On a lighter note:

There are people on my ‘People Who Are Exactly Like HomerTheBrave‘ blogring who aren’t subscribed to me. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad, but either way, it’s funny, so I’m OK with it.

Crazy genius who can’t operate simple machines update:

I just discovered that you have to click on ‘Protected Posts’ to read your friends’ protected ‘blogs. So all of you folks out there who think I’m ignoring you, I’m not. It’s just that I’ve been working under the assumption that I’d see everything I was subscribed to by reading my subscriptions. Silly me.

Here’s some news I find hard to believe:

A federal judge “rejected Microsoft’s post-trial claim that Eolas had misrepresented the facts in the patent case, which claimed the software giant had stolen browser technology relating to plug-ins. The ruling came after a $521 million verdict against the software giant last month, and ends Microsoft’s first attempt to challenge the result.”

Besides paying over half a billion dollars to the patent holder, Microsoft is supposed to cripple its market-leading browser so that IE/Windows will no longer seamlessly play Flash, Quicktime, RealVideo, or Adobe Acrobat files, Java applets, and other rich media formats. Once the company does this, any site that uses these technologies will no longer work in the browser most people use.

And here’s Microsoft’s solution

User Experience for Affected Web Pages

By default, users are prompted with a dialog box prior to loading each ActiveX control on an affected Web page. When the user clicks OK in this dialog box, the control loads normally.

So basically, for every element that’s a plug-in, you’ll have to click OK in a little dialog box.

Part of me is happy to see MS get the pointy end. Another part of me knows that MS’ stop-gap solution is designed to annoy users into rising up against the ruling and hopefully effect the outcome of their appeal. And still another part of me is glad I use a better browser anyway.

I’m leaving a thrift store. There are two women, early 30s or so, immediately in front of me on the way through the exit door. One of them is carrying a toddler, 2 years old or less, who’s facing me over her shoulder. He sees me and makes eye contact. I smile and wave. By now, we’ve all gone through the exit door. He waves back awkwardly and says, “Byeeeeeeeee!”

The women hear him and laugh. They will go their entire lives thinking he was saying goodbye to the store.

You know where I want to live?

I want to live here.

See, I’m looking for a new place to live, for a variety of reasons, and ya you betcha, it’s gotta be da Ballard, eh? Now, if only I had $1900/month to throw down a hole, I’d be set.

Ya know what’s funny? When I click on ‘New Blog Entry,’ my web browser chooses to draw the big text entry square before it draws the window and the rest of the page on the screen. So, for just a split second, there’s a big white square with a 3-4 pixel border in the middle of the monitor.

And you know what else looks like that? Well, back in the good old days, Macintosh system software had a debugger called MacsBug. Whenever software would crash, it would draw a big white square with a 3-4 pixel border in the middle of the monitor, with a text prompt where you could find out what just happened.

So every time of late that I’ve started to ‘blog, there’s a split second where I think my computer has crashed. I’ll use this lame excuse to explain why I haven’t had much to say here lately.

To make it up to all my loyal readers and loving friends (and despised enemies), here’s some music for your auditory edification: ‘Changes‘ by Paul Whiteman And His Orchestra. One of the singers is Bing Crosby, though you really can’t tell. Recorded November 23, 1927. It always reminds me of Frank Zappa.

A propos of nothing, here’s the first item in the list of things Google mentions as having happened that day:

The young priest’s health was poor. He was especially troubled with constant stomach pains. His return to Mexico was a joy on the one hand and suffering on the other. He saw his people suppressed by the government that should have been serving them. Father Pro realized that he could bring them spiritual comfort. He could forgive their sins through the sacrament of Reconciliation. He could bring them the Eucharistic Jesus to be strength. And that he did. Miguel was ingenious at disguising himself. He slipped in and out of buildings and rooms and lives. He was always just on the verge of getting caught. Then he would slip out of sight.

Father Pro performed his ministry heroically until November 23, 1927. He was caught and condemned for being a Catholic priest. He faced the firing squad and stretched out his arms until his whole body was like a living cross. Then he called in a loud voice: “Visa Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King.)

The idea of Bing Crosby (Catholic, educated by Jesuits) singing this song while Father Pro was being martyred makes one wonder what’s happening in the world while you’re, say, sitting on the toilet doing crossword puzzles.

Did you know that $4 billion (with a ‘b’) of the Iraqi oil money is unaccounted for? That is, the US provisional government doesn’t know where it is.

Here… Read about it in the foreign press, or from the Christian Aid press release.

Did you read this in YOUR newspaper? Of course not. Like President Bush says, the US media is too busy concentrating on the bad news. I’d add that they’re not concentrating enough on the REALLY BAD news.

I just had an idea for a new computer game. It’s like The Sims, only instead of the regular depiction of the sims, they’re represented only by their chakras. The chakras vary in brightness, according to ‘score.’

Also, in addition to changing the sims into transcendent energy-beings, we remove the fettered world of the known, but we leave it’s geographical limitations in effect. That is, our chakra sims live in The Void, shown on screen as a huge black emptiness. But the sims can still stub their toes, bump into each other, crash their cars, and die. You still have to feed them, because they have bodies, even if they aren’t visible on the screen.

SimVoid expansion pack… I’ll make a million!

Hope you folks in the LA area are doing OK…

I know for a fact that at least one of my readers will be happy to learn that there’s an open-source clone of OxyD for a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X.