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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ My daughter and I went to see Monsters, Inc. this afternoon. We agreed with the critics that it's worth seeing. As a nerd, I just sat there with my mind boggling as I watched every individual strand of blue and green fur on the protagonist monster individually wave and ripple with each motion. Can you say "computing power?" I knew that you could. But the flick is very cute, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. On a scale of ten, with Shrek being as close to a ten as I've seen, I'd give this a nine. Well worth my matinee dollars. |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ So I wondered why changing the styles in my Cascading Style Sheet no longer had any visible effect on the way my page displayed. And then, looking at the bare-nekkid HTML source code, I saw that one of the various editors I had used on this page (I muck about with way too much stuf) had saved a snapshot of my styles right in my main page, index.html, as "Inline Styles" a la Front Page. Man! Serves me right, I spoze, for paddling about in unfamiliar waters. So I deleted the inline styles and reinserted a link to my style sheet, and now I can once again happily mess things up globally, rather than page by page. I decided to try going back to a sans serif font, because they typically render better on monitors, as opposed to paper, on which serif fonts are usually more readable. I'm still trying to make the page look decent in various browsers, and also under Linux, with its (to my eye) appalling font rendering. So we'll see how I like this. Any comments are welcome, as always. |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ This day was spent expelling my intestines from my body in ways inappropriate for discussion in polite company. In summary, let me make the personal observation that some germs are very bad. |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Tummy much better today. I went to the grocery store and looked for some yogurt with live and active cultures in it (some germs are good). Slim pickings, but I bought something that seemed OK. And speaking of slim, may I recommend to you the Pete Moore 24-hour Weight Loss Regimen? Not interested? Hm. Sure, it's got some side effects, but you can't argue with the numbers. So my main concern this morning is simple... How long until I can trust my tummy to handle coffee? I'm rehydrating my tissues with Gatorade (which after all these years still tastes kind of like a bucket of warm spit). I remember once years ago, on a road trip with the band, I took some NoDoze to keep me awake during a late-night portion of the driving chores. Not only did it not give me the esthetic pleasure that coffee would have, not only did it leave a nasty medicine taste in my mouth, but it appeared that the only way it kept me awake was by making me very nauseated. Feh! If I recall, I was sort of shamed into taking it, by the fact that the other band members would sneer at me if I requested too many pit stops when we traveled. This had the primary effect of making me curtail my coffee drinking (and indeed all liquid refreshment), and the secondary effect of causing me to seek caffeine in all the wrong places. Ah well... those days are gone. So this morning I sit at my desk in a foggy stupor and count the moments until I can once again safely imbibe that beverage of the gods... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Today was kind of nice, a sort of throwback to a simpler era. A client called me up and said her computer wouldn't turn on (and yes, I have actually seen them not plugged in before, but not this time). I asked her if it was plugged into a power strip, and if so, whether anything else plugged into the same strip was working properly. Yes, and yes. So I had her plug it into a totally different outlet anyway, just to be sure. No juice. I asked her if she got any lights or fan noises at all when she pushed the power button. Nope, zilch. So I popped over, expecting to diagnose a dead power supply in this ~3-year-old clone, and when I got there I ran through the same basic things that I'd had her do. Then I opened the box and made sure that the connections inside were all tight, especially the power supply-to-motherboard connection. Of course, everything was fine. So I took the box back to the north pole with me, and swapped in a power supply from a working PC. Bingo. All over but the shouting. Actually the billing. Then came the shouting. So why even bring this up? Who cares if I successfully diagnosed a bad power supply? Well... it's just that for a really long time now, every problem I've run across has just gotten |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Ever read User Friendly? It's a comic strip about an internet service provider. Their cartoon for September 23 has an interesting angle on the Borg... I can't decide if it makes me want to laugh or cry. Remember the internet phenomenon of a few months back about "All your base are belong to us"? I think, after reading about the revised agreement between the DoJ and the Borg, that the Beast From Redmond is justifiably able now to sing that song and mean it. Things have gone pretty much the way I expected them to go from the beginning of the legal action. Microsoft loses every battle, but wins the war. C'mon, brave little penguin! And speaking of penguins, I've been mucking about with RedmondLinux on my work PC, and I've actually been very encouraged. I REALLY wish that Linux would make it possible to just plain LOG IN to a Windows or Netware network in a DOS/WIN-like manner, with a single login screen that calls a login script from the server, makes shares and printers available, and so on. Maybe that actually exists, and my ignorance is still too beau coup. But in any event, RL's Network Browser sees my Windows NT network, and lets me connect manually to all the shared folders. Its version of the Add Printer Wizard lets me browse the NT network for shared printers, and install them easily. These things must apparently be done while logged in as "root". I logged in that way, and was able to connect to all the cool stuf. I was also able to install Opera 5 and OpenOffice 6 (beta), and open Word and Excel documents that I keep in a network folder. I have to say, this is Extremely Kewl! Installing new programs still has a ways to go for ease of use, but it's reasonably doable. For instance, to install Opera, I clicked on the RPM file, which opened up RL's Package Manager program. This definitely needs a bit of work, but after I figured out that by UNchecking the "Check dependencies" box, the install would run properly, it installed OK. When I say "installed" I don't mean that it put an icon for the program on the desktop, toolbar, or menu. I had to find the program directory and copy the appropriate gizmo myself. And it's still counter-intuitive that some program files will run when you click on them in an Explorer-type window, but other program files will only run if you open a console (command prompt) and CD to the appropriate directory, and then manually type in the (case-sensitive) command name. Netscape 6 is a case in point here. And I don't know the officially approved way to extract files from a TAR.GZ archive to install a program. The KDE desktop environment's Explorer clone, "Konqueror," lets you treat those files kind of as if they were directories, in that you can go into one and see what's in it, but you can't click on something to run it from there. You can, however, select all the files there and copy them into a temporary folder that you create yourself, and then run the installation from there. That's what I did for OpenOffice. Version 6, BTW, is MUCH better that 5, with its ugly and intrusive interface. So at the moment I have a basic RedmondLinux installation, with access to NT network files and printers, plus the Opera browser (yay), OpenOffice, and Netscape. Oh yeah, the only reason I installed Netscape was because when I tried to install the VMWare Windows emulator, it failed to install, and told me that it couldn't find Netscape. Since I installed Netscape, I haven't yet retried the VMWare install. If it works, maybe I'll be able to use Outlook (boo) to get email from my Exchange server. I'll let you know. I have to say, I was premature in calling RL underpowered. Its suite comes more or less "take it or leave it," with almost no options at install time. But it's a reasonable selection of stuf. They definitely should include Opera, OpenOffice, and some kind of Windows emulator in the basic install, though, if they want to pick up Windows users. But all in all, I'm enjoying this. I've never made so much progress with any distro, and I readily admit that it's been entirely because of improvements in the install routines, rather than any greater smarts on my part. But hey... it's the result that counts, right? I'm a very knowledgeable Windows user, and moving to Linux is still not that easy for me. But keep trying, penguin. I WANT this to work! |
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Top of Page Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ No entry. |
and 
as I delved into it. I still shudder when I remember that recent server rebuild! It was just so pleasant to stumble across a problem that actually was what it seemed to be, and was brain-dead simple to fix. It reminds me that despite much evidence to the contrary, sometimes things actually are what they seem to be. Good thing to keep in mind.