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Pictured: the rear of my audio-video devices. I had the opportunity to dismantle this monstrosity during my recent foray into interior painting. What you see is only about 60% of the total conglomeration. I’m hoping that one day all of these date transmission wires will be supplanted by infrared technology or some other wireless means, perhaps. If it can happen to routers, it can happen to audio/video devices.

I have a few days before school starts again, so I thought I’d run a database-driven blog instead of my modest flat-file creation. Much integration will happen in the near future!

Yesterday I went to the Montgomery County Waste Transfer Station and recycled an old computer of mine. Old as in 1992. It held some sentimental value to me, as it was the first computer on which I connected to the Internet. *Sniff* It had a 2400 baud modem, a 200mb hard drive and a 33mhz processor. Excuse me while I go get a tissue.

There was a huge pile of old computers and accessories. I was scavenging around for PC100 memory when Annie noticed a sign that said “Scavenging is strictly prohibited.” Hrmph. Too bad. This afternoon, I noticed a computer outside one of my condominium complex’s trash rooms. The tower must have been about two feet high. A monster. I opened the case to find that someone had already cannibalized the memory. Hmm. There was another smaller tower next to it and a 64mb PC100 memory chip was still intact! I took it out, brought it home, and installed it. Bingo! I now have 160mb, a 66% improvement over the embarrassingly low 96mb I had previously.

At work recently, I was given the green light to create a CD-ROM/print presentation for my organization’s annual Open House. Naturally I chose XHTML as my format. Yesterday morning, I spent four hours in virtual bliss and left muttering under my breath: I can’t believe they’re paying me for this… I’m having so much fun at work; it reminds me of those enthusiastic employees in the Microsoft TV/print ads…

Dude… I’m no. 1 on Google Images for the keywords small kurd.

I’m getting about 16% Firefox penetration at City-Gate.org. Hooray for the Moz!

Dear Mike~

In the article “Apple, Microsoft prepare for war with new systems“, you mention that The name Longhorn just doesn’t get people very excited — unless they live in Texas. Actually, people from Oklahoma, Kansas, Mexico, and Cuba also have the potential to get excited, as longhorn cattle exist in those areas.

Let’s turn the argument around:
The name Tiger just doesn’t get people very excited — unless they live in China, the Russian Federation, North Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bhutan, Nepal, or Bangladesh. Hmm.

I will be editing web pages for the Energy Library and Law Library and need to check my work in multiple browsers — more specifically, multiple rendering engines. Internet Explorer doesn’t adhere to web standards as devised and recommended by the W3C — it doesn’t fully support XHTML or CSS2, and has numerous page-rendering bugs, most notibly the box model problem. IE 6.0 is a stale, flawed product and hasn’t had an update in over five years. The Firefox codebase is constantly being honed and improved, and has richer support for web standards — most noticably XHTML, CSS2/CSS2.1 and parts of CSS3.

From a developer’s standpoint, Firefox comes with a standard set of developer tools including a powerful JavaScript and CSS error/warning console, and an optional Document Inspector that gives detailed insight about your pages. Coding and fixing web pages is easier with Firefox because it’s more strict and less forgiving if you throw mal-formed code at it. Web designers find it easier to code in Firefox, then check their work in IE, rather than the other way around.

From theage.com.au:

Microsoft has hampered standards support in Explorer for five years with its go-slow campaign against the web. Standards-oriented page layout is not possible on most versions of Explorer (CSS box model). Explorer has never met standards for web document identification (HTTP MIME content types), or if one is supported, then simultaneously the other is not.

Security:
Secunia.com reports that IE has 79 security alerts, 33 of which are rated highly or extremely critical. In comparison, Secunia.com reports that Firefox has 4 unfixed security alerts, 0 of which are rated highly or extremely critical.
http://secunia.com/product/11/
http://secunia.com/product/4227/

I also seriously recommend a Department-wide rollout of Firefox to supplant IE6.0.

Know what deeply saddens me? When I go to peoples’ houses and they have a huge, fancy widescreen HDTV, and they’ve got a 4×3 picture stretched to fit their 16:9 display, and they’re using a standard $5 yellow RCA cable instead of component video or HDMI. *Sigh* Granted, I watched the Super Bowl at a friend’s house, and he had everything right — HD, correct aspect ratio, correct cables, sound, et cetera. But it’s no use telling some people when their audio/video components aren’t optimized. When I leave, they would say, “Oh, Matt told me to do something with my TV cables, but I forget now. Oh well.”

MSN.com actually warns you not to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. Check the 14th paragraph, where it gives an external link to download Mozilla Firefox:

Stop using Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s Web browser is a hog. Switching to the Mozilla Firefox or Opera browser can yield swifter program launches, faster page loads, and an all-around smoother ride. In my personal experience, Firefox has proven the fleetest browser…