Drinking whiskey clear!
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One of the upsides of Firefox is that it has a built-in spell-checker, so when you type up a post on a message board (or in WordPress!), you get the same red squiggly line under misspelled words like you do in Microsoft Word.
One of the downsides of Firefox is that the spell-checker is… quirky:
Yep, it’s telling me that “brain” is misspelled, and offers no suggestions on how to spell it “correctly”.
Slap Upside the Head is a Canadian website dedicated to ending anti-gay bigotry in the nation of our neighbors to the north. The other day, I was updating the banners on this site, and did a Google search for “Anglican”. A couple of Slap’s cartoons came up, and for some reason I found them amusing:
With the Super Bowl only days away, I’ve been far too excited to write. But not so excited that I couldn’t bookmark a bunch of interesting stuff to share with you. So… let’s get started:
– Mohan Srivastava is a Canadian “geological statistician”. Basically, mining companies go to some location and take hundreds of soil samples, and Srivastava crunches the numbers to see what’s in the ground there. Anyway, like a lot of people, Srivastava always thought that scratch-off lotto tickets were a scam… until one day, when he found a ticket in a pile of stuff on his desk. It had been given to him by a co-worker as a gag gift, but Srivastava decided to play it anyway. He won $3 (Canadian dollars, even) and went to the nearest gas station to redeem it. On the walk back to the office, he had an epiphany: what if he could use his statistical mojo to determine winning lottery tickets? Come to find out, it was amazingly easy. Read the whole article at Wired.com… it really is damn interesting!
– If it were up to her, Baroness Floella Benjamin would ban TVs in childrens’ bedrooms. Ho-hum… more of the British nanny state if you want to read it.
– Maybe those obese British kids should exercise? Perhaps they might want to avoid swimming off the coast of Florida, where 100,000 sharks assembled.
– On this date in 1690, the government of the Massachusetts Colony issued the first paper money in America.
– 1973 marked the 50th anniversary of Yankee Stadium, so the team sent a letter out to former players and staff, asking them to share their most memorable moments in the ballpark. Slugger Mickey Mantle’s memories… probably weren’t what they had in mind. NSFW WARNING: Although the linked article just shows a scan of Mantle’s letter, Mantle’s written response is very lewd. So, no graphic images or anything, but you’ve been warned all the same.
– So, apparently, Verizon iPhone users can get a 450 minute plan for $40/month, but will need to add $20/month for unlimited texting and $30/month for unlimited data, for a total of $90/month. I just want to point out that my Virgin Mobile Droid costs $25/month for 300 minutes and unlimited text and data. Enjoy those iPhones, suckers!
– Hank Green is a nerd who has a hard-on for the James Webb Space Telescope. And who can blame him, really? The JWST will be amazing, and it’ll make the Hubble look like a toy in comparison. Here’s a video of Green giving his five reasons why the JWST is awesome:
Read more about the JWST at the official NASA site here.
And you wonder why I watch Community?
The pic features stars Alison Brie (who also appears on Mad Men) and Gillian Jacobs in a near kiss. Thanks to Brie for posting this on her Twitter feed.
Community airs at 8pm on Thursdays on NBC. You know I’ll be there… especially since tonight’s episode is about Dungeons and Dragons!
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“I don’t know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives. All comes down to today, and either we heal as a team or we’re gonna crumble. Inch by inch, play by play. Until we’re finished. We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell… one inch at a time.
Now I can’t do it for ya, I’m too old. I look around, I see these young faces and I think, I mean, I’ve made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I, uh, I’ve pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror. You know, when you get old, in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that’s… that’s… that’s a part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losin’ stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it.
The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying! I’ll tell you this, in any fight it’s the guy who’s willing to die who’s gonna win that inch. And I know, if I’m gonna have any life any more it’s because I’m still willing to fight and die for that inch, because that’s what living is, the six inches in front of your face.
Now I can’t make you do it. You’ve got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now I think you’re going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You’re gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you’re gonna do the same for him. That’s a team, gentlemen, and either, we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That’s football guys, that’s all it is.
Now, what are you gonna do?”
– Al Pacino as Tony D’Amato
Any Given Sunday
– There’s a meeting of the primates of the Anglican Communion going on in Dublin this week. Sort of. Primates of the Global South made it clear to the Archbishop of Canterbury that they would not attend if Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church in the US, was invited. She was, so they boycotted. This post at the Anglican Communion Institute has a Pac-Man like graph which shows, in one simple picture, how the boycotting primates hold all the power in the Communion.
– Speaking of The Episcopal Church, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (of which the Church is a member) has been strangely silent about the sickening case of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia doctor indicted recently on eight charges of murder. Gosnell was the doctor of choice for women who wanted late-stage abortions… very late stage abortions. In fact, Gosnell didn’t really perform “abortions” so much as he’d give women huge doses of labor-inducing drugs, deliver the babies and then jab a pair of scissors into the base of the babies’ necks and cut their spinal cords. What’s worse is that few of the machines in his clinic (i.e. EKGs and respirators, etc). were functional, and even if they worked, they were rarely used. Hygiene was found to be almost non-existent. Many of his staff had attended medical school, but most were drop-outs. Even more vile: although his clinic routinely aborted 25-30 week-old fetuses during the week, he’d sometimes secretly open the clinic on Sundays to perform abortions on even later term babies. There’s a PDF at the linked article, but you really don’t want to read it.
– On a lighter note, Glee creator Ryan Murphy appears to be a bit of a dick. The short version of the story is that Kings of Leon didn’t want their music used on his show, so Murphy went on a rant about how the band is (somehow) taking music education away from children. Whatever.
– Paul Allen has died. No, not the co-founder of Microsoft and current owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers. I’m talking about Paul Allen, an Englishman and one of the few professional jousters in this world. Allen was killed when a wooden lance fragment went through his face mask, pierced his eyeball and punctured his brain. Allen was filming a segment about jousting for the popular British TV show Time Team when the accident occurred.
– TripAdvisor has released their 2011 list of the Dirtiest Hotels in America. If you have some spare time, check out the reviews for these places… they’re sadly hilarious! And it’s nice to see that NYC’s Hotel Carter made the list, although it fell from #1 last year to #4 this year.
– Speaking of New York, I’ve been spending a lot of time at ScoutingNY recently. It’s a blog written by a guy who scouts filming locations for movie and TV shoots in the city. If you like stories about urban architectural oddities, this site is for you! He has a few long posts in which he shows screen caps of old movies shot in New York (like Taxi Driver and Ghost Busters) and then takes photos of the same sites, so you can see what’s changed. But I especially recommend The Abandoned Palace At 5 Beekman Street and The Smallest Plot of Land In New York City to get started.
– American football was almost banned in 1905, a year when there were 18 deaths on football fields across the country. With President Theodore Roosevelt breathing down their necks, representatives of 62 schools met in New York City and approved several changes to the game. These included banning the “flying wedge” (a brutal, V-shaped formation that frequently led to injuries), creating the “neutral zone” between the offense and defense, and doubling the amount of yardage needed for a first down from five to ten yards. But their most innovative change – the one that would forever separate American football from rugby – was legalizing the forward pass. It might seem hard to believe with today’s pass-happy NFL, but the forward pass wasn’t popular at first. Check out this article at Smithsonian.com for the full story.
VLC is one of the best media players around, mainly because the app can play almost any video file you throw at it. However, it does have one strange quirk: after installing (or upgrading) it, you might see this dialog box when you try to open a video file:
The font cache is responsible for displaying subtitles in the VLC window. Which is fine… but sometimes the dialog box can hang, or the “less than a few minutes” can turn in to 20 or 30 minutes, or the box appears every time you open a video file. And all of those things can be annoying.
There are two routes you can take to fix this.
The first is to delete the cache and start over. To do this, type %APPDATA% into the Start Menu’s run box (Windows XP) or search box (Vista\7). Delete the “VLC” folder in the Explorer window that opens and try opening VLC again. The “building font cache” window will appear again, but (hopefully) this time the cache will be compiled correctly and you’ll only see it once.
If you’ve tried this and find that it doesn’t work for you, open VLC and choose Tools > Preferences. Look in the lower left corner of the preferences window and make sure that “All” is selected under “Show Settings”. Then click Video > Subtitles\OSD. Change the value of “Text rendering module” from “Default” to “Dummy font rendering functions” and then click “Save”. This will disable font caching completely.
“Everything old is new again”, or so the old saying goes. The current buzzword in IT is “The Cloud”, which, at its most basic, means “storing data on a server instead of a desktop PC”. In many ways, this is an idea as old as computing itself, and isn’t all that exciting.
However, today’s “New Cloud” is much more than that. It’s not just about storing data on a server, it’s about presenting that data, too. Companies want to write desktop applications that can access cloud data, but they also want to create webapps for remote users that look and feel like traditional desktop apps. They also want to create smartphone apps that allow executives and traveling salespeople to manipulate cloud data in a format that fits their phones.
Most analysts predict a war in the very near future… a war between traditional software companies (like Microsoft and Adobe) who have made billions off desktop applications, and between upstarts (like, well, Google) that will offer similar applications over the Internet. To give just one example, Google is hoping to vanquish both Microsoft Office and competitors like the open-source OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus Symphony with Google Docs. Results, so far, are mixed.
But Microsoft isn’t going to just lie there and take it like a roofied-up sorority pledge. The company has created its own online suite – Office Web Apps – which includes capable versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. As webapps, they’re available to anyone with a web browser and an Internet connection. And, as of this moment, they’re free.
Continue reading “Office Starter vs. Office Web Apps… fight!”