Further Assimilations

• 11:13 Experiencing a blast from the past: I have Eve Tokimatsuri songs running through my head now. #
• 11:45 @snidegrrl "The spiders launched to the space station a supply of tasty fruit flies for food" - spiders with orbital capability? Uh-oh. #
• 12:07 Noting that the "post Twitter entries to LJ" script is doing so at wildly varying times of day for some reason. #

Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter

Well, I'm actually feeling a bit accomplished these days. This weekend, I shook the rust from my joints and did some serious database programming, teaching it how to build (static) webpages for manual upload. Today, I forced our server (which recently graduated from peer-to-peer file sharer to real server) to take an OS upgrade that it supposedly can't, getting better networking and filesystem performance from it.

( You had to 'force' it? )

Has anyone ever noticed that when a Jedi fights a lightsaber-wielding villain, things usually don't go well for the Jedi?
Ep.4 - Obi-Wan vs. Vader, ends with Obi-Wan dead.
Ep.5 - Luke vs. Vader, ends with everyone calling Luke 'lefty.'
Ep.6 - Luke vs. Vader, ends with Luke almost succumbing to the dark side, then lying on the floor sucking Sidious' energy bolts.
Ep.1 - Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan vs. Maul, ends with Qui-Gon dead and Obi-Wan having to train Anakin. (Yeah, that all works out well.)
Ep.2 - Obi-Wan & Anakin & Yoda vs. Dooku, ends with 'lefty' Anakin, injured Obi-Wan, defeated Yoda, and Dooku flying off in his ship cackling, pausing only briefly to skywrite "Surrender Dorothy" on his way out.

Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but if I were a Jedi, and saw the other guy light up a laser blade, I'd be pretty depressed about how things were going.

A friend of mine has a website she updates once a week. I have been visiting and enjoying this site for two years, chatted with her about it on Yahoo! Messenger, and corresponded with her by e-mail, We've exchanged pictures of spouses and (in her case) child, and get along pretty well. But she has other things to do besides learn HTML, so she has a friend build her site with updates she passes along.

And now I can't get in her site. Why? Because her webmaster has fallen in love with the nonstandard JavaScript tricks available to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

I use a Macintosh. I don't apologize for that, I love it. It's not perfect, I can point out some of the issues involved long before any Windows user can, but it's a solid machine that I can get all my work done on. Just about the only thing I haven't been able to do with my Mac is play "Half-Life", and even that's been ported to the PlayStation 2 now.

So I write politely to the webmaster, pointing out that the latest IE I can access is 5.1, and suggesting that he might want to design a more flexible site. Heck, with JavaScript you can ask the browser who it is and reconfigure on the fly.

What do I hear back? "Can't be bothered. Your machine sucks. Why don't you buy a PC?"

I gently point out that there are still plenty of users out there who don't use Windows. Heck, some of the Windows users I know won't install IE 6 'cause (I'm told) it's a buggy, bloated piece of work that rewrites half your system when you install it. Does he want to block every one of those users from his sites?

Response? "Don't care. Buy a PC so you can look at my site. If Macs were so great, they could handle IE 6 JavaScript."

At this point, I realized, I was talking to a brick wall. I'm not bothering to respond by telling him that I can, if I want, run a more cutting edge version of MS Office than he can and get great framerate in Quake III at the same time. But I have to miss out on a friend's website because he's some l33t idiot who figures, "The hell with standards; it's from Redmond, so it's perfection and the wave of the future!"

I'm done now. I wish to point out here that in no part of this rant have I been rude about the general capabilities of PCs as hardware, or of Windows as an operating system.