Year: 2008

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Wonky Firefox Encoding

Ever since upgrading to Firefox 3.0 back in June of this year, I’ve had a bizarre problem with the browser. On around 10% of the sites I’d visit, the headline would be gibberish, as if the page had been encoded incorrectly. Here’s an example:

As you can see from the screencap, only the headline was affected. The rest of the text looked fine. Interestingly, if I highlighted the “gibberish text” and right-clicked on it, the proper text would displayed in the context menu (i.e. “Search Google for…”).

I troubleshot the issue as thoroughly as I could. I played with the character encodings and I made sure that the server was passing the page as TEXT/HTML and not TEXT/PLAIN. I disabled my Kaspersky Antivirus on the off chance that it was somehow messing with Firefox. I loaded up the page in Firefox’s “safe mode”. I tried creating a new Firefox profile. I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox (including deleting any leftover files and folders, in addition to checking the “Remove my Firefox personal data and customizations” option). But nothing seemed to work.

Thankfully, a kind soul over at MozillaZine’s Firefox Support forums pointed me in the direction of my installed fonts. Some program I used installed a copy of the Helvetica font, and that was rendering the page all screwy. Once I opened the Fonts folder in Windows Explorer and moved HELV.TTF to the desktop, the page immediately began rendering correctly. Hooray!

I hadn’t thought about fonts, since only Firefox was displaying this behavior. Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome all worked without complaint on my system, and the font didn’t present a problem in Firefox 2.x.

So if you have an issue where only one part of your Firefox pages are wonky… look to the fonts!

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Scottish Pubs: No Drugs For You!

Britain’s march towards INGSOC continues with news that certain Scottish pubs have started testing patrons for drugs as they walk through the door.

Scottish police will use a device called an “Itemiser” to swab the hands of patrons as they enter a pub. The machine will then give a simple, color-coded response: green (no drugs found), yellow (possible drug contamination) and red (definite drug contamination). Patrons with a green result will be welcomed into the pub. Patrons with a yellow result will be given a “drug information pack” and sent away. Patrons with a red result “may be searched by police”, and possibly arrested if drugs are found. Although the test is “completely voluntary”, people that refuse the test will not be admitted inside the pub.

The “Itemizer” has been in limited use in England thus far, and opponents have complained that the device may give false positives if people touch a surface a drug user\dealer has touched previously.

Sadly, few have complained about the attack on civil liberties that such a machine represents.

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Dreaming in Color?

This is an interesting story. It seems that Scottish researchers at the University of Dundee have discovered that how you dream is influenced by the type of media you’re exposed to.

People 55 and over – who were exposed to a great deal of black & white movies and television – tend to dream in monochrome around 25% of the time, while people 25 and under almost always dream in color. Even more interesting is that, according to Eva Murzyn, a psychology student who carried out the study, is that “before the advent of black and white television, all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color”. Studies carried out from 1915 through the 1950s suggested that overwhelming majority of dreams were in black and white. This did not change until the 1960s, when color films became standard and color TV started creeping in to home. By that point, later results suggested “that up to 83-percent of dreams contain some color”.

Murzyn feels that something happens between the ages of 3 and 10 that affects the way we dream, and that whatever media we are exposed to during this time plays heavily into it. I wonder what it will be like for kids of the future that are exposed to 3D HDTV? Engadget thinks that they’ll “wind up dreaming in heavily-compressed SD stretched to the wrong aspect ratio, buffering endlessly before failing out due to a missing plugin”.

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WSCC Rocks!

For years, I’ve loved the freeware utilities put out by SysInternals and Nirsoft. If you have a problem – especially an obscure one – and SysInternals or Nirsoft make a utility that addresses the issue… it’s the only way to go to fix it. Unfortunately, most of their products are standalone command-line apps, and it’s difficult to grab them all and throw them on a flash drive. Or at least it was. The freeware app Windows System Control Center gives them all a nice UI to navigate, so each tool is only a couple of mouse clicks away:

Remember WSCC is only a UI – you’ll still have to download the actual programs from SysInternals and Nirsoft.

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The Dunwoody Tornado

I remember the night of April 8, 1998 well. I was living in Dunwoody, Georgia at the time. My ex-girlfriend was (if I’m not mistaken) in New Orleans, at a “group meeting” for her job. Since New Orleans is an hour behind Atlanta, and since her boss had treated everyone to a fancy dinner that night, it wasn’t especially unusual that she called me a few minutes before midnight to tell me about her day.

I remember the weather being bizarre that night. It was raining like I’d never seen before, there was so much lightning that it almost seemed like daytime, and it was windy… so windy, in fact, that the rain was falling sideways! The whole thing was so unusual that when my ex called I went out on the covered porch by the bedroom to describe it for her. We then continued talking for a half hour or so as I sat on the porch, watching leaves and small branches fly every which way. I remember bringing up the weather several more times in our conversation.

Although the weather was bad, I didn’t think anything of it… until I turned on the TV the next morning to catch the headlines before leaving for work. Not more than two miles away from me, this happened:

(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)

It’s now known as the “1998 Dunwoody tornado”, and it was so bad that it got its own Wikipedia page several years after the fact. The tornado itself wasn’t especially powerful, but when it hit Dunwoody it hit its greatest strength (an F2 on the Fujita Scale) and expanded to 800 yards across. Yes, the tornado was as wide as eight football fields!

I drove through the area pictured above the next day, and I know people often use the phrase “it looked like a bomb went off”, but in this case, it really did look like a nuclear bomb had gone off. Tress were ripped out of the ground and thrown hundreds of feet. Many houses were simply gone, and some of them were absolutely, completely gone. As in, there was only a concrete foundation left, and the yards where those houses once stood were completely empty of any debris. Not a single 2×4 or sheet of siding was seen anywhere.

It was surreal. It was depressing. I couldn’t believe that it’d happened.

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God Bless Texas!

I’ll make no apologies for it: I love to eat, and I love to eat junk food. Now, I don’t eat Twinkies every day of my life, and although my dinners are typically heavy on the animal protein, I usually at least try to throw a couple of vegetables in the mix. But when it comes time to eat crap – like, I dunno… at a state fair or something – I can throw down like there’s no tomorrow.

The 2008 Texas State Fair is over now, but thanks to a foodie website I was able to pull up the fair’s menu. And my God… it almost makes me quiver just reading it! Here are some of the highlights:

Chicken Fried Bacon – Thick and peppery Farm Pac® bacon is seasoned, double-dipped in a special batter and breading and deep-fried. Served with a creamy side of ranch or honey mustard sauce.   Served at  N30 located on Nimitz at MLK. Winner of Best Taste in the Big Tex Choice Awards competition.

Fried Banana Split – A mixture of banana and honey peanut butter is rolled in balls, battered and deep-fried and topped with assorted, delicious fixings, including powdered sugar, caramel and chocolate syrups, chopped peanuts, whipped cream and banana split flavored ice cream bites then fittingly crowned with the traditional cherry.  Served at the Auto Grill inside the Automobile Building. Winner of Most Creative in the Big Tex Choice Awards competition.

Texas Fried Jelly Belly Beans – Jelly Belly Beans are rolled in funnel cake batter and fried to a crunch.  People can share the treat with friends and try to guess the flavors before biting down.  Enjoy at the Granny’s Funnel Cake stand C6 at the south side of the Coliseum and at Rico’s Burgers, stand C7, behind Gateway Pavilion. Finalist in the Big Tex Choice Awards competition.

Continue reading “God Bless Texas!”

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Canadian Hottie!

This is Nazneen Contractor, a Canadian actress currently appearing on The Border, a CBC (Canadian) knockoff of Spooks or 24:

Sadly, this picture cannot convey her best asset: her sexy voice. If you ever get a chance to watch The Border, you should really check it out, if only to see Nazneen!

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Random TV News

Here’s a bunch of random stories from the world of TV land:

– Fox has cancelled King of the Hill. Well, not “cancelled” so much as “will not renew”. This isn’t exactly surprising, since the show’s creators have moved on to other things – Mike Judge is doing a new series for ABC and Greg Daniels went on to produce The Office for NBC.

– For some reason, Fox has renewed American Dad. The show is OK, but I find the premise wearing thin.

– Jon Hamm of Mad Men is in talks to play Liz Lemon’s boyfriend in several episodes of 30 Rock.

– It might be the end for Pushing Daisies. Word on the street is that ABC has told the show’s producers to treat episode 13 as the “series finale” just in case the show does not get the order for the “back nine” episodes. Actually, the episode is supposed to work “either way” – as a series finale or as a springboard for the final nine episodes – so the network is covered in either case. This is both good and bad news. “Bad” because it looks like Daisies won’t be around next year; “Good” because it appears that the show, at the very least, won’t be unceremoniously yanked off the air.