So it seems that there have been numerous accounts and stories floating around the net of people mishandling their Wii-motes, inadvertently throwing them or letting go of them causing damage to both animate (humans) and inanimate objects ($5k plasmas). I’m not sure where I stand on this. I kind of think a lot of these self-proclaimed victims of faulty straps are kind of spazzes. Then again, I’ve come across some people that have that disease where they sweat all the time and I can sympathize that maybe it’s these poor guys that are launching their Wii-motes.

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You ever sleep for like ten hours and you weren’t really that tired? Instead, you were caught up in one of those most vividest dreams ever…the kind where it takes you a long time to realize it’s just a dream, but even when you do you don’t want to wake up, because you want to find out how it turns out cause it’s just so, I dunno, right or thought provoking - worthy of letting your brain wrap itself around it no matter how atypical, out-of-nowhere or relevant it is to your life. Maybe once upon a time it was very relevant, but it hasn’t been for a few years or even decades. Bizarre.

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Because this always bears repeating… (Find out more information @ http://www.stopie.com.

Help stop Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular and worst internet browser. This site tells you how and why to switch.

StopIE - Rid the web of Internet Explorer

Welcome to StopIE.com. We are dedicated to the removal of InternetExplorer as the most common browser on the web. There are many reasons for this.

Internet Explorer’s Main Problems

There are countless bugs in Internet Explorer, but here are the main reasons to choose a free alternative.

• Prone to viruses and worms
• Renders pages incorrectly. Web designers then need to spend extratime working so that pages work in Internet Explorer. This puts costsup, and slows the web down.
• Doesn’t let people resize certain text sizes. This means those with poor sight cannot read small text on many sites.
• Far slower program than other web browsers
• Far larger program than other web browsers
• Isn’t as user-centric as other web browsers. It lacks many handy features such as tabbed browsing and integrated search
• Doesn’t support PNG images properly

Alternatives to Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is the worst major browser. There are a number of free alternativesavailable. These alternatives are standards compliant, i.e. theyconform to international standards. Internet Explorer is not standardscompliant, and thus renders pages wrongly.

On the alternatives to Internet Explorerpage, we outline many superior competitors, all of which are free orhave free versions. These are Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon, Mozilla,Opera, Camino and Safari.

Microsoft responding?

Microsoft have announced ‘IE7′ will be available in the summer(Beta). Security fixes are expected, given MS’ recent bad press in thisarea, but few expect Microsoft to fix web standards issues in Internet Explorer, or IE’s accesibility problems.

Some only expect a similar update to Service Pack 2 (which fixed a number of very serious vulnerabilities).

Maybe some handy features will be adopted from alternative browsers, but no-one is holding their breath.

Play your part - StopIE

Change browser, encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Yahoogle.com





Heh. heh.

I gotta watch myself. I’m starting to get addicted to television…not so much “television” but more specifically serialized TV shows via DVD or DVR…so technically I still “don’t really watch TV.”

I just finished watching seasons 1 and 2 of this show on USA called The 4400. It’s pretty fakking good. Lost-good? Well, it doesn’t have the same funding/budget a show like Lost has, but I’d say the story’s pretty compelling, and none of the FX I’ve seen so far have made me think WTF. I found out about this show a few weeks ago upon learning about a new show airing on NBC come this Fall called Heroes. Both series remind me of a comic book series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, called Rising Stars.

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Sigh.

and

Okay. I’m hooked. My Lost history dates back to Fall 2001, but I’ll get to that.

I had thought my history with the show, Lost, began whenever the pilot episodes aired. I don’t remember why I watched. I think that I just happened across it. At the time, I liked what I saw. Was it always on Wednesday night? Perhaps the reason for watching was that Smallville was still airing at the same time slot on Wednesday nights and that particular night Smallville was a rerun or something so I flipped channels. After this night, Lost became out of sight out of mind.

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Well, this is my gratuitous, first post on my WordPress blog. I’ve imported the blogs from my old Blogger blog which didn’t last long, fyi. I can’t import my old old Blogger blog because I can’t remember my Username/PW. I did the best that I could importing my blogs from myspace, but their damn rss feed only allows me access to the most recent 10 blogs. On top of that I cannot import the comments to those blogs to here. Sigh…

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So I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Code. I must be the last person on Earth to read this. It wasn’t the best thing I ever read or anything, but it was definitely a fun read. I dug the numerous homages to the Indiana Jones series. Shades of Agatha Christie and story ‘beats’ akin to those in script-writing. Dude totally intended for this to become a movie. They even mentioned one of my top five favorite painters, Carravaggio!

Afterwards, I ended up opening up my old notes from art history classes to check out what I wrote about The Last Supper and the Madonna on the Rocks as well as other paintings and works not in the movie but had similar entries. Then I cracked open some math notebooks from high school on the Fibonacci sequence, matrices, and other crap. I forgot how much I loved math! Checked out the History Channel special on the book and a maybe!BBC one. The maybe!BBC was totally anti-book, but I’m glad it was.

So yeah, this thing got me on a kick to look up stuff during this era again…just like when I went through my Rome phase. Alas, I’ve since gotten distracted by the Discovery channel’s coverage on fucking manta rays and tracking. It was in HD so I got mesmerized by the pretty pictures and before I knew it, I was sucked in.

Every project made for the web in the past has had to go through my dreaded “Open up IE” stage. I’ve had enough. A little bit dies inside of me each time I hover my mouse over the icon for IE6 and even a little bit more if it’s IE5.2 on my mac.

I recently started testing out IE7 Beta and that has got to be THE WORST ‘Beta’ of any product I’ve ever encountered. (It’s since been uninstalled.)

It pains me to have to test on IE. It pains me to have to do Windows Updates via IE. It pains me when certain “behind-the-scenes” programs I have running have to use IE. (I’m looking at you Weather Channel.)

As just a plain old web user, I shrug when I come across a page when I see .aspx (Looking at you NBCOlympics.com) or even “Your Operating System or Browser is not supported. Blah Blah. Please use IE. Blah blah…latest version of Windows Media Player.” I shrug, because usually, whatever site and content it is that would like me to open up IE is pretty inconsequential. Aside from these nitpicks, FFox or anything else does the job for me in spades.

As a developer, though, sigh…IE 5.2, why do you suck so much. IE6 why do you suck so much. I’ve had it. I know I’m breaking some supposed cardinal rule of design and development by not considering IE in my work and therefore drastically minimizing the web audience…and for my clients that’ll translate into sags in revenue.

Eff it.

I’m starting a call-to-arms of my fellow designers and developers. FUCK IE. The majority of web users use that unstable, flaw-ridden, un-secure piece of shit and therefore we’re supposed to give in and give these users some consideration in order to maximize our potential audience? I’m not saying to screw the web users nor our clients, they are not the enemy. If we keep developing for Internet H4xxplorer, maybe the audience is wider, but the audience will not learn that there are other alternatives. If the web community as a whole becomes more and more aware of BETTER browsers, they’ll be in a better situation to make better web-related decisions. They’ll become more web-savvy. The more savvy everyone is, the more innovations and stuff we can dish out. There’s plenty out there now we can do, but just can’t or are years behind when it should have initially been implemented. (Non-develoopers, you like your Google Maps don’t you? You could have had that years ago.) Shit. Microsoft might even come out with a DECENT browser for a change if they lose a huge chunk of IE users. This attitude also extends to Microsoft’s other big 2’s: Windows and Office. An argument for another day. I don’t think Microsoft is shit. They’ve shown the capacity and capability to make awesome products…particularly when it comes to business related products. They just don’t give enough of a shit to do something in the three areas they have a cornered market on. And why should they?

Call-to-arms dudes. If more of us disregarded IE in the testing stages, the more services and projects out there will mess up upon viewing via IE (and for everyone else NO it does not mean the site’s busted, it means that IE doesn’t support a few (read:A LOT) of changes and improvements for ohhh almost a DECADE), and therefore feel more compelled to use ANY of the other browsers. Seriously, I love Firefox and all, but it doesn’t even have to be that one. Pick one. It’s totally cool, because the way it works for us usually is we create. We test in all the browsers. Very minor inconsistencies MAY occur, but nothing drastic…that is until IE opens. Then, to us, it looks like IE just had an aneurism. I mentioned earlier 5.2 and 6. You’d think there wouldn’t be that much difference. Holy shit, you have no idea. You’d also think, well why not just design for 5.2. If it works on that, it stands to reason that it would appear as intended in 6.0 as well. NOPE! So pretty much any project takes three times as long as it should just because of IE5.2 and 6.0. Even the less-intrusive-to-sanity workarounds are time-consuming. But usually, you’re probably going to have to create 3 versions of the exact same thing.

That’s it. No more IE testing. If it happens to actually work on IE, great. If not, too bad, and maybe everyone will have the opportunity to see what we see first before we actually alter the IE versions to look the way you’re accustomed to seeing them and have some sympathy for us.