Blogs

To motivate you.

Just finished reading The Wee Free Men, a book set in the Discworld universe, after completeing Going Postal. Now I just need to read through A Hat Full of Sky, and I'll be almost all caught up on my Discworld, minus Thud!.

Quick mini-review. It's classic Discworld, although slightly blunter since it's meant for "young adults" although I'd think a "young adult" would be more than capable of reading straight Discworld. But that doesn't mean it's any less entertaining.

If it were going to be in any of the other storylines, it would be a "three witches" story, although it concentrates on Tiffany Aching, a young girl just discovering what it means to be a witch. She discovers the Nac Mac Feegle, who assist her in fighting the invasion of fairy monsters from another world.

So I'm helping someone with something, because they're getting an error:

"Catastrophic error" (8000ffff)

Um... OK. I guess something went wrong. I dunno what, but SOMETHING sure wasn't happy!

So, after a bit of searching, I've been able to figure out that "Catastrophic error" essentially means "some error occured that I don't have an error code for." (Interestingly enough, if you search for it, you'll get the VB error code that I was getting, along with two surgeons who removed the good kidney from a man with kidney failure and an editorial on the war in Iraq.)

Ah, I finally finished my Christmas shopping and got everything all wrapped for Christmas.

Which, by my local time, is in about 10 and a half hours.

Yay!

President Bush:
We would make it so the world could never trust us again.

Yeah, sorta like those WMDs, right?

President Bush:
We will win the war in Iraq.

Sort of like you said we would last year?

Now don't get me wrong, I know that we have to stay in Iraq and that pulling out would likely be disasterous. But, I knew that before you went into Iraq in the first place!

Face it, Bush, you were overly optimistic. The war in Iraq is going to take a long time. History teaches us that. It took years for the United States to become the United States after the revolutionary war. You know when we finally pulled out of Germany and Japan after World War II? We haven't yet. Iraq is, almost certainly, going to follow that pattern. It'll take a good ten years at least to rebuild Iraq and make it secure, and many billions of dollars. Saying otherwise is naive.

There's nothing quite like watching analog cable, and noticing... MPEG artifacts?! (See, analog is, well, analog, and MPEG is digital, so......)

Actually, there is something worse.

When whatever computer they're using to decode the MPEG stream screws up the stream, cutting out a few seconds of the episode. (Frequently during some important scene...)

But they've actually gone one worse than that. One night - it actually crashed. All channels, frozen.

Yay Comcast. This is definitely worth the money.

Everywhere you go,
There's traffic blocking the street,

... and I don't remember the original song enough to continue.

Bottom line, it's NOT EVEN THANKSGIVING YET, and we couldn't find a parking space at the Best Buy. So instead we got DragonQuest VIII at GameStop, after finally finding a parking spot at the mall.

If this were the weekend after Thanksgiving, I could understand the traffic. But it's not. It's the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Actually, come to think of it, when Christmas does actually arrive, we can expect the traffic to be twice as bad.

A pox on those who don't use "a { cursor: pointer; }"! A pox on them!

Seriously, try and guess where the links are on that page. Go ahead.

Guess.

(Unless your browser doesn't support cursor: help, in which case it's slightly easier.)

Even then, the lack of underlines or other hints left me thinking, originally, that there was no content on that page.

Bad Fey, bad!

(Some of the other pages have links which use "cursor: default" which is also BAD.)

So, I'm trying to set up a server to only allow connections from within the company I work for. I give it two IP ranges to allow connections from, and hit apply. And then...

I get disconnected.

So it's down from the third floor to the lab in the basement, to discover that I had indeed mis-typed the IP range. Quickly correct it, check from another computer in the lab that it actually works, and then back up to the third floor.

D'oh.

At least I know the firewall works!

So over the past week, Jason in Foxtrot has been trying to decide on the best costume, with hopes to scare people into giving him the most candy.

So what did they choose?

Well, it's two guys in suits and hats. But what's written on those hats?