Blog
Yet Another Wordpress User
After dealing with spam again tonight and facing the prospect of reworking my captcha and adding user registration, I completely gave up on the whole site-from-scratch thing and have replaced it with the Wordpress site you’re looking at now. I found this process to be very simple and straightforward, and I especially liked all the import options (in my case, I got the articles from my old RSS feed). After spending about an hour changing settings, adding plugins, and tweaking CSS, I think that I’ll be able to live with it.
In Defense of Sarah Palin (Sort of)
For the past six months or so, the presidential election hasn’t ceased to provide me with story after story that I find deeply disturbing or upsetting. I’ve been particularly struck by the absolute about-face McCain has made from his independent stances in the past. With his acquisition of Sarah Palin as a running-mate, I’ve become certain that the awful, crippled monstrosity that is the US election system has done the unimaginable and provided us with a ticket even more harmful to our nation then the drooling sack of ineptitude currently occupying the White House. I’ve thought of at least a dozen blog posts that I haven’t had the time to write concerning this dismal state of affairs in the last few weeks alone.
Facebook Chat, Making My Life More Complicated
When Facebook added the chat feature a few months ago, I found it to be entirely unnecessary. All the people with whom I wished to chat were already in my MSN, AIM, and GoogleTalk contact lists, which are all tied together by Pidgin.
Dear Xinerama: Goodbye, and Good Riddance
Having used many distros of Linux with a variety of graphics cards during the past five or so years, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get my hands dirty with xorg.conf. When I eventually got an Nvidia card and discovered nvidia-settings, it was great to not have to mess with xorg.conf any more…or not. I still had to read up on xorg.conf options whenever I wanted to do something fancy, but I found nvidia-settings to be a useful tool for generating xorg.confs that I could later modify.
A few years ago I started using two monitors with my desktop computer. In nvidia-settings I had two options for configuring the monitors: either with TwinView or Separate X servers. Separate X servers is hugely annoying, so that was out. TwinView made my window manager (Fluxbox, at the time) think that I basically had one screen. This meant that maximizing applications caused them to fill both screens. It also meant that no edge snapping occurred at the border between the monitors. I have seen experienced the same behavior with TwinView in Xfce. This means that for at least two years I’ve associated TwinView with pure suck.
Movie Review: Wanted
I’m going to preface this by saying that I was moderately excited to see Wanted. From the trailer, I was anticipating lots of crazy bullet-bending action, car chases, and, well, Angelina Jolie. In fact, I recommend you go watch the trailer right now. I’ll wait. It’s pretty good.
That done with, this film was more or less appalling, and you definitely shouldn’t waste time on the full thing. It’s one of those movies that, at times, becomes hilarious because of its abject awfulness, but not with enough frequency to in any way redeem it. This is the point at which I would normally tell you that this review contains spoilers, but that might make it seem as though there is some part of this movie which I could ruin even more.
Spam
I’ve had to disable comments because I’m getting spammed. Unfortunately I’m going to have to put in a captcha to prevent this, so that kind of sucks. I’ll try to do this as soon as I get a chance. Blarg.
I’m Not Fat (Anymore)
If you search online for information about losing weight, you will find no shortage of material. As a result of previous experience (detailed below), I say that you can pretty much place any of it into one of two distinct camps: either it advocates the old, tired adage of “diet and exercise”, or it is utter dreck. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something, and you can guess which category it falls into.
Comments, Please
I just put up the comments. This took a few hours of work to get right, and I suspect that there are still bugs. The formatting seems to be great, but I think that there might be problems with submission. I’ve tried to make it somewhat secure by stripping most of the nonsense you could put into one of the form strings to cause nasty things to happen. So (fingers crossed) it should be safe from SQL injection, XSS trickery, or html that messes up the page too much. › Continue reading