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Weekend Home
As I said before I took today off of work and am in CT right now (on a “old fashoned” wired desktop since I can’t get any wireless here at home). Went down to the book barn today and got a nice set of SCIFI/GEEK books (A few Ray Bradbury books, one on Linus Torvalds the Linux guy, and a nice find of a Alfred Bester hardcover.) All in all a good day of finds!
Tonight I’m going to see Serenity (woo hoo) and maybe Corpse Bride too if I am in the mood.
Anyway….No idea yet what I am doing with the rest of the weekend before I have to head back on Sunday. Just have to wait and see.
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Movie trailer
Check out this great trailer for the feel good movie of the year….“Shining”
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Stupid Bill Pay…
I’ve been using the on-line bill pay that my bank provides for more then a year now and really like it. It’s fast and I don’t have to bother with finding stamps and checks and all that. The problem started when I got my laptop and tried to use Safari to access the bill pay site. My regular banks site works just fine but the bill pay page will give me a “Cookies Not Enabled” error, even when I knew they were. If I switched to Firefox, still on the laptop, it would work fine so for the last few months I would just use that. Tonight I tried yet again to use the site from safari, and again got the same error. Just for the hell of it I tried changing my browsers User Agent (which is just information that your browser sends to a webpage when you try to access it telling the site what sort of browser and operating system you are using). Well again just for the fun of it I changed my user agent to make the site think that I was using IE 6.0 on a windows box and low-and-behold the site let me in and worked just fine.
Why they feel it was necessary to block safari users from their site is beyond me but why the BS about cookies? Why not just say they don’t like my browser for some reason and leave it at that? I could see if for some reason they wanted to block a older or less secure browser, this is on-line banking after all, but come on? Just about anything is more secure than IE…it’s just lame is all.
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New Look
Well if you are reading this you will likely of noticed that my blog has a new look to it. The short version is that I was getting bored with the old one so found something new. The long version is that this weekend after working Saturday I got my geek on and finally got a SQL server and MyPHPAdmin working on my IBook. The results of this are that I can test out and play with stuff for my blog on my laptop and see just how it would work/look on the web (because I am running OS X’s built in web server also). Maybe some day I will get motivated enough to work on my own design for the blog but for now…well this will do. May as well let others do all the hard work…it’s the American Way!
Speaking of America they had some “America Day” parade today down Myrtle ave. Um…yah….”Go America” or something like that. It started at 12 so I chose that time to go shopping hopping that it wouldn’t be crowded (it was still). But I got food and avoided the parade so that was good. Other then shopping and getting my computer geek on didn’t do much else. Next weekend I will likely be going home to Hartford (well Thursday night actually, taking Friday off). Want to see a few movies and probably visit Val and do some little day trip thing or something (like finding real, un-pasturized cider). Just have to wait and see.
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Penguin Spoilers?
So I was looking on the movie spoiler page tonight (to see if Flight plan was as lame as it looked on the TV adds) and saw that they had a spoiler entry for march of the penguins. Now granted I didn’t see the movie yet my self but is a nature documentary really the sort of movie that can have a spoiler for it? I mean would it ruin the ending for me were I to read it? I would assume it would involve penguins, some getting eaten and born and the like. I don’t really see there being like a twist ending where it turns out the 4th penguin on the left was really a puffin or Keyser Soze, or something shocking like that.
Just overkill I guess is all I’m saying.
Neil Gaiman Goodness
So last night I cut out of work early and went into the city to see Neil Gaiman at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square. He was there to kick off the tour for his new book Anansi Boys. The event started at 6 but I got there around 4 and already the seating section was already more then half full. So I sat, read, and waited, and it was well worth the wait.
He gave a little talk, told a story or two, read some from Anansi Boys, and then took a few questions, before starting signings. When I got home and talked to Meg was uber jealous, She has a bit of a thing for Neil. But it was forgiven when I told her that I got the new book signed for her. All in all it was a fun night. He also gave us a sneak peak at the prototype covers for the re-issue of Good Omens
He said these are still just mock ups and that the art work needs some work still before he’s happy with them. They look cool even if they are one of those gimmicks to get die hard book geeks to buy 2 more copies of a book they already own.
He was really cool to see in person and just seems like a really nice guy (he was willing to sign for EVERYONE who was there and there were a lot of people.
Anyway again, a good night out. Right now I am anxiously awaiting the season premier of Lost when we finally get to see what is inside the hatch. 
It’s talk like a Pirate day again!
Aarrr! Avast you scurvy dog! Today be talk like a pirate day.
Glendale Wanderings
Since it was nice out today I decided to go for a little walk around the neighborhood with my camera incase inspiration strikes. This time I explored up past the end of my street where the RR tracks are. They are still active with freight and LIRR trains. Following them up a little I ended up coming upon the old Glendale LIRR station. Well less a station and more just a sigh where the trains used to stop before they eliminated the stop in the late 90′s. Right next to said abandoned stop is yet another cemetery (Lutheran from the sign). Which just reinforces the fact that should the dead rise (in say a Dawn of the Dead [- 1978 version] scenario ) I am going to have quite a zombie fight on my hands! The worst coming from the Jewish Cemetery because I hear they burry their dead naked, and really the only thing worse then a zombie would be a naked zombie.
Anyway….I took a few decent picts and played with photoshop on one and it came out looking good, in an experimental photoshop layer sort of way:
I think it’s the C from the old C-town (now Met) supermarket. How it ended up against a fence next to the rail road tracks blocks away who knows. Though this being NY nothing would surprise me really.
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A sigh for crapy web design
Now I will just pre-face this by admitting that captainscience.com isn’t the bastion of great design. It’s a tad drab in color and doesn’t have any fancy tricks to it but it gets the job done damn it.
That said…after about a year and a half with no updates the new powers in charge of the old Forensic Science and Chemistry club back at UNH finally decided to update the club web page (I care because back in the day it was my job). Even then the site wasn’t anything fancy, most of the design was left over from the older one that I just updated, mostly because at the time we decided it just worked and why change it too much if we didn’t have to. Well about 5 minutes after I left the new web girl there trashed everything and put up something totally new. So ok fine, it was alright. Again nothing fancy, just different. Well I don’t know who they have doing their new design but…yah.
Now I know it is still a work in progress, as shown by the fact that 90% of the site doesn’t work and just has under construction pages and blank holder gifs. Which is really a big no-no to start with. i know you want to get something up but nothing can be better then something that just sucks really. Right now all that really works there is the main page which is an issue in it self. Count one of the inditement: frames, count two: fixed size background image in main frame. Now count one could be forgiven…I guess. They are just ugly and a pain for page navigation. CSS totally the way to go now a days. But having a fixed size background image….tisk tisk… I am sure it looked fine on who-ever’s computer screen, which was probably at a certain size and resolution but um if your screen doesn’t match that all you get is a cut off image that fills 3/4 of the frame. (and really background images them selves have their place, which is mostly back in 1996 on a geocities.com site)
Ok I think I am about all ranted out. I guess the main point is if you are going to make a crapy myspace or geoccities page then frames and nifty backgrounds are just fine but when doing a site that is sort of a show case of ones school and club it’s better to keep a page simple and clean. Give people the info they want/need right up front and then you can get cute later on inside the site somewhere.
Ok now I am really done, and this whole thing is just a rambling rant but it’s also 1:17 am so I am surprised it’s even sort of in proper english at this point
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Ram is Successfully in!
I got my ram installed just fine. Was actually easier to install it in my powerbook than back when I did it in my old desktop. Things seem faster now, partly might just be the placebo effect but I just tried launching photoshop and that definitely does start up a lot faster now. So woot!
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I got ram
Last week I ordered some extra RAM for my laptop and they tried to deliver it yesterday while I was at work so I had to go down to the post office today to pick it up. Which as you can guess on a Saturday was just a JOY! But I got my RAM (a 512 MB stick) which is about the size of a stick of gum but was shipped in a box about the size of a shoe box….yah thats not over kill or anything.
So now I am going to attempt to put said stick of ram into my laptop which, from the manual, looks like quite an adventure. So I you don’t see a follow up post touting my RAM instillation success than something likely went very badly and I am crying over a broken computer
So wish me luck!
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Happy Birthday Jenn!
Happy Birthday Jenn! (this is for Kalamazoo Jenn for those keeping track)
365 tomorrows
Found linked off of Boingboing this morning:
“365 tomorrows is a collaborative project designed to present readers with one new piece of short speculative fiction each day for one year. Utilizing the broad palate of science fiction, our vision of the future creates a diverse pool of stories with something for everyone to enjoy.
365 launched August 1, 2005 and will continue until July 31, 2006″
Seeing as it’s only 6:40 AM I have only had time to read two of them but its a interesting concept to say the least.
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