Plaidophile

Why does Logic Pro love to lose my instrument and channel strip settings? Especially on a song I haven't touched in a few months and of course can't remember what they were. GOD DAMNIT.

It seems to do this completely at random, and lots of my songs have had to get totally remastered as a result (usually because EXS24 decides to fuck up while I'm tuning the mix). And now the plus+5 version of Stronger Than, which I don't have a .wav version of anymore because of my own stupid shortsightedness many months ago, is completely hosed. Fuck.

If you're seeing this, then DNS has propagated over to you. Yay!

I decided to move my stuff over to Dreamhost. My little Mac mini was getting overworked by serving up so much stuff, and my home DSL connection was getting pretty slow as well. Also, Dreamhost offers a lot of rather nice stuff including a vhosted Jabber server, a pretty nifty file selling mechanism (which I am most definitely considering for any albums I put out in the future), and much better uptime especially considering how often OSX security updates are getting pushed out lately.

In the future, please put primary keys on all your tables. It makes it a lot easier to restore and convert the database without having to worry about duplicate rows.

Love,
fluffy

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Remember that insane guy I did contract work for back in 2004?

Yeah.

But the BCG partners sued each other and parted ways in September, each alleging the other owed money.

I'm pretty sure I know who owes who.

If three related things occur at once it's a "trifecta." If it occurs in sports, it's a "hat-trick," and if you do it specifically in bowling it's a "turkey." There are no related special terms for more than three. Why is getting three things special but four things not?

Why do we latch on to a law of threes?

Spoilers within.

I'm converting my databases from Postgres to MySQL so I can move my sites over to Dreamhost. I think this has all gone off without a hitch, but I need to test it, of course.

As much as I want to like Safari, and as much as it's better-integrated into the OS than Firefox (albeit in ways which don't really make much difference, like using the system spelling checker and proxy settings and native widgets and so on), lots of websites just don't work right on Safari. Also Firefox actually has session restoring, which is something I rarely need in Safari but when I do need it, I really wish it were there.

Plus, I got sick of not having any equivalent to AdBlock Plus. Sure, I had a huge user.css file which was accreting all the new common banner ad sizes but there was still no way to block IntelliTXT et al.

I do miss being able to right-click a word or selection and get all the usual rich things that OSX provides for that, though, like 'look up in dictionary' or whatever. Oh well.

Safari really just needs a proper extensions framework!

The hard drive in my aging laptop finally gave out after a bit over 3 years of more or less faithful service and abuse. So I just ordered a new drive. Hopefully it won't be as difficult to install as the scary guide makes it seem.

Since nobody had any other ideas and I heard no objections to this one:

We will meet at Sunset Bowl (1420 NW Market St, Seattle) at 8:00 PM on Saturday (the 16th). At that time we can have dinner (mm greasy spoon) and bowl a few games. I will have several coupons which allow for 21 free games (one game meaning 10 frames). I doubt enough people will bowl that we will use all 210 free frames. (Also, it is worth knowing that if you get a receipt for a drink from the bar, you get a free shoe rental.)

We will stay for karaoke, which begins at 9:30.

If the karaoke sucks too bad, we will go to my home. There we will watch movies or play video games (I have quite a few multiplayer games to choose from) or just generally "chillax."

SO THAT IS THE PLAN. Meet at 8 at Sunset Bowl.

I know most of the people who I want to come will not be reading this so if you are reading this and know someone else who would probably want to come to this please give them the details. GET THE WORDS OUT, YO.

<3 ♥

This Thursday is my birthday. As such, we need to make this Saturday special. Since we don't have a current regular stop anymore, maybe we should entertain notions of something else to do?

I'm sort of considering throwing a party at my place but I don't really feel like preparing for one.

An alternate idea: Blue C Sushi (in U Village). It's not the best sushi in town or anything but it's (relatively) cheap and (objectively) fun.

Another easy thing: just order a bunch of pizza and watch movies at my place, and maybe play a bunch of Wii Sports and/or DDR. (Though for anything at my place I'd much much rather cook something, since I have this hang-up about not showing off my epicurean tendencies whenever possible.)

Any thoughts?

6/14 Just to clarify, I was referring to the Saturday shenanigans (karaoke, which is already in a state of flux), not the Thursday night crowd! Spud told the Thursday crowd I want to do something different than our usual thing but it's exactly what I wanted to do tonight. Sorry for not being more clear.

Everyone's all atwitter with the gay bomb thing that was recently reported, except several news sources broke this story a year and a half ago. Has righteous indignation on the Internet gained much more critical mass since then?

I can no longer tell the difference between LCD subpixel rendering and traditional anti-aliasing.

I used to always be able to see color fringes on ClearType rendering. Though I also realized mathematically that if there were ever a high enough pixel density that ClearType's fringes weren't visible, there shouldn't be a visible difference between it and non-subpixel rendering anyway - which has borne out.

Anyway. Just the thing I needed to realize right before a birthday. Ugh. (That and I have a hell of a lot of gray hair now. Though I started going gray when I was 16 so that's not too surprising.)

Yesterday, finally started playing it in earnest. I'm glad I managed to get past the annoying fishing thing towards the beginning because very soon after it becomes really awesome.

Also, Midna is totally cute-hot.

So, a few weeks ago, T-Mobile redesigned their billing site again. As a result of this change, I could no longer pay my T-Mobile bill via Safari. So of course I sent them an email to that effect, pointing out that it used to work in Safari and that it still works in Firefox, and it looked like a very simple Javascript error (they were URL-encoding the Javascript in the onClick handler). So of course I got this response from them: (in all of the emails I've trimmed out the dozens of times they use my first name in some attempt at coming across as more "personal")

we regret to inform you that our website has not been test with Mac OS X or the Safari browser. We strongly recommend using a supported browser such as Internet Explorer from a Windows computer. On a Windows computer using Internet Explorer please try to clear the cookies/temporary Internet files on your computer. To do this please follow the steps below.

1. Select Tools from the tool bar on your browser.
2. Select Internet Options.
3. When this window displays, select Delete Files, and delete all Offline Content.
4. Then, select Settings, and View Files.
5. A window will appear displaying all of your cookies/temporary Internet files. Hit Ctrl+A on your keyboard to highlight all of your files, and select Delete on the keyboard.
6. Return back to the regular Internet Options window, and select Clear History.

Once you have completed all of these steps, please close out all of your open windows of Internet Explorer. This step is important because the cookie/Internet File deletion will not take place until they are all closed. In addition, please make sure that your browser security settings are set to Medium. If you are still experiencing difficulties we recommend trying on a different computer.

Devin was under a lot of stress so she canceled karaoke this weekend, and since I got an acoustic pickup the other day I decided to record a song with it. (That's not the best performance I've done of that particular song but after 12 takes which got screwed up for stupid reasons I just wanted to get it done. I'll probably rerecord it again later.)

I keep forgetting how much I hate bok choi. Why do I keep putting it in stirfry?