General

For Rod: obsessed with sound-dampening your computer? Look here.

Some browsers don’t just suck, they suck profoundly.

This page is mainly a bookmarks-folder for me, and I use IE5.5, because it’s the best browser around right now. I think it’s really neat that other people read this page, so I’ll fix obvious problems that prevent them from reading it. However, I’m not going to go out of my way to ensure that you, with your Netscape 3.0, on your 386, will be able to read this page. If I were selling widgets, and really needed your business, I would probably do something to accommodate your blatant attempt to live in the past. However, I’m not selling anything, and I don’t even run ads on this page, so I’m not overly concerned with making my site readable to blind Hungarians on their TRS-80 braille web-readers. If it means that much to you, send me some money, and use the super-leet low-bandwidth page.

I’ve been memetically-engineering the folks at work. I wore this godawful Hawaiian shirt yesterday.

Everyone said something to me about it, and I looked at them and said, “It’s Hawaiian-shirt-Thursday.”

“No it’s not!”

“Yes,it is!” I said, “Don’t you even READ your email?!” And I went on and on about it because I know they all trash corporate email without looking at it.

Next Thursday I’m sure some people will be wearing Hawaiian shirts.

I finally gave in to peer pressure and got a cellphone. Since I’m a geek, I got the geekiest one — a Sanyo SCP-4500, which does everything, including my taxes and managing my stock portfolio. It also changes the oil in my car, and generates terrible things to say to Kelli.

I am so three one three three seven now.

I recently regained contact with one of my high school Algebra teachers, Mr. Upton. His manic intensity .. uh.. didn’t really do anything for me, because I hated math. Passionately.

However, to this day I believe his teaching methods to be excellent: he always kept one window open, unless it snowed, he maintained rigid control over the class, and he rotated student seating based on the grades of the last test, lower scores at the front of the class, higher towards the back.

Anybody got a spare 15,000 volt capacitor bank? I want to shrink some quarters.

Here is a fascinating Java-based weblog connectivity map. I’m such a geography nerd.

On February 10th, 2001 at approximately 4:09 PM CST, using laptop-based Cisco IP SoftPhone on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, Astronaut Marsha Ivin made the first and second telephone calls ever from space.

After confirming with the Flight Commander, Marsha started SoftPhone and at approximately 4:09PM made a call to the Flight Director. The call went from her SoftPhone software through a VG-200 gateway, over an FXO port, through a PBX to the phone on the Flight Director’s desk. At the end Marsha called one of the Cisco 7960 phones in the Payload Operations Center, which was answered by Brett Parrish, lead NASA engineer on this project. Marsha asked “So how do you like getting the second ever call from space?”.

Joseph sent me another great use for web tech: The live streaming Honolulu Traffic Cam. Now you can see how irritating Honolulu traffic is from the comfort of your own bathroom. That is, if you have net access in your bathroom.

More evil genius, straight from the bent minds at Evil Avatar, here’s how to remove ICQ Ads:

Delete the following .dll files in your /ICQ directory:

icqateima32.dll (removes advertisement downloading)

icqateimg32.dll (removes the loading of images)
icqateres.dll (removes part of the advertisement function)

This should make ICQ run a little faster, but the missing ads make ICQ a little uglier.