Plaidophile

and yet I've still lost a kilogram and a half in the past week from playing DDR. :)

Goes well with the previous potatoes recipe.

The side dish I've been eating way too much of lately. Goes well with seafood, or on its own, or whatever.

I am uninspired.

I am feeling lazy.

I am thinking I should design a website for my media company.

I am not feeling like it right now.

So, apparently, Delphine and I are starting a media/design/etc. company.

We decided on the name by using Drug Induced Ultra Scrabble, a free-association game Delphine plays when she wants to come up with names. So we already got the domainname. Woo.

We'll do stuff like web and print media design, tile table tops, video editing and music production, and costuming.

If anyone here needs that sort of thing, I mean.

Just got this message from them.

Ah, those crazy Koreans.

1. People put clever stuff on the Internet for free as a hobby
2. Marketing vultures convince investors that this is a viable business model
3. Everyone gets in on it, making scarce resources (bandwidth, domains, etc.) even scarcer, while bringing up cockeyed business plans which mostly involve selling advertising space to other "businesses" which sell advertising space back to them
4. The fake economy based on fake business plans collapses, leaving a huge gulch, no viable business opportunities, and lots of scammish stuff from people trying to make a quick buck off of the misfortunes of others
5. Website operators have, by this point, totally forgotten that it was originally just them sharing stuff for free, and still believe axiomatically that their websites should be revenue-generating sources of income; any stuff of any quality is now locked up behind aggravating, viewer-unfriendly advertising or "bandwidth control" or "subscriptions" which are priced so high (and way over their current operating overhead) that nobody in their right mind would want to pay for them, and the only new entrants to the arena are either vultures or people who make for vulture prey
6. Anyone who could possibly be interested in a web-based service but isn't already impassioned about it is, thus, totally alienated from it

Don't feel like thinking about anything or working on anything. So probably no Eaveston tonight. But I need to be entertained. So, could someone please entertain me? :)

Was easy, and free, since I was able to use nothing but stuff Delphine had laying around which she was willing to part with. :D

Minor: The cords are too short. Easy fix, just needs some cheap extension cables.

Major: Even though the pads are non-slip, they still slide around a bit, and it's very easy to lose track of where your feet are.

And very exhausting. But in a good way. Unlike Beatmania which makes me feel like amputating my hands after I play it for a stretch.

It'd be really nice if the arcade mode could be used as a workout too, though. I think I'll play it in arcade until I unlock everything before I do anything in workout mode. (Workout mode doesn't unlock stuff.)

My DDR dance pads just arrived! Yay!

And like a good consumer, before I use them, I should read the manual.

I'm mostly happy with Opera 7.11 now that I've gotten the major issues out of the way, but there are still a few annoyances with it.

Calibrate your monitor, so you can see how dark most webpages are.

Damnit. It's really hard to want to make sure everything of mine fits a standard if it means having to put up with everyone else's stuff being really dark. (Though I'm not the first to notice this.)

I think the sRGB group made a horrible choice in going with γ=2.2 (they decided to go with 2.2 because "that's what NTSC uses," and IMO they should have stuck to somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8), specifically because most of the content out there appears to be designed for a gamma somewhere between 1.5 and 1.8; a standard gamma of 2.2 means everyone who wants to adhere to the standard really has their work cut out for them.

When I first put it up, I was calibrating everything to a linear color space for pedantic reasons, but I've modified it to work with gamma of 1.8 or 2.2, with an explanation of why those two gammas (specifically 2.2), and a bit of a thing complaining about that being the "standard." I also fixed the printer/scanner stuff, and cleaned up my wording to try to make it more consistent and accurate.

So, if you haven't looked already, check it out, especially if you're going to be posting images on the web. I'm also going through the site and color-correcting everything I can for sRGB, since sRGB images still look reasonable on non-sRGB displays but the converse is definitely not true. It was foolish of me to do all my prior work with a gamma of 1.2... so if you ever looked at my artwork and thought, "God damn that's dark and shadowy," go back and look again. :)

Earlier today, a friend was upset that his digital camera was capturing a purple object as blue, and sent me the picture to show off how bad it was. However, it looked perfectly purple to me, because unlike him, my monitor was actually calibrated to the linear colorspace.

So I made some quick monitor calibration images so that he, and anyone else, could calibrate his monitor, too.

Then I realized that calibrating a monitor to a linear curve is nonstandard, and modified things to calibrate it to a gamma of 1.8. (The W3C says that you're supposed to use the sRGB standard of 2.2, but IMO 1.8 looks better, and most software seems to be geared towards a display at 1.8. Or something.) The friend needs to just properly gamma-correct the camera, or see if he can make the camera put out sRGB instead.

Basically, colorspaces fucking suck.

Wow, it actually uses X11 focus and window management policies!

Wow, it gets along with pwm!

Wow, it has session management and recovery which is almost as good as Galeon 1.2's was!

Wow, it lets me set keyboard bindings to UNIX-style, and its UNIX keyboard bindings are mostly-correct! (though ^T is incorrect, and I don't like how shift-whatever has a loaded meaning, and apparently doesn't allow shift-enter, and how pressing 'down' at the bottom of a text field doesn't jump to the end of the line)

Something I've been thinking about recently.

Concept: Take advantage of underlying UNIXisms to make a file system which has complete, or at least pretty good, undo recovery.

I finally got a steamer which can also cook rice, because it's apparently impossible for me to cook a single serving of rice in a regular saucepan and so I never like to actually do it. Apparently it takes 40 minutes to do one serving of sushi rice in this steamer (according to the manual, anyway), as opposed to 20 minutes to do like 6 servings in a regular pot. Oh well, I'm not hungry yet anyway.

Update: Apparently I'm an idiot who doesn't realize that you shouldn't use your hands to open up a hot steamer. My thumb is probably going to hurt for a few days now. Meh.

I'm just in the early planning stages of some major house renovation (a lot of it depending on getting an income and so on), and just now a friend linked me to this.

Damn, that is really cool.

I finally fixed my firewall the other day, and did the whole case-swapping fandango.

At this point, none of the parts in my workstation are from the original system (I decided it was stupid to actually swap a floppy drive between two cases).

In the meantime, my home network is much happier, and my workstation looks much cooler. This black case is actually designed well to work with white-colored drives.

The snapping shrimp is a shrimp which has a very unique defense and hunting mechanism; it actually uses acoustic cavitation to produce a large snapping sound to stun its attackers and prey. The snap is so powerful that it actually produces a small (but ultimately insignificant) flash of light.

Considering that the energy output of the cavitation is enough to heat the cavity to around 5000K, I definitely wouldn't want my finger to be in the way when it happens.

Just bought DDRMax for PS2 (but no pad; the one they had at Best Buy was crappy and more expensive than getting two decent pads on eBay), the Samurai Jack movie, and Thirteenth Floor. Yay me.

babylago writes,

How will [visibility determination research] help people?

I'm curious, now that you know [what I discovered in my master's research], what do you do with it?

I mean, my mom's in Germany right now without a phone number or email access, so it's kind of hard to wish her happy mother's day, right? :)

Guess I'll email all of her addresses and hope one gets through to her.

A while ago, the motherboard on my firewall died, so I've been using a crappy D-Link router in the meantime. I finally just ordered a new motherboard for it, and also a new case, which I will probably transplant my current workstation into, and then I will transplant my studio system into my workstation's case, and then finally put the firewall into the studio system's case.

(I didn't have a case for the firewall before, and I think that contributed to the motherboard getting zapped.)

So, after doing this, there won't be a single part on my workstation which has been continuous since its inception except for its floppy drive, which it has a terrible pain in.

Maybe I should rename it "Marvin."

Two and a half dreams from last night.

Last 30000 hits:

• Opera (total): 394 (1.313%)
  • version 6: 235 (0.783%)
  • version 7: 183 (0.61%)
• Safari: 238 (0.793%)
• MSIE (all platforms): 15950 (53.166%)
  • Mac: 271 (0.903%)

In the meantime, it's real annoying how most browsers put "Mozilla" in their User-Agent string, including very non-Mozilla browsers like Safari, Konqueror, and MSIE, because it makes getting accurate stats on actual Mozilla browsers very difficult, and to make things even stupider, Safari puts "KHTML, like Gecko" in its User-Agent, making it even harder! But my guesstimate from the above is that practically all visitors run MSIE for Windows or something Gecko-based, both of which at least try to get CSS correct (and when they fail, it's not catastrophically), which is great because this is a personal site I receive no income from and can't exactly hire people to make sure every single page of my site performs perfectly on every buggy browser out there.

I'm sure I had a point in there somewhere, but I don't want to be a zealot... :P

I just had a long, involved, and mostly-nonsensical dream which was in perfectly-valid HTML4 and CSS2 about Shooby insisting that I make kitten-friendly accessibility-minded alternate stylesheets.

I think that's enough webdesign for a few days.

Becky Burke asks,

I am very interested in learning more about video game designers. I am a Substitute Teacher who has met students who are "highly" interested and passionate about wanting to know how one educates themselves on how to design video games. I glanced through your ideas and think they are terrific. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My (probably ill-informed) response follows.

I was hoping that in the browsers which didn't implement the before and after elements properly, it just wouldn't display them. KHTML was perverse in displaying them and then putting in an implicit linebreak after them.

So if you're seeing a doubling-up of certain contentless formatting things (such as dashes, parenthesis, and angle brackets), reload the page to refresh the stylesheet. Oh joy.

Update: I think I figured out where the problem is. The default display for :before is block. Now I know how to fix it.

Update: No, I have no idea how to fix it, but I think in this case, it's actually Gecko which is implementing it wrong.

Update: Okay, it was very briefly working totally correctly in KHTML, but now for the main site all of the generated brackets and parentheses and so on have disappeared. Oh well, at least it's not ugly. Now to still figure out how to work around this fucking obnoxious bug with IE/Mac 5.2...

Look, the CSS for my site isn't all that complex.

But apparently it seems to think that the default width:auto property on a div (specifically, #main) means "reduce it to a 0%-wide sliver," and that min-width:25% means "make it 100% of the page width, and don't bother floating it or anything."

Meh.

All your atoms must now tremble before me in fear and admiration!

Or something.

Initiate startup sequence for project MASTER'S DEFENSE.

WOOOOOOO!