Comments are off until further notice.
I’ve gotten a ton of comment spam lately. One morning I woke up with something like 10 comment spam posts in the moderation queue. I may allow comments or new posts from now on, or I may allow comments temporarily, or I may allow comments only for select posts.
It sucks, but spammers are awful people.
So I sent my Xbox 360 in to Microsoft for repair. They sent me back a replacement unit. That’s funny, because the unit they replaced was itself a replacement unit.
So the current machine runs fine — it doesn’t freeze while playing Gears of War. That’s a nice feature. However, whenever the DVD drive stops spinning (like when I quit a game up to the dashboard) the 360 lets out a noise uncannily similar to the noise made by a Tusken Raider. A Tusken Raider repeats the noise a few times, but my Xbox 360 just makes the noise once. I’m afraid that one of these days I’m going to press the eject button and a smoldering puddle of plastic that used to be a game disc will pop out. But my fingers are crossed so that won’t happen.
After Google bought YouTube, did anyone else think, “Okay, yeah, I can upload content to YouTube, and now I don’t have to worry about it going out of business some day”?
Anyone?
In case you hadn’t heard, Democrats took back the House and the Senate on Tuesday. Also, we got back to a majority in the Governorships.
Holla!
I hadn’t come up with a post about this, but I was browsing the archive and came across this gem: My post on election night 2004. The last four sentences:
We don’t have the house, we don’t have the senate, and we sure as hell don’t have the Presidency. We’re outnumbered 5-4 on the Supreme Court. Most of the Governors are Republicans. Things have to change.
Well, things have changed. Two out of the four things I mentioned have changed. Isn’t that awesome? On Wednesday I felt like it was the first day of Summer vacation. After 12 years of shit, we’re looking at two years of — at the very least — checks and balances. I’m hoping we get another thirty, or fifty, or hundred years of Democrat control of Congress. While we’re at it, how about the next Presidential election, too. (John Edwards and Wes Clark — get out there.)
More to come …
Saturday I drove into Buckhead to buy some frames. On my way I hit some backed up traffic. When I got to the scene, police officers were searching a guy’s car. I spotted one officer pull what I can only guess was a nickel-plated revolver out of the trunk. Or maybe it was the back seat. Fulton County.
Then after the frame trip, I drove past my apartment to get some Wendy’s drive-thru. I ordered at the walkie-talkie thing then pulled up behind this. There’s not a lot to say. The guy looked as troubled/befuddled the whole time as he did when I took the picture. Note that his road machine has Fulton County tags. After he finally pulled off with his spoils the lady at the window told me that he had ordered his food there, too — eschewing the convenience of ordering while looking at the giant menu. He also inspected his sandwich and sent it back because he wanted more onions.
To be clear on this, I live in DeKalb County, the county so nice they capitalized it twice. In a span of about one hour I encountered one case of first hand and one case of second hand evidence of crazy people in Fulton County.
Vote tomorrow! And vote Democrat for your US Congressional race.
This is my first fall with the new camera and the pictures are really turning out great. I uploaded a bunch today. Check them out on my Flickr page.
Windows Vista comes out in January, but there are currently three Microsoft applications (that I know of) that boast the Vista look.
These are: Windows Live Messenger, Windows Media Player 11, and of course, Internet Explorer 7.
Immediately, I find it strange that of the three, IE7’s interface is the least Vista-fied. Media Player 11 looks exactly how I expect it to look in Windows Vista. Messenger is a little tougher, because although its appearance falls between those the XP versions of MP11 and IE7, I can’t tell if it will look any different in Vista. I can’t tell if its interface has stayed a bit more traditional because it’s generally a small window or because it’s the XP version.
Why would Microsoft hold back the visual progression of its most ubiquitous application? My first thought was that the age of the average IE user might be a bit higher than the age of the average Media Player user or Messenger User. By leaving the traditional title bar and corner buttons (minimize, maximize/restore, close) the same as those found in most XP applications, Microsoft may be trying to minimize intimidation experienced by older users — users who are already intimidated enough by computers. (As an example, I can imagine my dad clicking on a link that opens in a spawned instance of Media Player 11, then saying, “What the hell is this?”) Younger users — teenagers and twentysomethings — might be more appreciative of the glossy new MP and Messenger windows.
However, this morning I used Google to look for the release date of Office 2007 (Is anyone else excited about Excel 12?) and ran across this article on Ars Technica. Author Peter Pollack speculates as to how Microsoft chose Office 2007’s ship date. One sentence from his article bears repeating here:
Sending Office into the world early also runs the risk that some users may install it, discover it works well enough on XP, and hold off on the operating system upgrade.
Might the same logic apply to Internet Explorer? On my computer, the most commonly used application is my web browser (which is Firefox 2). I’d bet it’s also the web browser on most people’s computers, and the numbers tell us that most people’s web browser is still Internet Explorer. If all those people get the Vista visual upgrade on the application they use more than any other — for free — might they be less inclined to run out and buy a new operating system? It’s food for thought.
As a side note, I’ve barely used any of these three applications since Microsoft most recently updated them. Of the three, I use Media Player the most, but since I got my (second) iPod, I’ve been using iTunes a lot. I’m not in love with iTunes, but I’ve been listening to podcasts more lately and as far as I can tell iTunes is the best end-to-end solution for finding and subscribing to podcasts and syncing (which is easier than dragging) them to my iPod. In order to make sure that my iPod is as up-to-date as possible, I make sure that my iTunes is as up-to-date as possible — by leaving it running all the time.
Lately I’ve noticed that in Gmail’s input fields (i.e., when you’re composing a new email or talking to someone in chat), a right click brings up the option to Paste. Previously, this was impossible. I wrote a brief but astutely titled post about just this subject in August.
So why the sudden change? Did Google finally crumble under the crushing weight of reason, usability, and tradition to put the second half of the “one really just isn’t the same without the other” copy-and-paste combo into their otherwise gleaming interface? Or is it just the browsers? Paste is there in both Firefox 2 and IE7. I wouldn’t hold it past Microsoft to “improve” the interface of someone else’s website. (Yes, I put the word improve in quotes to make a small point — but paste functionality is an improvement.) But Mozilla? Mozilla wouldn’t do that, would they? Well, I guess they did put in that whole immensely useful spell check feature — a feature that shows up in the exact same text fields in which I now have the option to paste using only the mouse (and every other text field I encounter on the Internet).
(This feels like a good time to bring this up: Is Mozilla stepping on Google’s toes with the spell check? Google’s toolbar offered the exact same feature with nearly identical visual cues (which are in turn ripped off from Microsoft Word). Is Mozilla stepping on Google’s toes with the “right click on highlighted text to search for it in a new tab” feature? Again, the browser implements functionality identical to that which the toolbar already offered. I’m five seconds from uninstalling Google Toolbar. The one feature I don’t wish to part with is its AutoFill feature. How long until FireFox offers an identical tool?
And as long as I’m off subject, it’d be great if the built in search box (prominent in both Firefox forever and now IE7, too) opened a new tab automatically. The Google Toolbar gives me a checkbox for that, but I want to get rid of it.)
So it’s possible that the current generation of browsers are correcting deficiencies in Google’s services. If this is the case, perhaps it will wake Google up to make more advances in its products and, oh, I don’t know — get something out of beta? And I’m not talking about Desktop, which I uninstalled months ago.