To Our Love Send A Dozen White Lilies

Hey boys and girls, it's time to enlarge your vocabulary!  Today's word is Foxcrement, a noun meaning "television programming devoid of quality or any redeeming value, usually pandering to the lowest common denominator. Commonly originating from, but not limited to, the Fox Television Network."  Let's all thank some random guy for providing us with this new word for our vocabulary.

Ok, so putting the sarcasm aside, I finally managed to see Shrek 2 today.  While I can't fault the animation (flawless) or the movie (great), the soundtrack drove me crazy.  Sure, it gained points for having songs by Tom Waits (Little Drop of Poison, originally found on the The End of Violence soundtrack) and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (People Ain't No Good), but the covers of songs originally by the Buzzcocks (Ever Fallen In Love) and David Bowie (Changes) were just uncalled for and (in my ears) grating.

Actually, that's my only complaint about the film: the fact that the soundtrack actually seemed to be distracting at times. For the most part I think they would have been better off with a largely instrumental score (with appropriate breaks for the necessary songs, like the first fairy godmother piece.)  As for the ending, well, I've always had a dislike for anything even remotely connected to Ricky Martin, so I won't comment.

All this just to keep my reputation as being able to find something wrong in every movie.  Oh, and this amuses me to no end.  Spider-sense … tingling!

Title has the same value as always.  Knock yourself out.

System Updates

I got bored and rather than do thesis work, I decided to work on my page layout.  The primary change is in the main index stylesheet, however it brings in some new compatability issues.

Where my previous layout worked in all browsers, but looked ugly in Internet Explorer (due to the latter's borked CSS2 support), the current layout makes extensive use of PNGs, due to their alpha-blending and transparency options.  In other words:  this site will look just plain ugly in IE.  Of course, being the gentleman that I am, I am offering IE users a choice:  you can either deal with the ugliness, or you can install a standards compliant browser.  (Think of it as the Internet era equivalent of an "Evolve or die!" ultimatum.)

Aah! German Potato Salad!

I've finally gotten around to fixing the Rapture Index script.  The website I take it from had recently been updated to a new version that was designed in FrontPage, meaning that there was lots of useless cruft in the HTML that was messing up my regexps. (There is, however, less cruft than had they designed it in, shudder, Word.)  Anyways, it's back now, so those of you who are wondering on just how close we are to the time when we all go to Hell can now keep track.

One point, again, for the title.

You Will Find Happiness With A New Love

I went to a Chinese restaurant on Friday night, and I got the following fortune cookie:

To say that it is by far the oddest cookie that I have ever received would be an understatement.  Not much else to say, this is just a placeholder while I work on a major entry for sometime early next week.

One point for the title, you know the drill.

S = (M)^d mod n

The observant reader may have noticed that my last comment appeared with a new link beside it, one that said 'PGP'.  The curious would have noticed that clicking on it gives them a clear-signed version of the message in question.  The just plain nosey would have noticed that there's a new <link rel> on the index file to this site that points to a GPG public key.  Now, what does this all mean?  It means that I've been allowed near a list of Movabletype plugins.

There's a whole bunch installed, most of which are fairly subtle, such as Numbers, AbbrevAllev, and Amputator; others, such as Revision have since been removed since they didn't want to work.  Finally, there's the ones like OpenPGPComment, which provides a framework for PGP signed comments, that should be immediately noticable.

Now, those of you who don't go through phases where you suddenly use GPG or PGP and then get bored with it don't have to worry.  This isn't some Typekey wannabe.  It remains possible to post without having the message digitally signed.  In fact, as of right now it is up to the end user to check to see if the signature is authentic.  It is possible to do the latter automatically however, from my past experiences, I've found that SPARC CPUs (at the least the 32-bit ones) tend to be dog slow at these operations.  So, it's really just another one of these toys that I play with.

Two points and a letter from either Alice or Bob for the title.

I've Got Diplomatic Immunity, So Hammer, You Can't Sue

I'm going to be running a game of Diplomacy with some friends (located here and in Toronto) sometime in the near future (ie within the next month).  However, we are at least 3 (and possibly 4) people short to have a game.  Therefore, if you're interested in playing, let me know.  All relevent information will be posted on the site for it , and those who don't understand the game can follow the links on that site to the rules and various online resources.

One point for the title.  Now do the bump!

Adobe Tricks

This one is for everyone who uses Windows: If you have Adobe Acrobat installed and want to shorten the amount of time it takes to load then take a look at this link.

Hey Hey, 16k

This won't be new to anyone who checks Fark on a semi-regular basis, but I still felt the need to post a link to it.

I've been informed that the references are largely UK centric, including reference to both the BBC Micro and Acorn Computers.  (The later being the original developer of the ARM CPU and producer of some early RISC PCs that rate high on my wants scale, but low on the attainability scale.) However, it's still both enjoyable and catchy.  I'm going to have to dig out my Commodore the next time I take a trip home.

Update:The song exists as a MP3 file!  I'm never going to manage to get this thing out of my head now.

Generic Title

My room mate sent me this link to shots of Sun's 3D desktop environment called 'Project Looking Glass'.  It's got the standard Sun desktop environment issues (translation: the window theme is ugly as sin), but other than that it's a fairly impressive looking system.

I can't help but wondering what the required specs for the final release are going to be.

Random Updates

On April 25th I posted links to articles by John Doyle with regards to Fox News and the responses he received from south of the border.

Well, those articles got attention in a big way.  So much attention in fact, that the New York Times ran an article about it in their Sunday edition.  (Free registration hopefully not required.  Go Google!)  Of course, such notice brings more responses, and Mr. Doyle published yet another column detailing his interactions with lette writers.  (These being more pleasent than the last.)

Finally, all the media furor managed to get Globe columnist Heather Mallick a guest spot on O'Reilly's show.  This was, to put it mildly, an experience for her, and you can read her opinion of it in last Saturday's column.

It's Not Sexist! It's Romantic

I've been running a game of Paranoia with some friends, and decided to check out the rumours^* of a new version that is currently in development.  Anyways, to make a long story short, I found out a few things:  First is that we're playing using the 'non-existant' fifth edition rules (I'll explain this bit when I finally get around to posting an opinion/review on Paranoia), which results in our 'Classic'-style module being run in a full 'Zap!'-style gameplay mode.  The second is that the new version comes out in August.  If I'm still interested in this by then, then I'll have to take a look.

Anyways, browsing around the Paranoia XP site eventually got me over to the site of Greg Costikyan, designer of TOON and one of the original authors of Paranoia.  To be more specific, I ended up at a particular article on his page.  In it, he talks about something called grognard capture, and why it's both a problem that should be avoided and one that can't really be eliminated.  (Actually, that's not true, he spends most of his time explaining just what exactly a grognard is, and how one goes about capturing it.)  Now, I've never been one to get into many games, and really, if I had to boil it down to something, it would be this.  Contrary to popular belief, I don't have the time to spend days getting extremely good just so I can advance to the next level.  Maybe that's why I've been slowly moving towards console games that require less skill than others (Paper Mario, Harvest Moon).  Or maybe it's just that I'm immature and better suited to games designed with a younger audience in mind.

We hope to finish up our Paranoia campaign by the end of the week, so I'll try to get an opinion on it up by then.

^* Friend Computer wishes to remind you that rumours are treason.  One treason point for the title, and please report to the nearest IntSec squad for termination.