Sorry about the lack of updates recently, and for missing the Friday Photo last week. Unfortunately when things get busy the website’s pretty much the first thing to go. Hopefully I’ll get some time to make some posts this weekend.
Category Archives: General
Commentary
A while back, I enabled comments for posts, but never mentioned it. If you’re interested in leaving one you can click on the title for a post and leave a comment at the bottom of that page. The tiny text on the right of the title block shows if there’re any comments for that post, and you can also click on that to leave a comment. Yes, I realize it’s nearly unreadable; it’s one of the many bits of CSS I need to clean up on the site.
If your comment doesn’t show up immediately, it’s probably been sent to me for approval (to cut down on comment spam). Unfortunately, I just realized this evening that there have been a couple comments for an old post hanging in the moderation queue for a couple weeks now, and I never noticed. Sorry about that, guys. I’ll try to watch that more closely in the future. Might have to see about backing down some of the moderation settings while I’m at it.
Hooray for Companies with a Conscience
A few weeks back, I found out that SendStation was giving away Firewire PocketDocks for the cost of shipping. The PocketDock is a little widget that restores functionality that Apple removed from the 3rd gen and later iPods, allowing you to use any old Firewire or USB cable (depending on which dock you get) to attach the iPod to your computer without messing with Apple’s special dock connector. Not something I really wanted to pay 20+ bucks for, but a pretty good deal at ~$6. So I went ahead and ordered one.
It’s a nice little product, but that’s not really what this post is about. When I went to check out on SendStation’s web store, they have an option to use an “ecologically friendly cardboard package” for shipping. It was no extra cost, so I checked the box, and kind of forgot about it. When the thing arrived in the mail a few days ago, I was pleased to see that the only packaging it came in was what you see above. A lightweight cardboard sleeve and a small shipping envelope. In this day and age of oversized, hard to open plastic blister packaging designed to make items hard to shoplift and stand out in the sea of product on store shelves, I just found this really refreshing. Kudos to SendStation for putting a bit of thought into the simple things!
“This means something. This is important.”
Thanks to the magic of Javascript, I now have randomly switching header images at the top of the page. There are only a couple of images at the moment, but I’ll be adding more in the future, promise. If you’re still seeing the waterfall, you can reload the page until you see the new one. Fun!
Props to Rob for the scripting help with this. Saved me a ton of time reading and messing around with this stuff…
I’m glad I know that now.
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled lately about Wikipedia, its accuracy, agenda, and the general quality of the articles contained therein. I have mixed feelings on the topic, but I would like to relate the following. I was looking for information on Jupiter’s moons (because I do this sort of thing), and while I used to use Nine Planets for this kind of info, they’ve started running more annoying ads, including occasional popups, and the site can be slow to update with the latest information. So I went to Wikipedia. Included in the article on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, after all of the scientific information about orbit, composition, and data returned by various space probes, was the following tidbit of information:
In the Power Rangers TV series, Ganymede is the hiding place chosen by Zordon as the hiding space for a fleet of Zords known as the Mega Vehicles, which combine to form the Mega Voyager. The Space Rangers locate these Zords after winning Key Cards from Darkonda in a card game. (“Flashes of Darkonda”, “The Rangers’ Mega Voyage”).
That pretty much sums up the whole Wikipedia experience right there, as far as I’m concerned.
Site updates
I’ve been messing around with the site layout this weekend, and expect to continue tweaking it over the next couple of weeks. The real content of interest here (at least to me) is the photos, as you can find pointless ramblings in nearly every other corner of the internet. I wanted a layout which would allow me to display them larger and with more detail, and where the layout wouldn’t distract from the pictures. I started with a theme from this guy, and I’m working on molding it to my needs. You might want to reload the page in your browser to make sure the latest CSS file is downloaded.
I’m also hoping to continue posting a “Friday Photo” every week. Hopefully it will encourage me to keep shooting, and keep processing photos I’ve already shot. We’ll see…
Sorry about the mess
I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress from the ancient version I had running before. So things are liable to be a bit confused until I can get everything moved up.
While doing this, I found that somebody’s been posting comment spam to my site, despite the fact that I have comments disabled. Punks.
Roger Wilco Rides Again
Through a mix of DOSBox and VDMSound, and the installation of some timer patches (watch for popups), I’ve managed to get all of the Space Quests installed and running on my laptop. I’ve been playing through Space Quest 1. It’s… refreshing. It’s the first game in a while that I’ve actually looked forward to going back and playing. I dunno why more games can’t be like this these days.