Planet Earth (Or the reason I need HDTV)

Holy… Shit. This show is amazing! The Discovery channel blows everything else out of the water with this new mini-series! In a 40 minute show, my jaw is literally on the floor the entire time. There are shots you have just never seen before and may never again. Words are failing me. I can’t imagine this show on a large HD projection screen. Some of the high speed camera work (especially the shot of the crocodile taking the wilderbeast with the lone zebra in the shot… Wow!...

How not to program a user interface

The following is a description on using the Clearquest 2003 windows application. Ok... I have a query that I need to send to someone via email. What I need is an "Export Query" option. Lets try under the file menu. Hm... no export option. Ok, lets try right clicking on the query I want to export. Yay. OK found it. "Export Query" and Save As a .qry file. Now... How the hell do I import it?...

damn you ie

Obviously do one who reads this uses Internet Explorer or they would have mentioned (hopefully) that my little drop case trick doesn’t work in IE. This is the CSS I’m currently using: p.dc:first-letter { float: left; font-size: 2.5em; text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: bold; font-family: Georgia, Times, Verdana; line-height: 0em; color: #707070; } It looks as though IE7 does support the :first-letter pseudo class, but the box model is failing with the float: left....

copyright run amok -- guitar tabs

I fully believe fan created guitar TABs are fair use. Someone might try to argue that the equivalent is someone going to see a play over and over and providing the transcript of the play on the internet. I would even fully entertain the argument that even that is fair use. The music publishing industry has in the past year or so really cracked down on sites that provided guitar TABs....

Pismo Beach

I was lucky enough to get out of work early today. Everything went pretty well on the AFB in prep for tomorrow’s testing, so I managed to head out to Pismo Beach, grab some BBQ, and walk around the beach for a bit. I hadn’t packed anything appropriate (didn’t think I’d have any daylight downtime), so I headed over to the local outlets, bought a new swimsuit and sandals, and enjoyed the sunshine....

by your powers combined

When XFree86 restricted their license in 2004, the result was a fork into the dominant X window manager we know today – X.org. At the time, just about everyone was pissed off at XFree’s sheer arrogance. Thankfully xorg and freedesktop.org pulled everything together and in very short order (relatively speaking) all the major distributions swapped their X server. I mistakenly thought at the time that the progress in the X server would digress – that forks were disruptive to software development....

online booking a vacation

Has anyone else experienced this? When Ann and I were trying to book a flight to Mexico, we started looking around with expedia, travelocity, etc, using different search parameters, etc. After refreshing things, we wanted to go back to a deal we had seen earlier, so we entered those search terms… yet when the one we wanted came up, it had gone up in price about $100! We thought we were mistaken, so tried again....

spring's false start

While it is actually quite mild here along the central coast, Detroit was completely another matter – substantial snowfall in the middle of April. While it was actually quite nice looking out the windows during the wedding to see the snow coming down, I’m sure it wasn’t something Allen and Christine had banked upon. On Sunday we were planning on walking around the town of Birmingham (which, under much better weather would have been quite nice)....

photography workflow

Is it not so simple to ask for one integrated photography workflow tool? It really is about as bad as finding a good photography bag – the people designing them have such a narrow focus, they completely miss the boat. Let me define a few terms: NFA -- Narrowly Focused Application Describes a program that does one or a subset of things very well. However, there is little integration, even on a simplistic level to branch out to other facets of the workflow....

quick turn around

Back from a great (but disconcertingly cold) weekend in Detroit. It was a fantastic wedding and wonderful to see my friends, many of whom its been four years since I saw them last. Everyone is so spread out over the country it’s only at weddings that you manage to get everyone together. I hope to find some excuses to get everyone to fly out to California (maybe with the lure of Tahoe)....