Shot In The Dark

Return to HTML Hell

My comments, obviously, are hosed. On the upside? They're spam-proof. My choice: Fix the commentsFinally convert the blog over to WordPress.I think I'm going to spend the time and do the conversion. Monday will tell......

The Good News

While I don't personally subscribe to the argument between evolution and creationism - I personally don't believe there's anything about evolution, at least in terms of empirical fact, that contraindicates the notion of God - there's at least one cool...

Speaking of Which...

Happy Fiftieth Birthday, Southdale Center, the world's first enclosed shopping mall! Without you, tucked away in posh Edina, and your thousands of imitators, the 'burbs wouldn't be anywhere near as 'burby! Ironically, the mall was intended to be...a socialist icon![Southdale's...

My Obsessions: Paleontology

One of my obsessions has always been paleontology - the study of how humans evolved into what we are today. So I'm fascinated by this story about the discovery of one of the world's oldest fossil humans. The skull, discovered...

SlAcKrZ

I love this (below the fold). Some language possibly NSFW....

A Thousand Responses

I took the laptop back to its vendor - a computer superstore who shall remained unnamed, but which relies on acronyms and abbrevations for its title, and which shall henceforth be known as "The Loathsome Vendor". I'm complaining to the...

Geek Question

Let's talk audio recording software. Obviously, the cream of the crop for recording for Windows is Adobe Audition (post-purchase heir to Cool Edit), which gives exceptionally powerful multi-track recording, editing, and special effects capabilities on the Windows platform. Mac is...

Shot in the Foot

Mitch asked me to keep the lights on here this week while he takes a well deserved vacation (Presumably to follow Bruce Springsteen around the country). If you like what you see from me, you can find more of my html-enhanced goodness at my regular blog, the Kool Aid Report. If you think I suck, then you'll probably want to avoid my other blog, Power Line.

Yeats!

Nobody - not even my college major advisor, Dr. Blake, himself a yuuuuuge fan - writes about Irish literature like Sheila does. When she writes about Irish lit, I envision her with a big treasure chest full of scraps of...

Worst Tech Ideas

For those of us who worked in high-tech, the dotcom boom was a little like the stadium siege "debate"; eventually, some dumb idea would leak through and suck you in. Reading about The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Timebrought...

The Accidental Geek

Item 1: My comment section is still down. In a sense it's a good thing; I'm finally able to catch up on eliminating comment spam. But I do miss the back and forth. Since Moveable Type 2.x is pretty much...

Audio Geek Question

So up until the last time my laptop was in the shop, I could do this: Run audio through the sound card - say, a streaming video or audio clip from Youtube or Political Teen or whatever. while running Adobe...

Dateless Dweebs Worldwide: "This Is The Greatest Day In History"

Those crafty South Koreans haved answered many a 30-something Dorito-fed video-game-addicted socially-challenged sad sack's dreams: The world's first female android:EveR-1, a combination of Eve and robot, looks just like a Korean female in her early 20s including her shape that...

Can You Hear Me Now? No? What?

Nancy from Protestwarrior sends:Speak Up for a Better World - Working Assets Wireless Speak up for a better world - get a FREE cell phone, a great plan, and FREE shipping from Working Assets. We donate 1% of your wireless...

Perceptions

I've gotten tired of some of the grinding animus in my comment section. It can be like having an itch that doesn't stop bothering you, 24x7; eventually it gets very, very old. Still, there's some fun stuff in there. As...

And What's Up With Airline Peanuts?

So I walked into a coffee shop this morning, and saw the little glass jar full of "Biscotti". I took a year each of Latin and Spanish in high school, and am kind of a language geek anyway, so -...

Laptops: The Impossible Dream?

Question for geeks: I'm thinking about buying a new laptop. Not soon; it's in my family budget for later in the year, most likely, probably November or so (although an unexpected bonus or windfall might accelerate things). I have a...

A Sea Of Palms In An Ocean Of Snow

First Ringer has an excellent piece on the Pennsylvania Senate race over at KVM. Which, while I encourage you to read KVM as well as his own excellent The First Ring blog, is not something I'd normally link. However, the...

Hobby On Steroids

Chuck Olson is one of my short list of favorite leftybloggers. Oh, his blog Blogumentary is a snarkfest, and goodness knows I would never descend to snarking... ...let me start over. Chuck did the blog documentary Blogumentary, and has a...

The Pole

Today is the 96th anniversary of Roald Amundsen reaching the South Pole 35 days ahead of British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. In typical Scandinavian style, the mission went fairly smoothly and uneventfully; in typical Victorian style, Scott and his whole...

Coming Soon To The Daily Kos Comment Section

Mice with a difference: Scientists announced Monday that they had created mice with small amounts of human brain cells in an effort to make realistic models of neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Led by Fred Gage of the Salk...

An Apology

To: Microsoft From: Mitch Berg Re: Apology I know; I've ripped on your "Outlook" email/personal info manager program in the past. And with good reason; it is a bloated monstrosity, a security nightmare and has a user interface that I...

Berg's Fourth Law of Corporate Conservation

The universe will contain an absolutely stable number of "professional staffing" (aka "staff augmentation") firms. The firms will in fact be the same firm; each "staff augmentation" firm will change names every few years, but the overall number of firms...

@ The Brink

Disclaimer: Languages fascinate me. Computer geekery, as a rule, does not. But the subjects cross paths in this piece by Nancy Szokan on the lowly "@" sign around the world.I'm talking on the phone to an Israeli writer who goes...

Yesterday, in an Alternate Universe

"Hello, this is your pilot, Kathleen Blanco." "The nose wheel on our landing gear is jammed ninety degrees in the wrong direction." "Each of you is now responsible for getting yourself safely to the ground. If it doesn't work...blame the...

I See Foucaultian People

Someone's working on getting PhD in Air Guitar:MEET madcap Amanda Griffiths of Chorlton, the PhD student who is studying for a doctorate - in air guitar....

E-Zombies

I had a new one today. Comment spammers, of course, are going farther and farther afield to find new domain names ("xxxxxx.com" is a domain name) to try to thwart filters and Blacklists and so on. They're also raiding old,...

Lonely Geeks Worldwide Take Hope

Submitted without comment....

I Should't Be Happy About This...

...and indeed I'm not. But you can't tell me it's never crossed your mind:Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on...

Bloomsday

It's Bloomsday again - the day in Dublin immortalized in James Joyce's Ulysses. But why listen to me prattle about it, when Red will write 38,000 column inches about it, all of them fascinating! Sigh. Next year, I'll do Bloomsday...

This Surprised Me

I love digital cameras, largely because I never remember to take film to be developed. I download the picture, and, poof, it's done. But I'm not much of a photographer; I got an "A" in my high school photography class...

Question

Actually, several questions, for all you geeks out there:What is a good, preferably freebie, Linux distro that has decent plug and play compatibility and doesn't take a whole lot of sitting around prowling websites for patches and plugs and stuff?...

Battle Is Joined

The Strib is moving up its heavy weapons in its battle with the alternative media. That's the Strib's Mark Brunswick atop a Russian-built (what else?) T-72. Excellent blog. Poor tank. The Northern Alliance tank is ready: Chad's driving, with Brian...

Visitors In The Night. Or Whenever.

Peter Swanson at Swanblog has been getting visitors....

Like Lileks on Laughing Gas

As much as I love reading Lileks, I can much more readily identify with Heather Armstrong's version of domestic life....

Apple Store, 2007

Seems about right. Mostly safe for work, as long as you don't have a movie screen for a monitor....