Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Love, Natalie

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A definite must-read: a letter from Natalie of the Dixie Chicks:

Dear Reader:

I am taking the time out of my very busy rock and roll life to write you this letter. As I am sure you can understand, being me is a full time job. I can’t just drop everything every three days because someone needs a quote or statement about a quote or statement we may or may not have said. It’s just draining me of time and effort I need to put toward other things. For one, I as a taxpayer have to get busy earning money to help pay off the latest \$87 billion dollar addition to the national debt! Also, I have a huge list of phone calls to return.

I’ll list a few just so you get the idea.

Message 1: Saddam Hussein called and wants to know where his weapons of mass destruction are. Listen Saddam, I already told you, I don’t know. You’re going to have to call the White House on that one.

Message 2: Country radio called and wants to know if it’s true that you’re leaving country music? This one must be a prank call. I mean, how can you leave a party now when the hosts had shown you to the door six months ago.

(via Atrios)

Geek porn!

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Cute girl + Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 = Geek Porn! ;)

If all goes well, I should be doing this very thing this weekend. ‘Cept I won’t be nearly as photogenic while doing it. And I don’t think I’d look as good in that dress. Other than that, though, it’ll be exactly the same. Really.

Burning toast brightly, proudly, and with great beauty

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Following up on yesterday’s book banning post, today comes news that the books will not be removed from the school curriculum.

In the end, the school board voted unanimously to keep Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land, while giving parents more control over their students’ choices by requiring principals to automatically offer an alternative to a challenged book.

While I’m very glad that this was the final decision, the requirement to offer alternative choices seems a little silly. How is that going to work? Most of the class reads Brave New World, while two or three students read something else? Class discussions are going to be an interesting experience.

(via Go Fish)

Credit where credit is due

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Wil’s request for a WMV-to-Qicktime converter reminded me of something that I’ve had rattling around in my head for a bit.

I’m fairly obvious about having a strong anti-Microsoft bias. However, I do have to admit (and really don’t mind doing so) that the Macintosh team at Microsoft does some truly kick-ass work. Nearly everything that MS has produced for the Mac in the past few years has been fairly impressive. Even with as much as I bash Internet Explorer in all its variations, when IE 5 for Mac OS X was released, it was the best browser on the market. The fact that it’s since been superceded by other browsers and subsequently abandoned by Microsoft isn’t the fault of the Mac team there, I’m sure.

What popped this into my head a couple weeks ago was, of all things, the driver software for the Microsoft Office keyboard, Intellitype Pro. Where the PC version of the software is its own standalone application, the Mac version of the software integrates right into the OS X control panel. More of a standout feature, though, is the fact that on the Mac, you can assign special functions to all the extra special keys on an application-by-application basis — something which I hardly thought about until I tried to do the same thing on my PC and discovered that it wasn’t possible. Score one more for the Mac team.

All that said, though, there is one glaring exception to the rule — and that’s the Mac version of Windows Media Player. Horrid little application, that one. I’m more surprised when I find a .wmv file that it can open, and even then, performace (at least on my 350Mhz G3) is abysmal. At least that’s the only stumbling block I’ve seen from them. I can’t say that I’m too distraught over having limited-to-nonexistant Windows Media functionality on my Mac, anyway.

So, that’s it, really. Kudos to the Microsoft at Mac team. Now, why don’t you all go tell the rest of the company how to write decent software? ;)

(Oh, and incidentally, I was also looking for a WMV-to-Quicktime converter a couple weeks ago, and found diddley.)

Inappropriate sexual arousal for teens

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Concerned parents in Texas want to ban Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land.

The board of directors for the South Texas Independent School District is expected to decide tonight whether to ban two books — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — from the high school’s 10th grade English Advanced Placement curriculum.

The books, part of the class’ summer reading list, may lead to “inappropriate sexual arousal of young teens,” parent Julie Wilde wrote in her complaint to the district.

Obviously (to me, at least), this is patently stupid. But I did have one question.

Would Ms. Wilde be so kind as to suggest some alternate reading that provides appropriate sexual arousal for young teens?

Britney Spears’ autobiography, perhaps?

(via Go Fish)

More on Gibson's 'The Passion'

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Dad sent me a couple articles over the last few days looking at Mel Gibson’s “The Passion“, lately seeming to be the most controversial religious film that almost no one’s seen since Dogma was in pre-release. Anyway, if you’re at all interested in the film or the controversy around it, both of these are worth a look.

‘You Can’t Whitewash the Events of the Bible’: New Testament scholar Darrell Bock recently spoke with Beliefnet about Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion,” which dramatizes the last hours of Jesus. Critics–including Catholic biblical scholars and the Anti-Defamation League–have raised concerns about the movie’s historicity and its portrayal of Jewish authorities. Bock saw a rough cut of the film in late August.

What Mel Missed: Most of us have yet to see Mel Gibson’s “The Passion,” but we’ve gained one sure impression: it’s bloody. “I wanted to bring you there,” Gibson told Peter J. Boyer in September 15’s New Yorker magazine. “I wanted to be true to the Gospels. That has never been done before.”

Shaolin Soccer needs to be released, dammit

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Among the top 10 movies downloaded on the Internet in August were the usual blockbusters: Pirates of the Caribbean, The Hulk, Matrix Reloaded … and Shaolin Soccer.

Can’t say as I’m surprised, I’ve been waiting for word of its release since I first saw the trailers. I don’t do the online downloading thing, either, so c’mon, Mirimax — get your act together and release this thing!

Matrix/Web

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This is cute — an introduction to CSS-based website design, Matrix style.

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain but you feel it, that there’s something wrong with the web. You don’t know what it is but it’s there like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.

You can see it when you look out your browser window or when you turn on your web tv. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.

This is the web that you know. The web as it was at the end of the twentieth century.

This is the web as it exists today…

Welcome To The Desert Of The Web

(via WebGraphics)

Bugfixes are good

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Well, that was a nice surprise. I just updated my Mac to OS X 10.2.8, and on restart, discovered a bug fix.

I’ve had an issue for a while now with my iPod where if I restart the machine with the iPod plugged in, it doesn’t behave correctly after the restart. It will mount to the Finder fine, but iTunes and iSync don’t recognize it at all. The only fix is to unmount and unplug it, shut down the machine, and then unplug the machine’s power cord and let it sit for five minutes before powering it on again — apparently this will clear a frozen FireWire port.

I forgot to unplug the iPod after installing the update tonight, though, and was pleasantly surprised to see iSync and iTunes launching after login, indicating that they saw the iPod without a hitch. Nice!

My eyes! My eyes!

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Until right now, I had no idea that there even was a CSS declaration for text-decoration: blink. I wish I hadn’t found out that it existed the hard way.

Hasn’t use of the ‘blink’ tag been outlawed by now? The worst part is, the rest of the design isn’t shabby at all, which just makes the gratuitously annoying blinking stand out by comparison. Ugh.

(via Will)