Just a heads up: I’ve transitioned this entire blog to Tumblr, and it can now be found at http://blog.maikeruon.com/. The main Michael Online site here will be converted to a domain portal/portfolio site in the next month or so. All future blogging will be at the new Tumblr-powered subdomain.
Between seeing The Princess and the Frog (love it, see it) and dinner the other day I had a bit of time to kill, so wandered over to the local book store. The “Everything 40% Off” signs intrigued me, and while I was sad to discover they’re going out of business (not at all surprised, however; they’re located in the local mall, which has been slowly dying for years) I did come across a curious tome: And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer. The thing that jumped out at me as curious wasn’t the title (though the bright neon sign it is displayed in on the front is eye catching, upheld by a viking ship sailing through the outer cosmos as it is) nor the author (whom I’d never heard of), but this bit at the top:
Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three
This struck me as particularly odd. Any good Hitchhiker fan knows the H2G2 is a five-part trilogy, so stumbling across a part six, written by someone whose name isn’t even an anagram of Douglas Adams, was more than a little strange. At 40% off, though, I couldn’t very well pass up the apparent next installment in one of my favorite series of books.
After getting home I discovered that Colfer has done much of his own work, none of which I’m particularly interested in for the moment, but also that Adams’ widow gave Colfer her blessing in penning a sixth installment (something Adams himself had planned on doing before his untimely death).
So far I’ve read the introduction and first chapter. Colfer does an admirable job of mimicking Adams’s style, though it must be said that, at least this far in, there’s something notably missing from the prose. Everything is there, but it doesn’t mesh quite as well as Adams himself might’ve made it mesh. It also doesn’t help that, as of the end of the first chapter, very little has been explained. It’s easy enough to understand what’s going on, but not exactly how, or why, or to what end.
It has me intrigued though. Mostly Harmless (the book preceding this one) was an incredibly bleak ending to the series, so the chance to revisit things and see what happens after that is welcome. And to Colfer’s credit the introduction, which roughly summarizes the events of the last five books in about three pages, does a great job as an introduction to the sixth book. The Guide Notes interjections are also a nice touch in the way they’re integrated into the text but blocked off instead of being buried in footnotes.
Here’s hoping our froody travelers get a happier ending this time around, and that Colfer can do justice to Adams’ works.
On Friday I picked up Winows 7 Ultimate (for nowehere near full price; who would pay that much for an OS?) which seemed like a good chance to give Apple’s BootCamp a try. BootCamp, for the unaware, is a Mac OS X utility that makes it dead-simple to install and run Windows (XP, Vista, or 7) on an Intel-based Mac. The utility itself doesn’t actually do a whole lot. When you start it up there’s an option to print the installation and setup guide (probably not necessary if you’re familiar with partitioning HDD’s and installing Windows) and a handful of steps that walk you through partitioning your existing OS X installation and rebooting into the Windows install. Since I have a current-gen Macbook Pro I opted for the 64-bit version of Windows (both 32 and 64-bit versions come in the retail box) and decided to give it a 117GB of my 500GB drive to work with.
Once rebooted into the installation it’s Windows all over again. Seven’s installation process is a tiny step forward over Vista’s, with nicer graphics, simpler options, and a slight faster overall install time (your mileage may very, of course). Once installed I was presented with a pretty standard looking Windows desktop, sporting the larger taskbar/dock (or whatever they call it now) and little else. Ejecting the Windows 7 installation and popping in the OS X installation disk will autorun the BootCamp setup utility, which installs a bunch of drivers and software to enable Apple-specific hardware features (specialized function keys, built-in iSight camera’s, card-specific video drivers. etc.) to work in Windows. This install seemed to take quite awhile, but it did need to install quite a bit. After all was said and done 102GB free of the 117GB allotted, making this a trimmer Windows install than previous incarnations.
After a reboot Windows was primed and ready to go. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the MBP’s multi-touch trackpad regained some of it’s greatness (it supports one and two-finger gestures in Windows), though I do miss the more advanced gestures that invoke OS X’s Expose and navigate through photos, browser history, etc. Windows 7 itself is very slick; one thing Microsoft seems to have gotten’ right this time around is the polish. There are a ton of theme options, which include window skin colors, background sets, and even system sound effects. I loved themes back in the days of Window’s 98, and it’s good to see them take a more central stage for system customization after they were largely forgotten in Windows XP and Vista. By default there are six or seven Aero themes and a handful of basic themes (including some high-contrast options and the good-old 9x style “Windows Classic”), but you can easily download about thirty or fourty more from Microsoft’s site, including international themes (Japan, Brazil, Canada, etc.) and branded themes (Coca-Cola, Gears of War, Ferrarri, etc.). I’ve downloaded them all and will probably pillage the included wallpaper images for my OS X partition.
The new taskbar/dock thing is relatively nice. Icons seem to have their own hover color (yellow for folders, blue for Internet Explorer, orange for Windows Media Player) and a small light tracks the cursors movement over the icons. These are tiny details most people won’t notice in day-to-day use, but it helps with that feeling of a polished system. Progress indicators also appear in the taskbar/dock icons; curing the BootCamp driver install, for example, I was free to browse the web in Internet Explorer and could glance at the taskbar/dock icon to see how far along the progress was (the icon background slowly filled with green based on the progress). The new system icons are nice as well, but almost feel out of place next to the Vista icons. I don’t know why Microsoft can’t get a consistent set of icons for their OS, but I haven’t noticed any pre-XP icons at least.
Having used it for a bit, Windows 7 feels like what Vista should have been: a modern, polished upgrade to Windows XP. It’s a shame Microsoft is releasing it three years too late for full price, though; as a Vista user I couldn’t bring myself to pay $200+ for what is, deep down, a shine-job on Vista. It’s slick and polished and arrived three years too late. Nice job Microsoft.
It seems deviantART also likes really annoying advertising. I appreciate the need to generate some kind of revenue, and for most sites that requires advertising. They need money, I get it. “Radio” ads that play automatically and have no obvious (or any, as far as I can tell) way to stop them are beyond annoying though. deviantART is a great site; it’s not great enough to justify uninterpretable audio ads, and I’m not buying a subscription to a site that abuses non-subscribing users with that kind of advertising.
Geocities officially closed it’s doors today. Most people don’t seem to sad about it (quite the opposite), but I’ll miss Geocities. I played around with it back when I first started learning HTML (with my shiny new copy of HTML 4 for Dummies) and I’ll always have a soft spot for it and the sort of Internet it represents.
A time when HTML frames were cutting edge and page layouts demanded tables nested so deep you’d need a shovel to dig yourself out if you made the mistake of looking at the source. A time when “Under Construction” wasn’t a joke or a recognized facet of all websites, but was displayed with pride using the most garish animated GIF one could find. A time when Javascript was still an arcane art that most people didn’t understand and few web browsers handled well. A time when explaining exactly what web browser and resolution your site should be viewed at was polite, and IE wasn’t quite the joke it quickly became. A time when tacking something down took effort, not a three second search on Google or Wikipedia.
I will miss you Geocities. Goodbye.
Alright, I get it; advertising is everywhere, especially on the web. Pop-ups, pop-unders, banners, towers, flash, videos, etc. Gotta’ make a living, right? Yeah, I feel your pain.
Whatever moron decided to stick an auto-play video ad with audio in a site feed, however, deserves to die. And not just pushed off a bridge or shot in the head die; I mean like Pyramid Head skin ripped from you body while you’re still screaming in pain, praying to God that he doesn’t rape you next (because you know it’s coming) die.
The offending site was Kotaku; they’re interesting enough that I’m willing to give them exactly one chance to never, ever, ever do it again, or I’ll just stop reading the site. They aren’t clever enough for audio.
Back in July I posted about why ComicPress was a poor choice for publishing webcomics with WordPress. In preparation for an upcoming Webcomic video tutorial I needed to install and (briefly) use ComicPress 2.8, which was just released last month. Here are some of the things that crossed my mind while working with ComicPress 2.8…
So apparently Comcast doesn’t think providing reliable Internet service is a top priority. Friday morning I noticed I’d lost access, but didn’t think much of it; it’s actually more common than it should be with them, and doesn’t usually last long. When I got home Friday evening, however, it was still out, so I called them up. After the typical moron spiel (“Did you plug it in?” “Can you power cycle the modem?” “Do you have a router?”) I managed to schedule a service tech to come out Saturday between 10am and 1pm. The Tech arrive around 12:30pm and was out by 1:30pm having apparently corrected the issue. I ended up spending most of Sunday in the Emergency room, but upon returning home I once again had no Internet access.
Back to the phone. >_>
Comcast’s phone support is incredibly unhelpful. I understand the usefulness of automated systems and scripts, but when you have to hear the exact same speech from both an automated system and then a person three or four times in a weekend it gets old. Fast. After my second attempt to have them get a tech out to the house Sunday evening (which was apparently impossible) I decided to cancel the service. At which point I get transfered to their retention center (it’s always a retention center, isn’t it? ’cause they don’t want to lose you once you get pissed off). The lady was kind enough and now there’s a new, U-Lite tech coming out this evening (U-Lite is apparently a highly technical term my tiny brain wouldn’t comprehend; I imagine it’s some disparaging comment directed at customers who are upset that the service they pay for doesn’t work).
Even if they do get it fixed I’ve lost what little faith I had in Comcast; if they actually can’t fix it I’ll cancel my service on the spot (internet and television) and switch to something else. Thanks for nothing Comcast.
As Liliy kindly pointed out I rarely save my blog posts whenever I retool the site. Some content is genuinely lost in transition, but part of the reason is that I like fresh starts, and major redesigns afford the opportunity for this. The problem, of course, is that I’m perpetually redesigning the site and so rarely (if ever) have much content to show for all the work I put into the thing. XD
I’ve finally started to move away form constant redesigns, however, so now I’m trying to revive some of that content, both from previous versions of this site and from previous sites I’ve had on blogger, tumblr, wordpress.com, and at my own previous domain. Some of it is totally lost, which I’m ok with; blog’s are inherently transitive and things I wrote in 2004 aren’t necessarily relevant to anyone—including myself—today. It’s not a huge loss to me or the world that no one will be able to read my review of Street Fighter Anthology, for example.
Some of it would be nice to have, though, and share again with the web. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is invaluable for this, particularly for my old domain; it actually caught quite a bit of content I can salvage. It didn’t catch quite as much from this domain, but that has more to do with my own lack of blogging and constant redesigning (both of which are being rectified). My hope is to get a decent backlog of posts up in the next month to expand the available content here along with new posts like this.
Back again, yes. ^_^ So… the site went down for a bit while I switched hosts, and it seemed like as good a time as any to rethink some things. I love the overall design, for once, so (apart from some tweaks here and there) I was able to focus more on the content. For all my attempts at blogging I’m pretty horrible at keeping up with it, so my goal was to make it a lot easier on myself. This went from “Maybe I should just use Tumblr” (which is great) to “Why don’t I just make a WordPress plugin that does all the things Tumblr does?”
*cough*
Anyway, I ended up creating Leyline, a custom plugin that adds some neat features to WordPress and tweaks the blogging interface a bit to be easier and faster to use. It let’s me post links, quotes, chats, photos (and photosets), audio, and video much like I’d be able to if I were using Tumblr, and strips away some of the more obnoxious WordPress backend stuff that can make posting a pain (like trying to embed videos or images >_<). I may release it some point but for now I’m happy to let it power Michael Online.
If you’re using a slightly more advanced browser you should notice some nice touches in the comment lists that are handled entirely via CSS box-shadow’s. If you happen to be using Internet Explorer, you’ll notice that absolutely nothing is styled. This was a conscious decision; the new site is designed using HTML 5 markup, and Internet Explorer doesn’t understand a bit of it. Which is fine with me. So long, Internet Explorer.
Here’s to more blogging in the future!