Month: September 2004

Full of Bitterness

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I am full of bitterness this morning, and I don’t know why. Everything seems to be pissing me off. Here’s just one thing:

Websites that disable the use of the right mouse button. Instead of my context menu, when I click with the right mouse buttons on these sites, either I get nothing, or a cutesy little dialog box informing me that I’ve been a bad boy and I must keep my paws off. First of all, who are you to say that I can’t use my right mouse button to move back and forth between pages within a website? Is it because you think I’m going to save some images from your website to my hard drive? Most of the time, people who do this have nothing worth stealing. Second of all, if you had something worth stealing, I certainly wouldn’t need to use my right mouse button if I really wanted to take it. Third of all, I could just disable JavaScript and use the right mouse button anyway. I don’t want to disable JavaScript because I don’t think I can on a per-site basis, and JavaScript is necessary for other things to work correctly. So stop trying to hijack my computer’s functions. Summary: Disabling the right mouse button action is ineffective and arrogant.

Okay, that’s one thing off my chest.

UPDATE: The bitterness has passed. I’m over it, and now I have a (cunning) plan. The plan includes some lunch and some work to be done tonight when I get home. Woo plan! (No, it has nothing to do with JavaScript or… umm… mouses.)

Well, It Was Free

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I found an audio cassette tape I made in 1981, at the tender age of five. My parents had a portable tape recorder and microphone and unfortunately for some, I got a hold of it.

I recorded a story that day about going to the Altamont Fair (link goes to the 2004 fair, not the 1981 fair) and winning a goldfish I promptly named after my mother. I also talked about an imaginary friend, made up words, tried to interview both my newborn brother and our cat, Meiko, and sang a little. It was funny to hear my voice with a Brooklyn accent; it’s hard to imagine that the child speaking was actually me. I also had a strange way of rolling my “r” sounds. I don’t know where I got that from.

Very few people have had the privilege of listening to this tape. The sound quality is surprisingly good, but I figured it might be safer to store the recording digitally. This brings us to the point.

For some reason, whenever I try to save anything in Sony Sound Forge 7.0, the program completely freezes. If it weren’t for the fact I downloaded the software for free from somewhere other than Sony, I would try to get some tech support for it. But alas, I guess this is what I get for downloading software without buying it. Note: it has worked every other time I’ve used it. It is very handy. Is it worth $400? To a professional, maybe.

Site XML Feed in Blogger and Movable Type

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To activate your XML site feed in Blogger (something you want to do), go into your blog’s settings and select Site Feed. Change “Publish Site Feed” to “Yes,” choose “Full Descriptions,” click “Save Settings” and republish.

If you use Movable Type, the default settings have included a site feed for years, so unless you’ve deleted it, you already have one. If you have an old version of Movable Type, you may want to obtain the Atom template and create a new index template.

UPDATE: This should be my last RSS-related update. You can now subscribe to my photo gallery by adding this link to your news reader.

Best Things In Life Are Free?

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Just to clear up any misconceptions, the “free iPods” junk mail that’s been going around? To quote Jon Stewart, “Not so much.” But you’re not someone who falls for that sort of thing. The article says that they have sent some out, but the company claims the rest are on “back order.”

Those cars that Oprah gave out for free? Well, almost. The recipients still have to pay an average of $7,000 in federal income tax. A $7,000 car isn’t bad at all, but still… not quite free.

Bloglines Subscription

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If you look above, you’ll see a link called “Subscribe via BlogLines.” BlogLines is a neat little aggregator that presents the blogs your read together, making it easy to see when someone posts something new. If you want to subscribe to the FiveAndTwenty manually, you can do so by registering at BlogLines if you haven’t already and subscribing to “atom.xml” for each of the locations. (For example, http://www.fiveandtwenty.com/barb/atom.xml.)

UPDATE: Okay, this post doesn’t make much sense. I have my excuse: I’ve had a cold the last 24+ hours. What I was trying to say is that if you sign up for BlogLines, you can add any FiveAndTwenty blog easily. Just use “atom.xml” after the blog address.

Now I’ve written what I wanted to say… twice, in fact.

Also, if you’re a fan of the blur and desaturation effects in Adobe PhotoShop, you’ll love Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That is all for now. Spike over and out.

Revisionism

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I just spent some time removing my real name from old posts and comments imported from the old site. I also removed references to identifiable locations. You never know when someone, say a parent of a friend, will discover a website you thought was failry anonymous. Let’s hope Google‘s cache is quick.

UPDATE. I just checked, and Google cached my site minutes after the updates were made. Weird.