It is 3:46am, on a… Wednesday… I guess. And for yet another fucking night there are huge fucking noisy machines tearing the road up 10 feet away from my bedroom window.
FUCK YOU, NOISY MACHINES.
THREE FUCKING FORTY-SIX FUCKING A FUCKING M???
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU, NOISY MACHINES.
The new road looks nice, though.
My good friend Rydell is at Nerdapalooza right now, and somehow managed to con MC Frontalot into calling me to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day. It is July 5th. To my credit, I answered the phone by screaming “Happy Mother’s Day” into it first.
Ok, so I have only just this evening finally gotten around to watching Batman Begins. I liked it.
I am sure other people have already written a ton of fluff about the movie, so I won’t bother. It is a good film, though. Probably the best superhero and/or comic book movie I’ve seen in a long while.
I will definitely be going to see The Dark Knight in the theater.
I’ve been following the Hans Reiser trial and conviction for the murder of his wife, via Wired.com’s Threat Level column.
I was a little bit shocked to read (very early this morning, thanks in part to the huge iced coffee I drank earlier combined with tummy trouble caused by a plate of tasty-but-damaging General Tso’s Chicken) that he’s finally led the police to the corpse as part of a deal to broker a reduced prison sentence. Asperger’s Syndrome, my ass. The guy is a freakshow, and so are the other people (well, one other person) involved. I predict there will be a movie deal soon.
At least the Linux-geeks have something new to giggle about.
The thing that struck me most about the digging-up-of-the-body is that, apparently, one of Reiser’s lawyers was handcuffed to him while he searched for the shallow grave and when Reiser found it, he and the lawyer dug up the body together. Do they tell people in Law School, “Someday, you might have to dig up a corpse.” I wonder what the billable rate is on that?
I’m typing this while riding on my recumbent exercise bike. I’ve modified an old art table so that the main chassis and pedals of the bike fit underneath, and added slats across the top of the table to hold my laptop and external keyboard and mouse steady.
It was inspired by the treadputer featured on Lifehacker awhile back, and I see that they also featured something called the Geek-a-cycle ™. It’s a little tricky remembering to keep the legs working while concentrating on typing, but hopefully this will help me achieve my daily exercise goals a bitter easier. I’d post some pics, but really, it’s just a table high enough for me to sit underneath and pedal without knocking my knees on the underside.
One thing I’ve noticed is that my spelling ability really takes a hit when using this. The keyboard is a little too high and off-center to hit the keys properly at the speed I normally type. Ah well, at least the WASD keys are comfortable for gaming. Now, to try and burn a few hundred calories in Oblivion…
UPDATE: Well, I didn’t get around to playing Elder Scrolls IV, but I did manage to trawl through my daily reading list. End result: 54 mminutes, 10.24 miles, 542 calories.
From Wired.com’s Threat Level:
The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly voted Wednesday to grant retroactive amnesty to the telecoms that aided the President Bush’s five-year secret, warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to expand the government’s authority to sift through U.S. communications, handing a key victory to the Bush administration.
The Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama (D-Illinois) voted for the final bill, despite intense lobbying by supporters who used Obama’s own online organizing technology to try to hold him to his promise to fight any bill that included amnesty. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.
Richard Koman at ZDnet sums it up:
Obama issued a statement saying the bill was the best resolution that lawmakers were able to reach. But with the vote so lopsided, Obama could have easily voted against the bill, confident that it would pass anyway. It comes down to a matter of politics. The political tea-readers decided that there was no political upside to being against enhanced government spying, and so a vote was cast. Pity.
So much for Change.
Here is the link from Comics Reporter.
I like DMG’s work, even though I have to be honest and say that I’d never heard of him before I read this interview. However, after digging through his blog E-merl.com, he does some great stuff. I’m especially enjoying Necessary Monsters right now.
The weird thing is, thinking about it, I must have actually met Daniel in person once.
If he was at the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing in 2006 (he is listed as one of the Exhibitors for that year), then I probably did. I went to every table and talked to everyone there that year. In particular, I probably annoyed John Allison with my extensive ignorance of yacht rock but he was still nice enough to give me a button that says, “It is the moon.”
Once again, I’m busy trying to get this site to display properly on different browsers, and there’s some fiddling problem with the sidebar CSS that is giving me a headache. Argh.
I’ve finally upgraded to Firefox 3. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my menu customizations (mostly) transferred from version 2 to version 3 without any problems. It is mildly irritating that Tab Mix Plus doesn’t yet work with FF3, but 70% of my plugins work just fine.
Overall, I hadn’t noticed any big improvement over version 2. Nothing has leapt out at me as being “way better” in Firefox 3 than it was in 2 — in fact, not being able to use my Tab Mix Plus customizations actually makes tabbed browsing more annoying in the new version of the browser. Hopefully, TMP will be made compatible soon.
The only thing that I can say is better in 3 is that they’ve finally fixed the annoying tooltip bug. Now I can read the tooltip punchline in Dinosaur Comics without having to view the HTML source. The bug in firefox was identified in 2003. It finally got fixed in 2008. Hooray Mozilla!
I am updating the site with the latest version of Comicpress and redesigning it to make better use of the new templates.
Production-wise, I am working on the script some more, and laying out the pages. The first pages might be published before Hell freezes over, or not.
I’ve also just picked up a copy of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. I haven’t had a chance to read much of it, because I have had a god-awful sinus cold for the last few days, but I enjoyed Understanding Comics and I can only imagine this one will be even more enjoyable and informative.