Category: Uncategorized

I’m quickly approaching the parity point on this, but one more. We have cats. Here are pictures on those cats.

Classifying this as Made Me Laugh is actually telling, since this photoshopped image actually does make me laugh when I see it, and I made the damn thing. I’m such a nerd.

So, I’m not an intentional Ludite, but sometimes I’m very, very slow on the uptake. I think it might have something to do with controlled substances in my past, but I don’t like that line of thinking.

Anyway, I finally signed up for a Flickr account. I really don’t have a reason to do so, but it seemed like fun. My first set is up, and oddly enough, I’m advertising for someone else.

…

I don’t know what’s wrong with my thought process on this one, but, enjoy the pictures.

So, J– and I have been looking for a house for about a month now. We’ve learned a few things:

• Basements in this area effin’ blow. Whatever crap some ice flow left in this hole thousands of years ago is begging for the next ice age, just to remove the apparent seventeen miles of clay that comprise the majority of the land.
• Apparently you can repair a foundation/basement that is leaning into the house at roughly a ten-degree angle with some steel rods, steel plates, and enough concrete to anchor a damn bridge.
• Real estate agents (except ours) are a bunch of liars.
• “For sale” on a sign doesn’t actually mean the house is for sale.
• Housing prices are a joke in Ann Arbor. Here’s a for instance. I had friends in Chicago who bought a 1,500 square foot condo in Wrigleyville (the area right around the stadium). They paid ~$300,000. For $40,000 less, you can buy a piece of shit house on Seventh, which, last I checked, wasn’t nearly as fun as Chicago. (see bullet one about basements.)
• Way too many people in this town think pink is a good color. Without exaggeration, we have toured upwards of six homes where one or more rooms had pink as… well, saying it’s a dominate color is an insult to all those colors (like white) that really want to dominate, but just can’t get it together.
• Speaking of paint, we have now seen five shades of green that do not exist in nature, all of them applied to the walls of someone’s bedroom. Even mirrors would be an improvement for those rooms.
• Fuel oil leaking at a rate of one ounce a day will completely saturate a house with its smell within a week.
• No one in this town understands the concept of grading the dirt around the foundation away from said foundation. (see previous two bullets about basements.)
• And tonight’s final lesson: Railroad tracks != good neighbors.

Today almost broke me… we lost the house we wanted. But, we couldn’t just lose it by finding out it was off the market. Oh no. We had to have our agent draw up the papers, set up a time to meet him at the house in question, have him be late (again), only to then tell us that some other dumbass agent had offered that morning, but hadn’t updated the listing. While we’re standing in the driveway of what we’d though up until that moment was going to be our house. Yeah, nice.

I could only hope to do something like this. Some guy (based on the URL, I assume his name is Paul Rademacher), wrote a scraper that maps all the listing from Craiglist with Google Maps. The results are freakin’ amazing.

Link

Crap, crap, CRAP!

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie.

That’s from the guy who was Adams’ biographer. Damn it, damn it, damn it yet again. And now, like the second and third Matrix movies, I have to go drop $8+ to go see something that not only can’t live up to expectations (which I was prepared for), but something that a qualified person hated. HATED.

Oh, and quotes like this aren’t helping either:

There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create.

But, as someone pointed out, keep in mind the most useful thing in the Guide: Don’t Panic. Yes, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard about this situation yet.

[Via Slashdot]

If you visit this page via a browser, you’ll see a new design today. It’s not huge, just some color tweaks in the CSS and a banner image instead of the default MT stuff. Tweaking may continue, or I could just forget about it for another few months. I’m not designer, so bumping content around with the CSS or making graphics that need to be positioned in pixel-perfect fashion just isn’t going to happen for a while.

But, this whole thing started as a learning experience and that’s what I’m doing. Experiencing a learning… erm.. experience. If I’m internalizing any of this has yet to be seen.

Oh, if you find something that’s busted, displaying improperly, or just plain bad, let me know.

If you’ve ever had to generate a color scheme (say for a website) but didn’t go it professionally, the availability of color wheel resources on the web is pretty depressing. Lots of people want to teach you about color, which isn’t bad, but few enable you to do real color design, such as generating a tetrad color scheme. You can buy an app for it, but I don’t want to spend $40 for something I do once a year.

But, this morning as I fuddle with this site, I finally found the motherlode; [ws] Color Scheme Generator. This is an awesome tool: triads, tetrads, color blindness simulator. A very robust tool, online. Check it out.

I think the DNS attack that’s hitting the East coast is spreading to AA. My connection has been flaky all night.

When can we get some vigilante justice for the fools that are poisoning the DNS servers? Idiot spammers.

Side note: I know that “flaky” spell-checks properly, but shouldn’t it really be “flakey”? I may have missed that day of class.

UPDATE There is a fix if you know how to edit your DNS server. Change your primary DNS to 4.1.1.1 and your alternate to 4.2.2.2 (solution from Broadbandreports uberforums)

Awesome article about buying a budget (read: under $400) LCD, with gaming in mind. The NEC LCD1770NX came out on top.

Budget LCD Roundup