church, even today.
why is it that every few years some yahoo thinks that it’s a good idea to charge for email? I’ll give you a clue. It’s not out of a sense of civic duty and doing the right thing. It’s because they think that they have the corner on the market.
So here’s a clue. SMTP, for all its shortcomings, is an open standard. That means that anyone can write mail clients and mail servers. That means that, whatever pay service you may set up, there will always be free email delivery over the Intenet.
If your model is wonderful enough, sure, you’ll get customers and make a few bucks. Are you going to reject email coming in from the open internet? That could have some rather serious repurcussions to your business customers, dontcha think?
And who gets the penny per message? Surely not the recipient, which would make sense given the claim that this is for the customer.
No, whatever Mr Gates may say (and says every few years, ever since he discovered the Internet) some things have been free from the outset, and without very unpleasant legislation to the contrary, are going to stay free.
Hmm. I wonder if someone can figure out a way to classify unsolicited email as terrorism?
apparently i managed to acquire some kind of flu bug. bleh. all day sitting about feeling awful. bleh. bleh.
I watched the first quarter of the Superbowl, and was less than thrilled. Apparently there have been a few scores since then, but … *yawn* … I’m not sure I care.
i saw the commercial in which the kids sued by the RIAA for downloading music (losers sued by losers, apparently) are promoting Pepsi, which is promoting iTunes. It’s all rather convoluted.
It seemed kinda cool at first, but after reading the Tune Recycler web site, it appears that there some rather significant misinformation floating around about this whole situation.
Sure, the RIAA are slime, but it’s not entirely clear to me that iTunes is much more than the RIAA’s sexy marketing arm. Kinda like the Microsoft Booth Babes.
But, given that I seldom buy music anyway, I can’t say I’m too terribly concerned one way or the other.
But, if you do drink Pepsi, consider giving your bottle caps to the Tune Recycler. It seems like a Good Thing to do.
I went over to help Basil move some stuff, but ended up having not nearly as much time to help as I thought I would have. He gave me two book cases. One of them was too long to fit in the Jeep, so I had to take the top down. So, there I am, 3 degrees below zero, driving the Jeep with the top down and a bookcase sticking out.
I can now say authoritatively that it is a Bad Idea to drive with the top down when it is below zero. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Fortunately, I didn’t have very far to go, and stashed the bigger bookcase in my Dad’s garage.
The other one, I brought home (having replaced the top on the Jeep) and it is already full.I’m glad I got two. But for the first time in more than a year, I have no books sitting on the floor. Just barely.
As some of you may know, I graph statistics on all sorts of things.
This morning I discovered that my temperature graphs don’t know what to do when it gets below zero. Which is just as well, since I don’t either.
I’ve added a new measure to my stats page. Up until now, I’ve been graphing email/spam as a cumulative for the month, which completely fails to reflect the seriousness of the latest flood of spam.
Although, on the graph, you can very clearly identify where the flood started, and although the spam percentage gradually creeps up, it has an entire month worth of 62% spam that is has to offset to make any changes. However, from watching the logs, I felt that spam levels were much closer 90%.
Turns out I was right. In the new graphs, you can seldom see any daylight between the spam graph and the total email graph, and spam levels are right around 91%. At my peak, I’m processing about 60 email messages in 5 minutes, but only 3 of those made it into anyone’s inbox.
Given that email is such an important part of what the internet carries, 90+% of it being essentially stolen resources is pretty serious. I’m hoping that the courts will authorize public floggings of spammers and virus authors.
I wonder if I can bill phydeaux for all the time spent on the silly things he recommends and that I waste hours on. (I’d put more here, but they appear to have been mentioned in IRC, and I can’t find them. 😛