Lenny's Old Old Blog: April 2004

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Friday, April 30, 2004

horsey hats - i guess this deserved a link a couple days ago
holy shit! it's real!

Mystery Sound

Friday, April 30, 2004

I recorded a mystery sound. That was the easy part. Now you have the responsibilty of guessing what that sound is.

Notes on things most would not recognize

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Liz: “I lost my thought, but I swear it was good.”
Mark mounting a sleeping Charlie
Craig: “Are we starting a new unit in gym?”
I was first pick for 2004 gym softball season, due to Justin’s eugenic team formation. As captain (yowza!) Justin selected me, then Beja and Craig. I still cannot feel complete until we steal Alex Roth and crew from the other teams.
I won the impossible coin-dropping game at Taco Hut!

I also got some direction in the college process. I am quite interested in Lehigh, a medium-sized school about an hour north of Philadelphia.

I apologize for the LiveJournal-style briefing.

Enter Mailman

Friday, April 23, 2004

As I log into Blogger to edit this site, I see:

As an active Blogger user, we would like to invite you to be one of the first to try out Google's new email service, Gmail.

Would you like to give it a whirl? YES / NO

Pretty cool, I would say. I never knew how people were selected for beta testing. It turns out they are targeting people who use their other services and would create hype about Gmail. Well, they have succeeded, since clearly by posting this I am spreading the word.

The interface seems very good and fast. Though they do discrminate against the blind and Javascript-less, I will probably use it anyway.

I cannot give much of a review since I am not a heavy email user, but I am sure you can turn to a web search for that.

If you want to send me a message there, the address is the username "Ldrhcp" at the domain "gmail.com".

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Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Evangelism

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Justin switched to Mozilla Firefox due to some sort of persistent crash bug in Internet Explorer that had been nagging him, and after I have long been trying to convince him to use Mozilla, he has accepted Firefox as the better browser.

All is well, but now the missionary has come about in Justin. Not content with just using the browser, he must now spread the gospel of Firefox. In his post, he urges everybody to switch, specifically to his case because he likes the assortment of powerful extensions available.

I have reason to want others to use a standard compliant browser because I code web pages. Internet Explorer's stubborn lack of support for technologies like CSS1 and Javascript, both published as formal web standards in 1996, nearly a decade ago, combined with its inexplicably high marketshare (inexplicably meaning the U.S. did not find Microsoft to be a monopoly) are very frustrating when trying to make a decent web design.

Justin, on the other hand, just loves the UI. He could hardly care less about a shit renderer as long as he can see web pages (usually tailored toward Internet Explorer only because of market share). What brought him in was at first a bug, but what kept him liking Firefox was an excellent interface. Justin's choice was based on the way he uses the browser, not how anybody else uses their's.

In other words, I am a printer, whereas Justin is an evangelist.

Scenario One

Me (playing the printer): Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Me: Here's a Bible—first one's on the house.
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Me: Tell your friends about Jesus. And the Bible. Mention the Bible. And me. Meanwhile, can I interest you in some dime novels?

Scenario Two

Justin (as the evangelist): Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Justin: Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Justin: Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Justin: Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Justin: Praise the lord!
Peasant: Praise the lord!
Justin: Praise the lord!

Justin has turned into a born-again Christian. He was saved, and now everybody has to hear about it.

Well, maybe not a Christian, but Mozilla is a religion. Point Mozilla or one of its derivitives (Firefox, Netscape) at about:mozilla and you will get a passage from the Book of Mozilla. For those of you lacking such a browser, I recommend using one, but in case you for some reason cannot use one or you just want to see the text immediately, here is a transcript:

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Of course, no religion is complete without an adversary, because any other situation would mean that the Messiah had already come. Visiting the same address (about:mozilla) is Internet Explorer shows a friendly blue screen. It is a joke from when Mozilla was the project code name for Netscape, and since Netscape and Microsoft were in direct competition, the Microsoft developers claimed that Netscape caused a blue screen of death (system crash).

Where shall I begin disclaiming this? I certainly will not say that old versions of Netscape were any good, because they certainly were not, but how about the fact that Microsoft built an operating system so prone to crashes (Windows 95 [Ed. (me) – * shudders *]) that users should associate a solid blue background for a web page with a total crash. And isn't the OS partially at fault for Netscape's crashes? One thing I know is that when an application crashes it is isolated to that specific application, but when Internet Explorer crashes it restarts Windows Explorer.

Old browsers aside, Mozilla is currently extremely stable. Version 1.7b, which I am using now, is extremely stable, and it's a beta. The current "stable branch" is pretty much completely crash-bug free, which despite being an older, more tortoise-esque browser, is still years ahead of the latest Internet Explorer, and is much more stable. Firefox, a browser that has not even had its 1.0 release yet, it being accepted as the browser of choice by people like Justin.

In summary, to be a good Christian:

Thou shalt attend church.
Thou shalt not steal software—just use the open-source Mozilla.
Thou shalt spread the gospel, whether you code or browse.
And finally: Thou shalt have no browser besides the lizard.

And as a side note: this was originally going to be a short link-list style post. I think I went a bit over the top, but I too am a religious man.

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Saturday, April 10, 2004

mozilla bittorrents
i wish i had some of that
note to self: look at birds before next web design
free adware! new marketing ploy - install adware on your machine and view partner websites without banner ads
top ten reasons to lower the voting age

Erections!

Thursday, April 08, 2004

Craig writes:

Jeff walks into a bar and sees his friend Paul slumped over the bar. He walks over and asks Paul what's wrong.

"Well," replies Paul, "You know that beautiful girl at work that I wanted to ask out, but I got an erection every time I saw her?"

"Yes," replies Jeff with a laugh.

"Well," says Paul, straightening up, "I finally plucked up the courage to ask her out, and she agreed."

"That's great!" says Jeff, "When are you going out?"

"I went to meet her this evening," continues Paul, "but I was worried I'd get an erection again. So I got some duct tape and taped my penis to my leg, so if I did, it wouldn't show."

"Sensible" says Jeff.

"So I get to her door," says Paul, "and I rang her doorbell. She answered it in the sheerest, tiniest dress you ever saw."

"And what happened then?"

"I kicked her in the face."

This reminds me of another joke I heard recently (via Natalie):

A Jew with an erection walks into a wall. What happens? — He breaks his nose.

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Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Tyson the stakeboarding bulldog

Merry Pesach

Monday, April 05, 2004

If I manage to leaven bread by putting dough on my back and walking around the desert for a while, am I allowed to eat it on Passover?

Not OK

Thursday, April 01, 2004

If you do not know Mark Alexander or do not know what happened, please do not read this post. I understand that this is a public weblog, but this post is not meant for public consumption. Things in it may seem vague if you are ignorant to recent events because I respect the family’s privacy and will not divulge things that are better kept within a circle of friends. This is in the news, but I will not provide a link. My choice to be discreet is better characterized by Brian, who gave the finger to Channel 12.

I was not sure if I should be writing this, so I checked Justin’s weblog. He wrote about it. His post is a bit more erratic. It was earlier. Things were still developing.

Who am I kidding? I didn’t even know her, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It really hasn’t settled down since Justin’s writing.

I decided that it was my duty to write this because I had to acknowledge what occurred. It would not be right to go on as if nothing happened, so even though I do not want anybody besides Justin or Lippy (or another of Mark’s friends who reads my weblog—none that I know of) to read this, my choice is between abandoning weblogging forever or to write this against my better judgment.

The hardest thing for me was telling people. I verified what Craig and Alex had heard, but more difficult was telling my parents and Sam, who had no idea what had happened. I had to bring it up with them because they deserved to know. Each time the word—the word of the deed—came out, my voice faltered.

I felt awful since I found out from Justin yesterday, so I can barely imagine what Mark must be going through.

Your friends love you, Mark.

He is such a great guy. I did not know her, but from what I hear they were very similar. When I learned of this I was afraid Mark would lose his spark. I waited until I got home from school to call him. Calling was made easier by the extraordinary combination of his friends and his own will. Brian had left school and spent the day with him, he invited a few people this afternoon who are currently with him, and he made plans for a movie tomorrow night.

My short chat with him was true to what Brian had said. He was handling his predicament as well as anybody could. More than any emotion, he was grateful for friends reaching out to him. Even after talking to Brian, I expected more sorrow. It seemed unnatural, but he was already numb to the pain. He told me that he had cried earlier.

I could not help but think about September 11. I felt the same way. In either case I only knew people who knew people. From my distance, the death was not of people, but of an integral part of life. What do you mean the Twin Towers fell? How can they not exist anymore if they always had and always were to stand tall and proud as a symbol of the city and its people? How can Mark not have her anymore? How can this core part of one’s being disappear from their life?

It is so frustrating that what happened is over and done with. There is nothing anybody can do—nothing anybody can say. All we have is each other, and we are all useless. The canvas of the past is still so recent and raw in our hearts and minds, but the devil is holding our paints and is laughing as we reach with our brushes. We all want to help Mark, but he cannot even help himself. All anybody can do is continue to live.