Computers: November 2006 Archives
I hate the new Burger King ads. The've had them for over a year, the ones with the guy with the King mask stalking people. I despise these ads, as I have mentioned before.
I don't get fast food option, but all my life, I've preferred Burger King over McDonald's. I like their fries, shakes, and burgers better. And they have onion rings. And better BBQ sauce.
I maybe get fast food every few months. It's very rare. And I have not gone to Burger King the last few times, just because of the ads. Today, I went to McDonald's, even though Burger King was slightly closer.
I don't get fast food option, but all my life, I've preferred Burger King over McDonald's. I like their fries, shakes, and burgers better. And they have onion rings. And better BBQ sauce.
I maybe get fast food every few months. It's very rare. And I have not gone to Burger King the last few times, just because of the ads. Today, I went to McDonald's, even though Burger King was slightly closer.
Now you can click the "Quote" button in your reply to, you know, quote the comment you're replying to.
See examples below.
See examples below.
The Celtics suck. So, I'll trade Paul Pierce for some pitching and maybe some DBs or WRs.
Now Playing: They Might Be Giants - Robot Parade [Adult Version]
Some liberals like to out gay Republicans. They say that they are justified because their targets are hypocrites. You see, being closeted itself is hypocritial, but more to the point, being a Republican and gay is hypocritical. To them, anyway.
What they, unsurprisingly, do not seem to understand is that in outing anyone they are themselves being hypocritial, since they are the ones who like to talk about how sexual preference is a personal issue. I happen to agree with that, which is why I find laws outlawing homosexual sex to be anathema, and why I also find outing other people against their will to be deplorable.
Recently, Bill Maher -- a bastion of smug and intellectually dishonest hypocrisy -- outed someone on Larry King's live show. CNN responsibly removed that reference from subsequent airings, without comment, but presumably because a. it was a disgusting thing for Maher to do and CNN didn't want to be a party to it by re-airing it, and b. CNN could be sued over it for defamation.
Seriously though, I can't stand Bill Maher. Most of the things he says are simply incorrect, and he is impossible to argue with because he takes the default position that you are an idiot if you disagree with him, and even if he does let you respond, he'll only use it as an opportunity for mockery. He's even worse than Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, and that's saying something.
What they, unsurprisingly, do not seem to understand is that in outing anyone they are themselves being hypocritial, since they are the ones who like to talk about how sexual preference is a personal issue. I happen to agree with that, which is why I find laws outlawing homosexual sex to be anathema, and why I also find outing other people against their will to be deplorable.
Recently, Bill Maher -- a bastion of smug and intellectually dishonest hypocrisy -- outed someone on Larry King's live show. CNN responsibly removed that reference from subsequent airings, without comment, but presumably because a. it was a disgusting thing for Maher to do and CNN didn't want to be a party to it by re-airing it, and b. CNN could be sued over it for defamation.
Seriously though, I can't stand Bill Maher. Most of the things he says are simply incorrect, and he is impossible to argue with because he takes the default position that you are an idiot if you disagree with him, and even if he does let you respond, he'll only use it as an opportunity for mockery. He's even worse than Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, and that's saying something.
Now Playing: Hector Berlioz - Symphonie fantastique - March to the Scaffold
Mac-Glue-1.28 has been released. Download it from the CPAN or SF.net.
(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)
Changes:
(Note: it may take time for the release to propagate to the various download mirrors.)
Changes:
* v1.28, Wednesday, November 8, 2006Posted using release by brian d foy.
Another endian fix, this time for UTF conversions (see comment in Glue.pm
for details). (Jelte Liebrand)
Fixed prereq for Mac::AppleEvents::Simple.
In theory, you should be able to send Unicode data via Apple events with a BOM. It's documented to be optional, but some apps seem to choke on it. So I send Unicode text without a BOM.
This is, obviously, a problem with Intel Macs.
So, here's the fix:
This is, obviously, a problem with Intel Macs.
So, here's the fix:
require Config;New release coming soon.
my $bom = $Config::Config{byteorder} eq '1234' ? 'LE' : 'BE';
return new AEDesc typeUnicodeText, Encode::encode('UTF-16'.$bom, $_[0]);
I am watching a movie I got off Netflix called Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale.
Oh my, it's bad.
I should have known, it was written by the same person as The Recruit, which is -- by far -- the most predictable spy movie of all time. And Ultraviolet, a movie that looked so bad from the trailer I actually wanted my money back after seeing the trailer itself.
It's the future and to get rid of war, they got rid of all art and keep everyone drugged. Christian Bale plays Keanu Reeves, a cop who stops taking his drugs and sees the light. Except unlike The Matrix, he has super powers before he sees the light. The opening scene is a nearly literal clone of a scene from The Matrix.
The flags the government flies look almost exactly like Nazi flags. They have little kids, no more than 10 or 11 years old, in black uniforms pointing out citizens to arrest. There's a Apple-1984-like speech over the loudspeaker. Take all the roll-your-eyes junk from V For Vendetta (which I liked quite a bit, despite its lame symbology) and multiply it several times.
Bale shoots his partner in the head, through a banned book the guy's reading (a Yeats collection). Oooo. Then he loses his drug dose one morning, and that day goes to arrest a woman who is off her drugs, and gasp, he sees himself in her, and prevents her from being killed. He stops taking his drugs. He is later coming to terms with his feelings, and puts Beethoven's Ninth on a record player, and he drops a snow globe to the floor -- in slow motion, of course -- just as the first movement reaches its initial crescendo. He then drops to a chair and weeps.
The police are killing dogs -- pets are bad, I guess -- and a puppy almost escapes and licks Bale's nose, and Bale saves the puppy from being killed. There is, also of course, the new partner to replace the one Bale killed, who is skeptical of Bale. Hmmmm, he saved a puppy ... maybe he has feelings for this juvenile canine ... ?
The movie progresses precisely as you think it would, from beginning to end, except for the introduction of this nonsensical martial art called "gun kata" or something, which consists almost entirely of standing in one place and shooting in different directions.
Calling this movie ham-handed only barely begins to describe how bad it is. (Speaking of ham-handed, the whole Battlestar Galactica-as-allegory-for-Iraq was entirely awful too, irrespective of your view on the war; come on, suicide bombers blowing up other humans volunteering to be part of a police force? Spare me!)
And don't even try to explain to me how these people on the drug supposedly have no feelings and emotions, yet all of them have very identifiable feelings and emotions, such as when Bale's partner arrests him for having feelings, and then himself gives an impassioned speech about how bad feelings are for society. Huh?
This movie is stick-in-the-eye bad.
Speaking of stories of totalitarian governments, anyone ever seen James Clavell's "The Children's Story"? It was on TV when I was a kid. I saw it once, and still remember some of it to this day. I found a copy on MilkAndCookies.com. It looks like a copy of an old VHS tape, and it's Real format. So it's pretty crummy, but worth a look anyway.
Oh, I also saw another terrible movie this week, The Butterfly Effect 2. Straight to DVD. They pretty much violated all the rules for the first movie, which turned it from a merely bad movie into a terrible movie. No blackouts, nosebleeds without new memories, and, ultimately, the dude killed himself even though there is no indication he needs to, or that it would do any good for him to do so (oops: spoiler alert!). A total waste.
Oh my, it's bad.
I should have known, it was written by the same person as The Recruit, which is -- by far -- the most predictable spy movie of all time. And Ultraviolet, a movie that looked so bad from the trailer I actually wanted my money back after seeing the trailer itself.
It's the future and to get rid of war, they got rid of all art and keep everyone drugged. Christian Bale plays Keanu Reeves, a cop who stops taking his drugs and sees the light. Except unlike The Matrix, he has super powers before he sees the light. The opening scene is a nearly literal clone of a scene from The Matrix.
The flags the government flies look almost exactly like Nazi flags. They have little kids, no more than 10 or 11 years old, in black uniforms pointing out citizens to arrest. There's a Apple-1984-like speech over the loudspeaker. Take all the roll-your-eyes junk from V For Vendetta (which I liked quite a bit, despite its lame symbology) and multiply it several times.
Bale shoots his partner in the head, through a banned book the guy's reading (a Yeats collection). Oooo. Then he loses his drug dose one morning, and that day goes to arrest a woman who is off her drugs, and gasp, he sees himself in her, and prevents her from being killed. He stops taking his drugs. He is later coming to terms with his feelings, and puts Beethoven's Ninth on a record player, and he drops a snow globe to the floor -- in slow motion, of course -- just as the first movement reaches its initial crescendo. He then drops to a chair and weeps.
The police are killing dogs -- pets are bad, I guess -- and a puppy almost escapes and licks Bale's nose, and Bale saves the puppy from being killed. There is, also of course, the new partner to replace the one Bale killed, who is skeptical of Bale. Hmmmm, he saved a puppy ... maybe he has feelings for this juvenile canine ... ?
The movie progresses precisely as you think it would, from beginning to end, except for the introduction of this nonsensical martial art called "gun kata" or something, which consists almost entirely of standing in one place and shooting in different directions.
Calling this movie ham-handed only barely begins to describe how bad it is. (Speaking of ham-handed, the whole Battlestar Galactica-as-allegory-for-Iraq was entirely awful too, irrespective of your view on the war; come on, suicide bombers blowing up other humans volunteering to be part of a police force? Spare me!)
And don't even try to explain to me how these people on the drug supposedly have no feelings and emotions, yet all of them have very identifiable feelings and emotions, such as when Bale's partner arrests him for having feelings, and then himself gives an impassioned speech about how bad feelings are for society. Huh?
This movie is stick-in-the-eye bad.
Speaking of stories of totalitarian governments, anyone ever seen James Clavell's "The Children's Story"? It was on TV when I was a kid. I saw it once, and still remember some of it to this day. I found a copy on MilkAndCookies.com. It looks like a copy of an old VHS tape, and it's Real format. So it's pretty crummy, but worth a look anyway.
Oh, I also saw another terrible movie this week, The Butterfly Effect 2. Straight to DVD. They pretty much violated all the rules for the first movie, which turned it from a merely bad movie into a terrible movie. No blackouts, nosebleeds without new memories, and, ultimately, the dude killed himself even though there is no indication he needs to, or that it would do any good for him to do so (oops: spoiler alert!). A total waste.
Apparently Kanye West did not win for best video at some awards show, and he actually crashed the stage to complain. Totally awesome.
So I had never heard this song (Touch the Sky) or seen the video, but I found it, and watched it.
And OK, maybe I am not one to talk, but Kanye, if you sing out of tune you are automatically excluded from winning an award. Being a rapper is no excuse. "Let's take them hi-i-i-i-i-igh, la la la la la la la ..." Someone shoulda told you, no, don't do that. Even if it was in tune, it would sound stupid. Seriously. Spend some of the money you spent on the video to pay for people to tell you that you can't sing.
So I had never heard this song (Touch the Sky) or seen the video, but I found it, and watched it.
And OK, maybe I am not one to talk, but Kanye, if you sing out of tune you are automatically excluded from winning an award. Being a rapper is no excuse. "Let's take them hi-i-i-i-i-igh, la la la la la la la ..." Someone shoulda told you, no, don't do that. Even if it was in tune, it would sound stupid. Seriously. Spend some of the money you spent on the video to pay for people to tell you that you can't sing.
So three years ago I pre-ordered the sequel to the classic puzzle game, The Fool's Errand, called The Fool and his Money. It never came, because it was never finished.
But today I got e-mail from Mr. Cliff Johnson: the game is set to be shipped December 4th, and he was asking all us preorderers to make sure he has our correct postal address.
Oh joy, oh happy day. Do I dare believe it will actually ship?
But today I got e-mail from Mr. Cliff Johnson: the game is set to be shipped December 4th, and he was asking all us preorderers to make sure he has our correct postal address.
Oh joy, oh happy day. Do I dare believe it will actually ship?
I have a Yamaha FG-230 12-string acoustic guitar. It's got a red label in the sound hole that says "Nippon Gakki," which is what Yamaha used to be called. I wanted to know more about it, and the Yamaha online guitar serial number finder had no info on it, so I e-mailed them (guitarguru at yamaha.com). They told me it was made sometime in 1968-1972, and it has a spruce top, mahogany back/neck/sides, with a rosewood fretboard.
It's not worth much, apparently. $200 tops, judging by eBay, but even then, mine's not in very good condition. It's got some warping on the neck, I think.
This was my first acoustic guitar, and I had it strung as a 6-string, and I loved the booming sound. I think I'll hold on to it and someday fix it up, bring it back to life. Maybe I'll bring it in to my local music store (Bigfoot Music) and see what they have to say about it.
Speaking of Bigfoot, I need to buy a ukulele from them for Christmas, for the kids. And maybe a book so I can learn to play it.
It's not worth much, apparently. $200 tops, judging by eBay, but even then, mine's not in very good condition. It's got some warping on the neck, I think.
This was my first acoustic guitar, and I had it strung as a 6-string, and I loved the booming sound. I think I'll hold on to it and someday fix it up, bring it back to life. Maybe I'll bring it in to my local music store (Bigfoot Music) and see what they have to say about it.
Speaking of Bigfoot, I need to buy a ukulele from them for Christmas, for the kids. And maybe a book so I can learn to play it.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
