Published on Thursday April 29, 2004 .
iTunes 4.5 is pretty nice and all, but two big pet peeves that have been around since the introduction of each feature sadly still remain:
- The iPod Preferences dialogue still sucks: In particular, if you have a lot of playlists, that too-small scroll pane is a big pain to work with. Just making that dialogue resizable would solve a lot of problems.
- On the other hand, the Smart Playlist preference dialogue has the opposite problem: If you add too many rules, the dialogue just grows off the screen, with no way to actually access the rules that are off the bottom of the screen. Those rules need to turn into a scroll pane at that point.
Besides that, iPod 2.2 still doesn't add the ability to delete entries from the On-The-Go playlist, or have multiple OTGs. Further, I'd like to have a "Party Shuffle" on the iPod, though the necessary editing features would be a little tricky to implement.
Feedback goes here.
Published on Tuesday April 27, 2004 .
John Kerry Is A Douche Bag But I'm Voting For Him Anyway.com
Yep, that's pretty much what it comes down to. Sad but true.
Not all fun and games - Police called 40 times this year to Chuck E. Cheese on Blue Mound Road
It's amazing what you find when trying to answer the question "Does Chuck E Cheese serve beer?" For the record: "Beer and wine are served at the majority of the 460 Chuck E. Cheese restaurants in the United States."
I spent most of my weekend working on Stew's Poos, a website I made for my mom for Mother's Day about her Cockapoos. They're awfully cute dogs (a cross between cocker spaniels and poodles), and they're adorably cuddly.
Most of the time was spent coming up with a useful extensible css based layout, but I'm pretty happy with the resulting html. It's apparently even xhtml 1.1 compliant, even though I was only shooting for xhtml 1.0 trans. There's still at least one more page to make, and there are some small adjustments I still need to make, but I'm pretty happy with its current state.
Published on Wednesday April 7, 2004 .
Fundrace.org: Find out who donated to whom.
That Money Map is almost depressing. No good at all.
Honestly, I wasn't particularly excited about going snowboarding at this point, and had pretty much written the season off as over. It'd been "unseasonably hot" for the better part of March, but about 10 inches of snow drove us to give it one more shot. But after the weekend, I'm pretty much convinced that the season really is over. I'm not quite ready to put summer wax on my board, but it's only a technicality at this point.
- Date(s): Saturday, March 27th and Sunday, March 28th, 2004.
- Who: Me, Rick, and Tyler.
- Basically, the snow was so bad we went for intoxicated skiing. I rode on three beers both days.
- On Saturday, we left Berkeley at around 7:30, and got to Kirkwood around noon. Then Rick had to put his new bindings on, so it was around 1 by the time we got on the mountain.
- I killed time by drinking, so by the time we were ready to go I was ready to stop.
- I rode with my Lame t-shirt over my burton thermal, and I was still sweating like crazy. I think it was something like 53 out on Saturday, so by the end of the day I had a monster dehydration headache. I can't imagine why.
- On Sunday, we woke up at 7:30 again, but on account of being in Minden we got to Kirkwood at around 8:30.
- We were sober in the morning, and we spent most of it taking really fast runs down a nicely groomed Wall. It was probably the fastest I've ever gone on The Wall -- possibly the fastest I've ever gone. I wasn't quite straightlining it, but I had a non-trivial amount of speed.
- We stopped to snack around 11 because we were already cooking. I wasn't wearing my fleece, despite the fact that Tyler somehow convinced me I needed to bring it. He totally owes me a donut for that.
- Drinking ensued.
- We rode until around 2, when the bottom of the mountain was getting so slushy that it was just too much work to even consider going on. I think it was forecast to be around 60 on Sunday, and it certainly felt like it.
- The snow was so soft that I was literally kicking up a wave when I turned, and it splashed when it landed.
- It was not at all an appropriate weekend for jumping, so there was none of that.
- Pictures:
So that's pretty much it for Snowboarding 2004. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. In theory I'll have videos to post at some point, if I ever get motivated.
On Wednesday night we listened to Kevin Smith answer questions for five hours before we finally couldn't take it anymore and left.
Now don't get me wrong -- the "it" I couldn't take certainly wasn't Kevin himself, because he's one damn funny man. Rather, what I couldn't stomach was all the fanboys (and girls) creating some truly awkward moments with their poorly thought out and unrehearsed questions. Now I grant it might be a little obsessive to rehearse a question, but given that you had to plan in advance to buy a ticket in the first place, you might as well plan your damn question in advance too. And I guarentee all these people saw An Evening With Kevin Smith, so I can't help but wonder if they realized that their poorly thought out questions made them "that guy" that made you squirm while watching the DVD.
Highlights of the evening that I remember were:
- Kevin clearly found the signers on stage novel. Extra funny was that he didn't notice the first time they swapped, so when he turned and saw a new person sitting there, he was visibly startled.
- The Jewish girl who goes to a Catholic high school in Oakland (because public schools in Oakland = no good). Kevin was fascinated, and was asking her a lot of questions about how that works.
- The guy from New Zealand who sounded like Kermit. Once Kevin pointed out his voice, everyone couldn't help but laugh every time he tried to finish asking his question. It was kind of mean, but fucking funny. After answering the question, Kevin sang a bit of Rainbow Connection.
- I was amazed by the scope of his potty mouth. It gave me something to strive for.
- Kevin was also amused by the Berkeley/Stanford rivalry, and by the NorCal/SoCal rivalry, and especially amused by the idea of LA stealing "our" water. "Do they really steal your water? I've never heard of that before," he said. "You're all Californians to me," he said.
- Apparenly Jason Mewes had sex with 27 women in a month. "If I knew all it took was starting a conversation with 'How you doin''? and ending it with 'Snooch,' I would have been all over that a long time ago.
- Apparently, Jason Mewes is also living clean now, and he's moved into a house with some other clean living people named "The Falcon's Nest."
It took me awhile, but I think I figured out how Kevin deals with the stupid questions:
- Someone paid him a whack of cash.
- He makes a moderate amount of fun of some of the people who ask the really stupid questions, so that's probably entertaining for him.
- If they're really stupid, then he can put them on a DVD, in hopes of both making the person feel like a real idiot, and in hopes of having that serve as a warning to dissuade future idiots from asking the same stupid questions.
Clearly 3 doesn't work in practice, so I guess he has to focus on 1 and 2. I would be curious to hear his internal monologue during the Q&A, though. "Oh damnit, not this question again." "Oh damnit, this fucker already asked me a question."
The straw that broke the camel's back was this: The girlfriend of the guy who asked the first question got into line after her boyfriend asked his question, so it was 4 or 5 hours later that she made it to the front of the line. She asked some stupid question, and then followed it up with a request for a kiss. "What!?" "My boyfriend's cool with it. He's sitting right there." And after she sat down, her boyfriend got back in the line to ask another question.
As it happened, though, we apparently left about 10 minutes before Kevin called it quits, and we missed someone ask him what his favorite bird of prey was. "What, like from the comic book?" he asked. "Wait, did you say you were a falconer?" Heh.