The first debate is not going to be between the actual presidential candidates, but between puppets and people in Avenue Q. Apparently there will be cadidate puppets joining the cast of the Broadway show… I’m not quite sure exactly what’s going on, but it sounds interesting… for now…
Pointless
Presenting the Internet’s Most Accurate English-to-English Translation Dictionary.
Your first question is undoubtedly, “What’s the point?” and my answer is undoubtedly, “There is none.”
By the way, it also does Spanish-to-Spansh, French-to-French, and German-to-German. I see no reason why I can’t easily add more languages in time.
New CDs
Over at my other website, I have a blog that keeps track of the albums I purchase, download, or otherwise acquire. I’m constantly getting live concerts from various bands as well, but since there’s no officially released album, I can’t post those. Check it out if you want to see what I’ve been buying and downloading…
Plan SOCA and Cameraphone Voyeurism
Well, I should have known. Things rarely go as I plan. I ended up missing lunch. I wasn’t that hungry since we had a Welcome Back Breakfast (not Welcome Back, Breakfast) at work for an employee who came back after she had a heart attack…
Anyway, plan SOCA has entered a new phase I like to call Actually Making An Attempt™. More news later.
In the meantime, I’m having fun with BlogLines. I subscribed to a feed at Flickr that contains cameraphone photos that people send to the image hosting service for posting on their blogs or emailing to people. It’s interesting to see what people take photos of. Street signs in Japanese, random people, buildings, concerts… it provides much needed entertainment for my otherwise dull, corporate day.
phpswf charts!
Flexo should use this: Flash charts controlled by PHP!
Full of Bitterness
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
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
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?
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.