I picked up a copy of The XML Bible on Monday. It’s a comprehensive book on XML and everything that goes with it. It’s about 1200 pages altogether.
I’ve already read 250 pages of it.
Some people devour mystery novels. Some people like romances. Other people just enjoy the classics.
I apparently think that a computer language book qualifies as a page-turner. Could I be any geekier?
I went to Circuit City today and found that 128MB RAM chips were on sale for $19.99! So I got one and just finished installing it in my computer. I’ve maxed out the RAM on my system now! And my computer’s all, “Dude!” And I’m all, “Sweet!”
This morning, while getting ready for Six Flags (I’m going with a bunch of friends today), I got my e-mail and found out that a lot of people have visited the rivalries site in the past two days. So I looked at the site logs, and found out that it’s a featured college football link on BellSouth’s site!. Look at the bottom, under “On Net This Week”, where it talks about college football. It may be gone soon, but that’s still pretty cool in my book.
Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History. Some of these are laugh-out-loud funny.
What am I doing up right now? I wish I knew. I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. I just popped wide awake this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep.
I now have access to the Internet at my grandparents’ house. This provides closure to my downtime, and reveals some things that are actually quite interesting to me, though I really should have known for quite some time.
For at least a couple of years now, the Net has been my primary source of information. By this, I mean that I usually get my news, sports, weather, etc., online. With the prominent exception of SportsCenter, of course. Even so, I normally go to espn.com at least a couple of times daily to read articles and find information about players and sports. The Net is the only place that I can find information on Aussie Rules Football or rugby. This and other ecclectic interests are not found on TV (easily, anyway), the radio, or the newspaper. What’s more, I can find information on how to improve my golf or tennis game free online instead of buying a book. Don’t know a definition? Go to dictionary.com instead of lugging out the Webster’s.
It’s become one of my main means of entertainment. I don’t watch a lot of TV…in fact, there are only a couple of shows that I really care about at all. There are a lot of people who have posted things on the net that interest me, from online games to stories. They tend to be better than what I could find on the television.
It’s become one of my primary methods of communication. E-mail is a way of life for me. There are plenty of times when I don’t need to get in touch with someone immediately, but I want them to know something, and e-mail provides the perfect solution. This site, and other ones that I maintain, are themselves a means of communication with the world. You can leave your mark on this site by commenting now. I’ve had people say that reading this site is like peeking inside my head. It’s the same with other sites that I frequent; those of friends and those who I do not know but whose lives are interesting just the same.
So now that I have finally come back online after a five-day hiatus (except for brief instances over at Ricky’s), I feel back in touch. Not that I don’t mind spending time in the real world – in fact, I’ve done more of that this summer than I have in a long while – but I need the wired world as well.
I had forgotten to update that. I’ve been checking for comments every now and then through the update pages so as to not inflate my counter, but for some reason the update pages don’t reflect new comments sometimes. Just something that I’ll have to figure out, I guess…
I subscribe to a weekly e-mail newsletter that talks about all things Net, and reading it this afternoon, I came across an interesting statistic. Of course, we all know that 41% of statistics are made up on the spot. 🙂 Furthermore, it’s even tougher to determine an accurate statistic about online things because of the very nature of the Net itself. But I can buy this one. See what you think.
CNN just released a study that suggests over 50% of the total time users spend online is dominated by only four companies – AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Napster, in that order.
I’d provide links, but we all already know the addresses, don’t we?
In the immortal words of Popeye, “That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!”
After being deluged with spam mail for much too long, I’ve done something that will hopefully limit the amount of it coming into my inbox. If you’ll notice on the e-mail link in the “contact” section (and, for that matter, every e-mail link in the site), my e-mail address has been changed. It’s pretty self-explanatory as to how to manipulate that address before sending me mail. The nice thing about it is that spam programs have trouble with these manuevers.
Otherwise, carry on per the norm.
A few days ago, I downloaded a copy of Netscape 4, just to see how my main page looked in it. It was a sight, and I don’t mean a good one.
Things were out of place. The type wasn’t the right size. The page just didn’t look right.
Now, I’m not a great web designer by any means, and I haven’t logged the hours doing it that others have. I’ve just heard horror stories of designers that toil hours on end designing graphics with “invisible” spacers so that they get positioned just so. I’ve heard of all means of workarounds that they had to implement just so that people could all view the page roughly the same way.
But I could identify with them just a little more when I took a look at my site using Netscape 4.
There are a lot of ways that you can make it so that everyone can view the page the same way. You can write multiple pages and have it so that the browser the user’s using is determined and the appropriate page is shown. Or you can just make your page appeal to the lowest common denominator. Nothing fancy; just plain text, maybe a Perl script, maybe a couple of gif images.
The question is this, though: is this what we should be limited to?
The answer to this question, in my opinion, is housed in a much bigger question. What is the Web about? Information? Entertainment? Commerce, or art, or something entirely different?
I would say that the answer is all of these things. And that is where the problem lies.
The tools that were originally made to build the web weren’t sufficient for all of these things. After all, who would have imagined back in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, that it would be the scene of a multibillion-dollar global market?
And now that the tools are there, we’ve got problems with browsers. There are many flavors of Netscape and Internet Explorer. Each of these has different levels of support for certain standards. But beyond that, there are text browers, like Lynx (which people do use). There are browsers for those who are visually impaired.
And absolutely none of them support all of the standards fully. The big ones: HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0, and CSS-1 are pretty well-done in the latest versions. But they’re only in the latest versions.
So what do we do? Do we code to standards? (I do…this site uses XHTML 1.0 and CSS-1.) But when we do that, people who use older browsers don’t see the page very well. Some people will even have their browsers crash if they view a page that’s been coded to standards if certain commands are used.
Do we write multiple versions of the pages? Professional web designers don’t like this idea at all, because it’s redundancy.
Do we use Flash? Flash is a great tool, when used right, and there are wonderful web sites coded entirely in Flash. But people who can’t see can’t use Flash at all.
Some people say that we should stick to the lowest common denominator. But this restricts our ability to use the web for commerce and art.
Others say that we should use the standards that we have, and believe that if people can be convinced to upgrade their browsers, we can use them effectively. But some people don’t have that option.
What a tangled, fragmented web we’ve woven…how do we untangle ourselves?
I have one of the best coaster makers in the world. And it only cost me a couple hundred bucks.
Today’s adventure begins, amazingly enough, today. I have been realizing that my CD burner wasn’t getting much use lately. To justify its initial purchase by reducing its variable cost per CD burned (man, that MBA education’s getting good use), I decided to make a “compilation compilation” CD. This term refers to my favorite songs off of what are known as “compilation” CDs, all put onto one CD all their own.
Now, recently, I had been getting irritated at RealJukebox. It’s free and all that, but there’s a lot of problems that I just can’t overlook:
Sigh. So I deleted it.
Anyway, I picked out the songs that I wanted, and recorded them as WAV sound files using the “Easy CD Creator” software that came with the CD burner. What the “Easy CD Creator” people don’t want you to know is that “Easy CD Creator” doesn’t seem to think that if skips happen during the recording process to a WAV, the user might like to know about this and recopy the song. Oh, no…the program just happily copies the files to the hard drive.
So I get all of the files copied to the hard drive, and start recording the CD. I even put it through “testing” phase (read: wasting another 10 minutes in the name of ensuring the success of the copying process). 20 minutes later, my CD is ready.
I note that in my haste, I misspelled compilation in the title. Twice. My CD is now known as “The Compliation Complilation” to Windows CD Player. No biggie, I say to myself…I’ll be the only one to see that. So I make the jewel case covers and everything (changing the title there), and I pop the CD in the drive.
Two minutes, 32 seconds into the first song, the CD skips.
Now I’m somewhat irritated. So I go and listen to the original WAV file that I copied earlier, and I find out what I told you earlier…those two WAV files were copied badly, but “Easy CD Creator” didn’t think that was important. I guess it would have been too difficult to prompt the user to copy the song over. And “Hard CD Creator” just isn’t as catchy a title.
This is when I remember our friend RealJukebox. For all its flaws, I remember that it does a great job of recording WAV files. I jump online and grab a copy of RealJukebox, all the while listening to my now destined-to-be-under-a-glass CD for problems with other songs. Good thing too…song seven is also messed up.
Eventually the RealJukebox installer is downloaded. I go through the install process, unchecking all of the boxes, telling it I do not want it to be my default CD player, etc. Finally, that whole process is complete. Time to try again.
I get the two CDs that I need to get the songs off of, and copy them using RealJukebox. I listen to them this time, just to make sure. Everything’s perfect. I close out RealJukebox.
I now go back to “Easy CD Creator” and set it up to use the two new WAV files when burning this copy. I don’t bother to test this time, and everything turns out fine again. I get the CD out and label it.
Ready to hear my now perfect CD, I close all programs and put the CD back in the player. And what pops open as my default CD player?
That’s right, friends…RealJukebox.
This turn of events elicits a caterwaul from yours truly.
So now, of course, I’m stuck with a piece of software that doesn’t do one thing that I need it to do, but is great otherwise, and a piece of software that I hate, but have to use to accomplish that one thing.
And one new coaster.