i had a lovely nightmare last night. but being a geek, it wasn't a normal nightmare, it was a special kind of nightmare. one where everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong. i woke up into the dream on an exam day for a class i couldn't identify. every time i looked at paperwork about it they came out like runes. i kept thinking "when did i sign up for a class about runes?" but it didn't matter because i just failed it by missing the final exam. damned runes.
so after failing, and having my entire rune class bitch at me for being a loser and sleeping past the final, i headed back to my car, only to find it scratched to hell along the sides. i tried to go ahead and start it up to leave, but my keys were missing. so i searched around, and found them on the ground. i had apparently dropped them there at some point, or some other equally stupid explanation that makes sense in a dream. further problems though, it had rained, so everything was ruined. my usb thumbdrive had been completely destroyed and rusted over, my keys had all been rusted to the point that they were all crumbly and lame, and my 6 year old "DON'T PANIC" dogtag was spontaneously obliterated by some kind of supernatural force while i was examining said keys. so, of course, i panicked. i fumbled for the actual car key, only to find it had been bent somehow into a right angle AND rusted, and i couldn't get into my car as my alarm beeper wossit had shorted out.
then it started raining. then Things started coming out of the ground. they had baskets, what they kept trying to throw at me. i don't know why. again, it seemed perfectly logical at the time. i eventually found myself at my house, which i knew was my house, but wasn't actually my house. more dream logic. the Things had slowed down, but were still coming. i went upstairs [stairs?! damned dream logic!] only to find that the stairs had been conveniently replaced by a slippery inclined plane near the top which had been painted to look like stairs, which promptly resulted in me falling down the stairs and nearly dying.
as i lay there broken at the bottom of the stairs i could hear the Things outside. they were ringing the doorbell. constantly. they had stopped being scary, and gone straight to being just really really annoying, which i consider to be worse than scary. i bet they were summoned by the runes i failed to use or comprehend. i decided to ignore them, which was easy due to pain, and eventually they got bored and went away. i slowly got up, and decided that hey, maybe i should just go to my computer, things don't go wrong with computers. computers are safe and nice and my friend, they don't do anything bad to me ever.
around then i looked at newsninja, as it's my start page. i looked at it real hard, and noticed something strange. it looked right, but not right. then suddenly i saw it in opera, and it was all scrunched up and falling off the right of the screen. then i looked at it in ie, and found that now it was falling off the right AND the left of the screen. i checked it again in firefox, and it was slowly lurching off the top of the screen, moving as i stared at it.
it was around this time that i woke up screaming. i had to wipe awful crusty bits from my eyes, locate my glasses, and verify right then at 5 am that everything was still working, that no i wasn't going insane, and that yes i can go back to sleep. i can take awful shit happening to me. i can take being followed by shadowy assailants [armed with baskets]. i can take injury and other awful things. but once a design i have deemed "done" starts going wrong for no discernable reason, that is when i lose it. [09.02.04@14:36]
today i learned that our glorious but now fallen trivial-knowledge deity, ken jennings, is an IB grad. i am not surprised by this fact whatsoever. [09.09.04@09:22]
oh bother, it looks like i'm going to actually have to do work today. [09.14.04@08:28]
i'm not quite sure what's wrong with me today. i feel like i'm in a haze. everything feels slowed down, and i'm having a hard time concentrating on . . well . . anything. i feel mildly dizzy, somewhat nauseous, and bored as hell. focusing is difficult to. not like . . concentrating . . but actual focus. i keep staring through things, resulting in a blur. maybe i'm just exhausted. i fell asleep abruptly, some time around ten . . ish . . and then recall nothing until my super neat foobar2k mp3 alarmclock plugin woke me up with the system shock 2 soundtrack. which i believe i will listen to now for lack of something better to do. [09.16.04@08:33]
i'm understandably having trouble staying focused today here at work. too much is going on. lets run down the list:
there's probably more, much more, but i'm too busy caught up in all this. and i should really be getting back to work, anyways. [09.21.04@13:02]
it's painfully old news, but i'm linking to this because i love the image. it's a jpeg, which is a resized screenshot, of people using jpegs, with the caption "Jpeg is a very widely used format". indeed. [09.24.04@08:38]
*sigh* looks like i'm going to be picking up an ipod in the near future. my rio karma has just about given up. i dropped it in my room last night, and the joystick wossit hasn't been the same. it makes me sad, because i really like my karma, it's very good and does everything i want, but alas, poor construction, lack of accessories, and poor buttons have gotten the best of it. the only thing i'm concerned about with the ipod is if it will fit in the happy little change-holder-ish thing under my parking brake, where my karma currently lives. and if it's easy enough to change the volume. but i assume if that's too ridiculous i can just get a remote, seeing as such things are actually fucking available for ipods.
this, unfortunately, means i will probably be heading out to the apple store at international plaza. cause hey, why not cut out the middle-man? and perhaps they can answer my question about the following crazy statement on their website: "Note: The AppleCare Protection Plan cannot be sold to consumers residing in Florida. “Consumers” are persons who use their computers primarily for personal, family, or household purposes". what. no seriously. what. heeey, maybe they can answer these things over the phone . . . [09.24.04@09:32]
i find it incredibly creepy that my ipod turns itself on automatically if i don't have hold turned on and i plug in something to the headphone jack. what the fuck. seriously.
i've overall been happy with my ipod, i like it because it actually has SUPPORT. i like that i can actually go out there and find third party programs that support it, and find accessories, and find cases and stuff. i've been quite annoyed by a few things, though. for starters, software is shit. itunes sucks, ephpod sucks, anapod sucks, winamp transfer stuff sucks [because i don't use winamp], and foobar support is nonexistant. i never thought i'd actually be able to say "wow, that rio music manager really wasn't too bad!", but compared to itunes it's GREAT. you'd just tell it "here, this is my music directory, spider it and spider it every time i load for new stuff. BUT DON'T YOU DARE CHANGE ANYTHING UNLESS I SAY SO", and then you've got your music. want to move stuff? great, it has views, it doesn't have crazy pseudo-hierarchical stuff like itunes. and moving things to my karma was actually LOGICAL, and DIDN'T SCREW WITH FILENAMES.
see, that's really the worst part here. back in the day, before we had newfangled "id3v2", back when i was originally ripping my cd collection to mp3, i didn't save tracknumbers to id3. i saved it to the filename. it worked fine, because whatever hardware or software i was using would be not-retarded enough to look at metadata AND filenames. but itunes? oh no, not itunes! itunes goes solely based on metadata. and once it pulls metadata into it's database, there's no obvious way to refresh the data from files. or at least, there might be, but you'd have to turn on crazy-ass "TRUST APPLE!" mode, where everything works magically and automatically, and itunes casually rapes all your filenames.
that would be roughly the Worst Thing Ever, so i've had to tiptoe around and do things the Hard Way. last night i went through and found all my mp3's that lacked tracknumbers or had other questionable metadata. i used foobar and ye olde cddb^W"freedb" to fix them. now, tonight, i get to do horrible shit. first i have to refresh their itunes metadata. how do i get to do this? why, remove them one album at a time and reset! because i really can't be bothered, i may just nuke my entire itunes DB and have it respider all of d:mp3, but i'm not sure yet. after that, i have to remove them from my ipod and re-add them, as manually editing one tracknumber at a time is INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS, and because i can't seem to find the "AUTOUPDATE MY FUCKING METADATA, BITCH" key. all this to get my albums to play in order.
i just have to keep telling myself that it'll be better in the long-run. oh, it will be, really. its just all these quirks i have to get used to. in retrospect, i really should've had proper metadata ages ago, i should've retagged my entire mp3 collection aeons ago, i should've done all this stuff right the first time, but shit, apple. why can't your hardware and software work like everyone elses? why can't it degrade gracefully? why can't it be not-retarded, and fall back to being filename based? or hell, just not rewrite all my goddamn filenames when i move them to your device? oh well. it gives me something to do. [09.27.04@10:09]
welcome to the dawn of a new age. what seems like aeons ago, i learned about the glory of site designs which implemented the css elements overflow:auto or overflow:scroll. they let you have divs [or any block container, really] with scrollbars. i made a few designs with it, and it was good, but shortly thereafter i made the switch to phoenix, now firefox. the problem? in gecko based browsers, you can't use the mousewheel to scroll such elements. to scroll you actually have to use the scrollbar.
this, of course, felt like going back to the dark ages. it would suck if this was widespread, but people barely use any of css, let alone esoteric things like overriding overflow. they'd probably rather use an iframe or something for such features. hell, i know i have in the past.
so anyways, since i had control over it, i just stopped changing overflow. it was fun, and it was disappointing that i'd have to shelve a great feature because of lack of support in gecko, but alas, you can't have everything. to date, this has been the only thing i've had to shelve due to lack of moz support, as opposed to the HUNDREDS of things i've had to shelve due to lack of ie support.
well, after three years of bitching about it, and arguing about arcane things like mouse scrolling paradigms, the moz crew have FINALLY RESOLVED IT. good news: it's finally fucking fixed. bad news: it won't make it into firefox 1.0 without extensive beating. it's just too last-minute.
can't have everything . . . [09.29.04@07:51]