A couple of months ago, a Virginia judge ruled in favor of 11 Episcopal parishes that wanted to break away from the Diocese of Virginia. The churches wanted to leave the Episcopal Church and become part of the “Anglican District of Virginia”, a part of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a mission of the (Anglican) Church of Nigeria. At that time, the judge ruled that Virginia’s “Division Statute” (Virginia Code § 57-9) did apply to those church’s efforts efforts to keep their property.
This morning, the judge issued a further ruling which upheld the constitutionality of the statute. Here’s a (delicious) excerpt from the ruling:
this Court finds their arguments unpersuasive, not least because their arguments are predicated in no small measure on a characterization of this Court’s April 3rd opinion that bears only a passing resemblance to the opinion itself.
Hey – remember that really cool into that HBO used back in the early 80s? The one that flew over the city and eventually ran into the glowing “starburst” HBO logo?
Did you know that the intro video took over three months to film, and was done almost completely with models?
Check out this short “Making Of” documentary from YouTube’ it’s really worth the 10 minutes!
George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his “Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV” routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.
“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
As you probably know, Firefox 3.0 was released this week. The good news about the upgarde is that the new version rocks: Firefox 3 has a slew of new features, performance enhancements, and is even less of a memory hog than precious versions! The bad news about the upgrade is that it breaks thousands of extensions (plug-ins that add functionality to Firefox, tweak the interface, and\or overcome some of Firefox’s annoyances).
But just because Firefox 3 says that an particular extension is “not compatible with Firefox 3”, that doesn’t mean it won’t work. In fact, many 2.x extensions will work just fine under Firefox 3 – you just need to turn off Firefox’s compatibility check:
1) Type “about”config” (without the quotes) into Firefox’s address bar. You will then see a screen warning you not to muck about with the settings; click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to continue.
2) Right-click in the list of preferences and choose New > Boolean. In the “Preference Name” box, type the words “extensions.checkCompatibility” (again, without the quotes) and click “OK”. In the “Enter Boolean Value” box, select FALSE.
3) Close all Firefox windows and restart the browser.
You will now be able to install any extension in Firefox 3 (or, if you upgraded from Firefox 2.x, you may activate any previous extensions that were disabled by the 3.0 upgrade).
Over the years, people have levelled thousands of complaints against Microsoft Outlook. To Microsoft’s credit, they have listened to their customers, slowly but surely fixing bugs and interface annoyances over the years. However, a few of these “annoyances” remain, and none is more annoying to some people than the “Business Fax” number being listed in the Outlook Address Book.
Here’s the issue in a nutshell: if you open a new email in Outlook and click the “To:”, “CC:” or “BCC:” buttons on the email, you’ll be presented with a list of email addresses and “Business Fax” numbers from the selected Address Book.
For most people, these “Business Fax” numbers just get in the way. If they’re sending out a mass email, they can’t just select all the addresses in the list, as sending an email to a Business Fax address makes Outlook (and\or Exchange) throw a hissy fit. And it’s easily to accidentally click on “Bob Smith (Business Fax)” instead of “Bob Smith (Email)” and end up sending Bob… nothing.
You might ask why Business Fax numbers even appear in the Outlook Address Book in the first place. That’s because many companies have fax servers – a computer with one or more fax modems installed. Instead of walking across an office to a fax machine, you can simply send a fax over your local network to a fax server, which then sends it out. Microsoft Exchange (and other third-party software programs) have integrated fax servers with Outlook, so if your company has Exchange and a fax server, you can easily fax someone simply by creating a new email, addressing it to a “Business Fax” address, attaching a Word or Excel document (if desired) and sending it on to Exchange, which then forwards it on to the fax server. It’s quite handy, actually.
But for people that don’t have a fax server, it’s a pain to have to sift through fax number when sending an email. Thankfully, though, there’s a simple workaround: just put a letter (any letter, although I use “F”) in front of any “Business Fax” number entries (e.g. change Bob Smith Enterprise’s “Business Fax” entry from “704-555-1212” to “F704-555-1212”).
This will prevent the “Business Fax” numbers from appearing in the Address Book, but you will still be able to view the numbers in Outlook’s “Business Card” view (and, as you might guess, you can also see the information by opening the Contact).
The first episode of the American remake of Life On Mars has leaked to the Internet… and it sucks, but not for the reasons you might expect.
But first… a brief recap from Wikipedia: “Life On Mars tells the story of DCI Sam Tyler of the Greater Manchester Police, who, after being hit by a car in 2006, finds himself in the year 1973. There, he works for Manchester and Salford Police CID as a DI under DCI Gene Hunt. Over the course of the series, Tyler faces various culture clashes, most frequently regarding the differences between his modern approach to policing and the more traditional methods of his colleagues. Mixing the genres of science fiction and police procedural, the series centres around the ambiguity concerning Tyler’s predicament: it is unclear whether he is insane, in a coma, or if he really has travelled back in time”.
The original British series was incredible television, perhaps my favorite TV show of all time. My stomach turned when I heard that ABC was interested in an American remake of the show. I was conflicted: on the one hand, I didn’t want my favorite TV show “ruined” by a crappy American remake; on the other hand, I was happy that millions of people might be exposed to the awesomeness of the Life On Mars story.
So when the first episode leaked online a few days ago, I eagerly downloaded it… only to have major mixed feelings about the U.S. version of the show.
Have you ever been to Disney World? EPCOT? Disneyland? Disney does an incredible job at copying things, down to the seemingly last tiny detail. Many people have gone to the World Showcase at EPCOT and, in the heat of the Florida sun, almost convinced themselves that they’re really in England or Mexico or Japan. But yet, they’re something just “off” about the whole thing. Like Uncanny Valley, there’s just something that’s not quite right about the World Showcase. Even though most people could almost convince themselves that they’re in England… something isn’t quite right. It’s not the obvious stuff – the heat, the crowds of people speaking in American accents. There’s just an indefinable something that lets you know you’re looking at a forgery – a well made forgery, mind you – instead of the “real deal”.
And that’s exactly what the American Life On Mars is like. It’s a Disney-fied version of the original series. Although I have several specific complaints about the American version (which I’ll get to in a minute), there’s just something about the new version that simply doesn’t add up.
Worst CGI ever?
I guess my first specific complaint is about the CGI cityscapes. Look at the picture above… is it not 100% completely obvious that this person is standing in front of a green screen? The halination – the halo that appears around “real” people when they’re inserted into a digital landscape – is simply awful. It looks so bad, in fact, that it completely pulls you out of the story. There’s nothing worse than being completely immersed in a show, only to be jarred back into reality by awful CGI.
The Life of Wylie blog has this great post about the second season of Ashes to Ashes. The post is a summary of a “BBC Writersroom” talk held at the Soho Theatre in London on April 4th, 2008. The two main writers at the talk were Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham, creators of Ashes to Ashes.
There aren’t a lot of spoilers in the write-up, just a lot of talk about the “overall feel” of series 2 of the show (hint: it only gets darker). They also state that they envision three series for the show in total (and, given their slow production schedule, that means that the show might finish up in 2010).
There’s a lot of great stuff in the post – any Ashes fan should check it out!
For years, the Libertarian Party has argued that the traditional “Left vs. Right” argument in politics is meaningless. And they have a point. One can be a “right winger”, but that doesn’t take into account that there also an “authoritarian\libertarian” element to your beliefs. George W. Bush, for example, could be a right winger that leans to the authoritarian side, while Ron Paul would be a right winger that leans (heavily) libertarian. On the other hand, traditional communists would fall on the “left wing, authoritarian” side, while a “libertarian socialist” like Noam Chomsky would fall under the “left wing, libertarian” definition.
I’ve taken the “Political Compass” quiz in the past, and I recently took it again. Here are my results:
Think you’d be interested in finding out where you fall on the compass scale? Click here to go to the main site (or click here to go directly to the quiz). If you have a few minutes to spare, you should take the quiz… I think you might be surprised at where you fall on the compass!
Are you one of those people that always seems to download files to his or her desktop? If so, are you also one of those people that lets files and folders build up on the desktop, such that on a bad day you have 100 icons cluttering your desktop?
If so, you might be interested in a free program called Desktop Teleporter. You basically install this little app and define a set of file types and destination directories for those files. Desktop Teleporter then sits in the background and periodically moves any matching files to the destination you set during setup. For example, you could set all .JPG files to be moved to your “My PIctures” folder, and Desktop Teleporter would move all pictures saved on your desktop to the “My Pictures” folder every few minutes or so.
Desktop Teleporter is free and works with most flavors of Windows.
Think you’d be interested in finding out where you fall on the compass scale? Click 