Maybe it is bunnies. Consider the evidence. They’re getting larger.
And more aggressive.
All posts by Dan
Cheesy Song Lyrics — People You Didn’t Know You Knew Edition
Via Rock Kills Kid.
Now you know that it’s all your fault
How are you doing with it?
Hey, are you nervous?
Everything that you’ve ever known
Will go up in flames
Tell me, are you nervous?
And the sky will fall down on you
And the world still turns round round round
And the sky will fall down on you
As your life goes on down down down
Everything that you’ve ever done
Will come back to haunt you
Tell me, are you nervous?
Now you know that it is for sure,
How are you taking it?
Do you deserve this?
(Chorus)
Dance! (x6)
March 11th’s Electric Six show, which I’d been eagerly anticipating, was a blast — everything I’d hoped for and then some. Not only did Dick Valentine and the rest of the band live up to their billing, but the opening acts, Rock Kills Kid and Every Move A Picture, were entirely solid as well. (I actually wound up buying some of their music on iTunes yesterday, wondering all the while how I survived before the age of instant musical gratfication.)
For a while I worried that Greg, who had arrived in town earlier in the afternoon, wasn’t really enjoying himself, because he was just kind of standing there shrugged into his overcoat. It turned out, though, that he was just exhausted from having gotten up in the wee hours of an east-coast morning prior to a cross-country flight. He revealed his true feelings around the middle of Electric Six’s set, when he turned to me and said, with frank admiration, of Dick Valentine, “I don’t understand how he can still be alive after the third song.” The man is, indeed, a dynamo.
Meet the Family
You know these people. Sure you do. Oh, you’ve tried to forget, but the knowledge is there. In your mind. Festering.
Today’s Jaw-Droppingly Gorgeous Time Sink
Plasma Pong. Further proof that sufficiently advanced GPU technology is indistinguishable from Very Hard Drugs.
Outlet 360
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that “360” is clearly the new “XP”, I need one of these. Actually, probably need half a dozen of them, but let’s start small and ramp up.
Webcomic of the week: Wondermark
While clip-art webcomics are not exactly new, Wondermark adds a dash of spice to an established form by giving a 19th-century look and feel to decidedly 21st-century humor and technology.
No. 74, In Which Thanks are Made For Nothing, crosses the line from mere cleverness into genius. I’ve ordered a print. (Hey, I had to.)
The Antidote to my Pain
Certain of my Mac-using friends — who know who they are — insist upon composing their messages with that platform’s Mail.app, which likes to honor a tradition established by its apparent idol, Microsoft Outlook, and indiscriminately break any line longer than 80 columns. Should such a line happen to consist of a URL, well, too bad.
After reassembling broken links by hand for the umpteenth time, I finally got sick of it and decided to find a Firefox extension that would solve the problem for me. Cue URL Link, which lets you highlight any chunk of text in Firefox and treat is as a URL, opening it in either the current window or a new tab. It reassembles broken links en passant, but its usefulness extends to any situation — as frequently arises on, for instance, message boards — where someone supplied a URL but for whatever reason didn’t, or couldn’t, turn it into an actual hyperlink.
Joe Bob says check it out.
Pet Peeve: Version Transparency
I have a possibly odd habit: I like to keep an up-to-date archive of the software I normally install on my Windows boxen. I maintain an SMB volume on my file server, exported to my home network via Samba, into which I file various installers and updaters. This makes bringing up a new machine — which I’ve been known to do from time to time — a minor rather than a major annoyance. Almost everything I want has already been fetched, and is available for retrieval at gigabit speeds.
This brings us to the second-most-retarded thing on the internet: software downloads without versions in the filename. (What’s the first-most-retarded thing on the internet, you ask? Why, e-commerce forms that require you to enter credit-card numbers “without dashes or spaces”, but Steve Friedl‘s got that one covered.)
When I’m looking at your web site, contemplating a set of download links, I should be able to tell at a glance whether or not the software bundle you’re offering me is newer than the one I’ve got. If you had the foresight to embed the bundle’s version number into its filename, this is a trivial determination for me to make. If you haven’t, then I may wind up downloading another copy only to determine that it’s no different from the one I have. This is waste of time for me, a waste of bandwidth for you, and a pointless annoyance to us both.
Names like “iTunesInstaller.exe”, “stable.tar.gz”, and “autoruns.zip” tell me nothing about the vintage of the software whose acquisition I’m contemplating. I am baffled that outfits which are by any other measure under the operation of the extremely smart — Apple, the folks behind perl.com, and Sysinternals, to name but three — haven’t figured this out yet. It makes me wonder whether I’m not in truth the one who’s missing something. But until someone offers me definitive proof that this the case, though, I’m going to continue waving my fist at the sky and acting cranky over this one.
Tabs Open Relative
Tabs Open Relative is a nifty and fairly-new Firefox extension that causes new tabs to appear adjacent to the tab from which they were opened, rather than after the last opened tab. There’s slightly more to it than that: it’s more accurate, although perhaps not more enlightening, to say that it makes the tab bar feel like a nested collection of queues, rather than a single large queue.
It’s actually harder to describe than it is to simply start using. Once you see the subtle-yet-intuitive way it alters tab-spawning behavior, you’ll get it immediately, and wonder why Firefox didn’t always work this way. The low version number of the current release, 0.1, belies the extension’s polish: I’ve yet to see it behave other than I’d expect it to in the course of its operation.
Another of its virtues, in my estimation, is a conspicuous absence of anything to configure. There’s nothing to do after installation, no new Options pane serving up a dizzying array of checkboxes, or any other kind of flimflammery to impress upon you what a sophisticated new piece of software you’ve just wired into the guts of your browser. It does its job, and dispenses with any flashy attempts to dazzle you. More software should be like that.
If I’m going to praise a Firefox extension, I also have to deliver a big, fat raspberry to the Firefox Extensions area of the Mozilla site, whose search functionality places second only to Penny Arcade‘s in the race for “worst ever”. Don’t believe me? Try searching for an extension whose name you already know. C’mon — I dare you!