A waste of bits and bandwidth

I had my first experience with [tag]Automator[/tag] on Sunday evening. It started when MiHwa sent some pics of her trip to [tag]DeokSu palace[/tag]. This was the palace we went to last year only to find it was closed for renovations. We watched the guard changing ceremony and then hiked to [tag]Gwanghwamun Palace[/tag] all while my cold festered culminating with my ears blowing off my head on the flight to Japan. Of course you already knew that so let’s move on…

Anyway, in one of the pictures she had what I would call her serious face. I know that face as I have caused it to appear on more than one occasion. It’s bad news my friend ’cause when I see it I know I’ve dissappointed/angered her and will shortly be entering the world of hurt.

So we were chatting away and I was laughing that I needed to write a script that would display that picture at 9PM every night. Why would I need to see this picture at a set time every night? When she was here, she instigated the thou shalt not smoke after 9PM rule. I bristled at first, mostly because there was now a rule where there wasn’t one before but soon I accepted it (sort of). Now she’s 8,000 kms away and well, sometimes I ‘forget’ about the rule.

So I decided to give it a shot and see if I could pull this off. I fired up Automator and 10 minutes later, I had it working. It was so easy it’s practically stupid. MiHwa was sorta happy, though not all that impressed with the idea of me using her picture to remind myself of the rule.

At least she could concede that is was kinda cool and now, I have an automatic reminder of how I disappoint her. That’s real life tech…

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. I little early but I’ve learned that my mental snooze doesn’t work all that well and it’s better to just get up. When I don’t get up, invariably I wake up 2 hours later, feeling like hell.

So I get up, stagger into the kitchen and turn on the [tag]coffee[/tag] maker. From there I went to the living room, sat down and began to stare at nothing in particular. One might have thought that I would be looking at the view which is responsible for my outrageous rent but I decided to just stare. Stare and blink, repeating as required.

After a few minutes I noticed that there was no ‘coffee noise’ coming from the kitchen so I got up to investigate. Hmmm…. what’s taking so long? The light is on, there’s water in the reservoir, what the hell? Is that the correct light? Yeah, ok so what’s up? I stare at the machine trying to comprehend this unwelcome turn of events. It was working yesterday…

I boiled some water as I came to the realization that my wonderful [tag]Braun[/tag] is now dead. Over ten years of faithful service and it’s all over. I also learned that water needs to pass through the grounds at a certain rate lest your coffee taste like ass.

As much as I hate to admit it, my [tag]Grande Mild[/tag] never tasted so good. I guess I know what I’ll be doing on my lunch hour.

Spec commercial for a ‘new’ [tag]iTalk[/tag] cell phone from [tag]Apple[/tag] by award winning filmmaker Christopher DeSantis with design by Gregory DeSantis.

I don’t think you need to be an Apple fan boy to drool over this phone. Too bad that it only exists on [tag]Google[/tag] video…

Maybe you have heard of [tag] Stefan Constantinescu[/tag]; he’s either brillant or an asshat, I’m not sure which he is but I know which way I’m leaning.

I’m using a sub 500 MHz PC and am dying to get a taste of the other side of the computing world. The Mac world. Billions of people use the net everyday, I just need a small percentage of those to give up a dollar, and then I’ll have a Mac.

You poor American… how do you get out of bed everyday and know that your PC runs at less than a GHz? You live in the richest nation on the face of the earth. Get yourself a new box like everyone else does. Get a job, save your money and buy one. You’re 19. You don’t need anything more than you already have, you want something more than you already have.

What floors me are all the [tag]imbeciles[/tag] who have actually given this guy money. Almost $1200 as of this writing. All so that this poor American kid can ‘buy’ a 20 inch Intel [tag]iMac[/tag]. The [tag]Cult of Mac[/tag] blog got it right when it came to this guy.

Maybe I should do something similar. Yeah, sure. I could manage that. In fact, I’ll do it so that you actually get something for your buck. Send me a buck and I’ll link to your site, mention your name or give you a paragraph on this blog to post anything you want. I’ll even give the money away. Who would you rather give your [tag]dollar[/tag] to?

Well, thanks to Karan, all of you who are stuck in the middle ages can rest assured that the site now can be read in [tag]Internet Exploder[/tag] without selecting all the text first. The bug had actually had been bothering me but not enough to sort it out as it didn’t affect me and I have very little empathy for people who do stupid things of their own volition. *stirs the pot*

Karan, who will single-handedly defend Microsoft from all verbale attacks (which makes for fascinating dinner party conversation between us) started troubleshooting the bug this afternoon. A new Microsoft toolbar had him asking me a million questions about my [tag]CSS[/tag].

[14:40] Karan: you notice how in your style.css you have color: /*#9C9C9C;*/ #ddd;
[14:40] Karan: get rid of the commented piece
[14:40] Karan: it’s skipping that line
[14:40] mark: you think it’s viewing the commented colour?
[14:40] Karan: i think it’s just ignoring it
[14:41] Karan: in the dev toolbar it shows the body color as #000000
[14:41] Karan: if i override it to #ddd it works
[14:41] mark: hmmm….
[14:41] Karan: so i’m thinking it must not like the comment
[14:41] mark: so IE doesn’t respect comments…. *begin rant*

So, I start to investigate it a little. I hadn’t looked at it in a few weeks but I started to remember some of the things that I had done when I was doing my [tag]CSS reboot[/tag]. So, the resolution is as follows… Internet Exploder sees a comment in the CSS and… IGNORES THE WHOLE LINE rather than ignoring the comment.

Why am I not surprised? I’ll now embark on a sweep of my CSS files to remove any comments. Lord only knows what the page is going to look like when I’m done. Still, it’s good to know that the bug is resolved. Thanks for the help buddy! Now get back to work…