My girlfriend pointed me towards a couple of comic strips over at Achewood. I hadn’t seen that site but it looks promising enough to violate my ban on contentless RSS feeds. I guess I can use it as a hint to go look at the strip. Here’s a couple of good ones: – December 5, 2001 – February 28th, 2007 Of course, I continue reading xkcd.com, as well as indexed. I think I need a couple more techie/dorky cartoons to read.
It’s scary, my experience with Microsoft Windows Vista on my desktop machines is starting to make me think seriously about a machine running Mac OS X. Maybe I’ll see if I can snag a cheap Mac Mini on eBay or something. Or, I could go back to Windows XP. Linux and FreeBSD aren’t options, given the applications I like to run. There is very little to love about Windows Vista, overall. Beyond the eye candy updates there are more problems than fixes, and it takes me 50% more clicks to do just about everything.
If anything, it’s how not to hold a rifle that you know is going to kick like crazy. Still amusing, though.
Well, it just fixed my iTunes Vista problems, but that’s very cool. Thanks Apple! Actually, iTunes still needs to be killed to quit it. I guess Apple programmers aren’t good Windows programmers after all. I think it may be time to ditch iTunes.
“A vulnerability has been reported in Netrek Vanilla Server, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or compromise a vulnerable system.” Why does this excite me? Because I haven’t thought about (or played) Netrek for years. It’s like seeing an advisory for Nethack. Lately, my gaming has been pretty low-tech: Dopewars and Wall Street Raider. Much to Sony’s dismay, good games don’t require crazy high tech graphics. Just ask Nintendo. 🙂
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of backscatter spam. Backscatter is the term for when a spammer uses your email address and you get all the bounces. Last night I got about 200 bounce messages, on top of the 1000 spam messages I usually get. The spam is filtered nicely, but the bounce messages head straight for my “in” box. The reason I like big mail systems is because the administrators usually understand the issues with spam and act to minimize the collateral damage from it. I don’t get backscatter from AOL, Hotmail, or domains served by Postini. I get it from all sorts of little domains and mail servers, where they don’t care enough to do it right. IT …
Well, I return from my ice fishing trip happy and warm. It was pretty damn cold 45 minutes south of Superior, WI, but that also means a nice two-foot sheet of ice to drive out on. 🙂 Collectively we did okay fishing, I caught a few things here and there but nothing serious. The one nice fish I did have came off the line as I was pulling him out. It was a big crappie. Big. Residents of the area may have heard the expletives I shouted across the lake in frustration. I did learn one lesson, though: in order for movie quotes to be considered funny (“I caught you a delicious bass!”) others need to have seen the movie …
It’s been a busy week. As the blog turns I’ve managed to annoy some users of certain text editors, and I’ve ranted a little. Not super productive. For the rest of February I want to do at least one on-topic post a day. My personal life has had some amazingly awesome things happening that have taken some of my free time, so I’ll have to work that out. Work has been super busy lately, with new projects starting that promise to be interesting, if not fun to work on. Many blog posts ahead for those things. But, now I have to head north, for poker, beer, and ice fishing. All this sub-zero weather is good for something: freezing lakes. 🙂
Okay, okay, I was going to make a comment but I thought a followup full post was a better idea. Jesse Grosjean and xen0cide had good comments, but I’ve been getting some, um, interesting hate email. I don’t have a lot of time to comment right now, but here’s what I’ve got: First, please stop sending me idiotic email. I don’t hate Macs, and I enjoy rational commentary as comments to the post. I think I mentioned there are two excellent ones in the post already, use them as examples. Second, I think it’s cool that Jesse/Hog Bay Software are cool with the duplication. Hopefully he can pull some good ideas back from the other clones. Third, xen0cide, I wouldn’t …