I'm sorry I'm showing such a complete lack of remorse
George’s friend Jack is a master of understatement:
On January 28, 1986 a retired optometrist named Jack Moss captured the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster on his Betamax camcorder. He never showed it to anyone, but told his pastor, Marc Wessels, about it shortly before he died from cancer in December. Wessels, who is also the executive director of the Space Exploration Archive, found the tape and added it to the Archive.
Posted in Uncategorized.
– February 8, 2010
Well, we lost one of our cats last night. Not the oldest, who continues to putter around the house smacking other cats silly, but Zoey. Technically I think Chandra got her before she ever met me, but it was close. Chandra always describes her as my little girl, at any rate. I first saw her as a kitten, and she definitely grew up with me. In grad school she used to sit on my lap while I worked on the computer, until her habit of licking my hand got out of control. She loved the things cats love (chasing stuff, including balls, string and Nikki, not to mention chocolate cake), and hated the things cats hate (vacuum cleaners, being chased by other cats, clean carpet). She will be missed, but at least our rugs are now safe.
Bye, Zoey.
Posted in Uncategorized.
– February 8, 2010
Paul Krugman had as good a summary as any on what’s wrong with the Senate:
What’s going on? The Senate has rules based on the idea that it was a chamber of gentlemen who would find ways to work together. But now, 41 Senators belong to a party that has no interest in a working government, no desire to work with the majority in good faith.
They desperately need to change the rules in the Senate to deal with this new reality. Sadly, I fear that members of the Senate are too wrapped up in themselves and their traditions to do it, and the pain it causes (except maybe in the case of a few high-profile efforts like health care) is too ill-defined for voters to pick up on the issues.
Posted in Politics.
– February 5, 2010
That didn’t take long:
In other words, it took Scott Brown a total of 10 minutes before embarrassing himself, repeating a blatant falsehood, and sounding like just another confused Republican who doesn’t understand the economy.
Though to be fair, this is nowhere near as embarrassing as things I had to put up with in Georgia, so by those standards. Scott’s a piker.
Posted in Politics.
– February 5, 2010
No one other than Chandra has asked me, but for whatever it’s worth here are my thoughts on the iPad.
First, it looks nifty and if money were no object I would most definitely grab one just to keep next to the loveseat to look stuff up on the web, tweak my NetFlix queue and check IMDB when we have those “where have we seen that person” moments. I also suspect that Bejeweled is going to rock on that thing.
Unfortunately, money is a problem, so I have to consider what we would do with it. I don’t think we can justify a web-browsing gamey toy when we have laptops that do that and much more. I think for us to justify an iPad we need to be able to do two things that I’m not sure are possible yet. We need to be able to print, and we need to be able to mount a fileshare. As far as I can tell you can’t do either of those, though I have seen some rumblings about those features maybe coming.
Finally, there’s the Flash thing. As an iPhone user this is something that I run into constantly, and while it can be annoying to see the little blue lego it’s never been a game-ender*. When that happens I either move on to something else, or I mark the page to check out later on another computer. After all, while there is a ton of stuff on the web rendered with Flash, it’s not like any of it is really critical. So as a user I’m perfectly happy without Flash. However, as a developer there are times when I need to do something zazzier than what is (easily) possible with HTML + Javascript + CSS, and I do have some concern about that. For example, we recently submitted a grant application part of which involves creating robust graphical applications on the web. My assumption has been that we would build those in Flash, but if we begin to see less than ubiquity in that platform we’ll have to re-evaluate what technologies to use (and I have no doubt we’ll run straight into the immovable object that is IE).
* Incidentally, the iPhone/iPad doesn’t do java applets either, and I haven’t heard a peep about that.
Posted in Tech.
– January 31, 2010
I took advantage of a special from YourFonts this past weekend to make a font of my own handwriting, which I am not using for posts where I feel a special human touch is required. Unfortunately, while I knew browser support for this might be iffy, I wasn’t expecting such extremes. It works great in Firefox and Safari, especially on the Mac. Unfortunately, on Windows even where browsers support it the font rendering is kind of yucky (that is, unless you cheat and use Safari with its imported rendering style). At least in my Parallels VM, with anti-aliasing turned on the letters look anorexic, and with it turned off they look cuh-rappy. Oh, well.
Posted in Uncategorized.
– January 28, 2010
Dear Fidelity National Title Insurance:
While dealing with an annoyed customer may not be the most pleasant thing you have to do, there are better ways to deal with it than putting them on hold so you can walk away. That’s a really good way to go from having an annoyed customer to an annoyed customer expressing his frustration on the internet. Do you really want Google responding to “Fidelity National Title Insurance Company” with “crappy customer service”?
Thanks for your time,
Jason
Posted in Uncategorized.
– January 28, 2010
Posted in Uncategorized.
– January 25, 2010
Heh.:
Little Johnny Congressman (D) was sitting in class one day. All of a sudden, he needed to go to the bathroom. He yelled out, “Miss Jones, I need to go pee!” The teacher replied, “Johnny, that is NOT the proper word to use in this situation. The proper word is ‘urinate.’ Use the word ‘urinate’ in a sentence correctly, and I will let you go.” Little Johnny thought for a bit, then said, “If a Republican wanted to urinate on me, I would let him because I have no self-respect.”
Posted in Uncategorized.
– January 23, 2010
