May 2004 Archive

Welcome to the Archive for May 2004! What you will find here may be old. It may scare you. It may even scare me! More importantly, you might find links that no longer work, and *gasp* information that is no longer, or possibly never was, accurate in any way. Don't rely on this information to save your life!

May 2004 Archive

Friday, May 21, 2004

[Comments: 2] 11:38 PM - no-longer-tied-down

Well, I bought my laptop. It's a big jump from the 90 MHz machine I got from my neighbor a while back!

Here are the specs:

Compaq Presario R3000Z

The HP order system says it should ship by June 7th, if not sooner. Hopefully I'll have it in a couple weeks! :)

[Comments: 0] 5:08 PM - ugly-but-it-works

I present to you one of the ugliest CSS hacks I have ever seen:

top: expression( ( 70 + ( ignoreMe = ( document.documentElement && document.documentElement.scrollTop ) ? document.documentElement.scrollTop : document.body.scrollTop ) ) + 'px' );

This code makes the navigation box act as if it is set to position: fixed, through some weird and proprietary "expression" feature Internet Explorer has. While messing around with it, I found that I could pretty effectively hang IE by passing odd things in the expression. That's stupid of you, Microsoft. Thanks.

In any case, props to this page over at HowToCreate.co.uk for the tip on how to get this to work.

I understand Safari feels the need to correct the colors on the PNG images in this theme, making them disagree with the background color. I tried to fix this with alpha layers, but IE stupidly fills the transparent space with white, and I am not willing to rework the HTML code to hack in the Microsoft alpha image loader for IE users, so Safari users, I apologize for the slight discoloring of the images.

[Comments: 0] 5:27 AM - happy-anniversary

Now that I look at it, this is the just past the first anniversary of the launch of SimGuy.net. That makes the redesign an anniversary celebratory thingamabob! :)

And yes, I should go to sleep.

[Comments: 0] 4:53 AM - the-grass-is-always-greener

If you've been here before, please direct your attention to the stylesheet selector, and consider choosing the "Green" theme. This is the new default theme for SimGuy.net, so you should switch unless you have some good reason not to. This theme is so good, one visitor even called it "sexy!"

I'd like to thank my good friend Jerm for a wealth of suggestions during the development of the new style.

Post some comments and tell me how much you love it! :)

Oh, I also fixed a bug with the selector javascript so that it doesn't disable the printer stylesheet completely. Not that that actually did anything but hide the navigation menu, anyway.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

[Comments: 2] 1:22 AM - it's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature

I'm still working on trying to get that evil second computer together and since I ended up deciding that the motherboard itself was the problem, I RMA'd the board and got an upgraded model which required a CPU.

So I bought a CPU (a 2.0 GHz Athlon XP 2400+), and I figured that I'd just shift the new CPU to my main machine and move my current to the other machine.

This was all well and good, except after installation Windows XP would no longer boot. A beautiful "Hardware Malfunction" BSOD complemented the failure. Interestingly, Gentoo Linux had no qualms about using the very same CPU, so I ran with that for a while, then tried to repair Windows.

Not even Windows XP setup would run with the CPU installed, so after much testing and aggravation, I returned to the previous CPU and now things seem to be stable again. So the next step is to contact AMD and yell at them for selling me a defective CPU.

Hopefully, I'll be able to RMA that soon, and get everything squared away, but then I'm going to have to figure out where the hell I'm going to put the extra computer now that I'm back home, given our already insanely cramped office area, and not much other room free.

I'm also looking into buying a laptop and I just took a look at a Compaq and, in spite of my general dislike for Compaq, decided that it may just be exactly what I want, given a small amount of customization and removal of Windows XP from the machine. :)

The machine I felt compelled to heart is this, the R3000Z with a 64 bit Athlon CPU, a nice sized screen, and pretty much everything else I was looking for. I still may need a bit more research and I welcome any comments one way or the other on this choice, because I'd like not to jump into this without any feedback from other people. :)

Thursday, May 6, 2004

[Comments: 0] 8:39 AM - one-last-thing

Forgot to mention... my grades came in, and I really am graduating. How cool is that? :)

Got a few A's, a couple B's and a C and C+. I'm actually very proud to call those letters mine, and to say that I pulled off a 19 credit hour semester without any major and/or permanent injury. ;)

[Comments: 0] 8:36 AM - omg-omg-omg

I hardly know what to do with myself. I'm graduating Sunday, after four years of college and 22 years of living in general. I don't know if I'm ready to move on from this point in my life, but it's pretty clear it's time.

I don't have a job yet, so much as paid work to do, since there aren't any benefits and nothing consistent enough to consider it a career. It will suffice while I continue to look for work. I have skills you want. Hire me!! :)

I'm going to miss college. I'm going to miss seeing my friends, doing stuff at WCKN all the time, and just the place in general. Many people didn't like it here. I did. I won't miss the classes or the homework, or the food for certain, but there were a lot of great people here, and a lot of great things to do, and those I will definitely miss.

Like I said, I don't know what to do with myself. There's so much here I should have spent more time on. There's so much I never got around to doing, and I have my doubts I'll get around to at this point. I don't know what to do now. I packed everything but my clothes, computer, and kitchen supplies, since nothing else has any useful purpose at this point. Sitting in a clean (relatively), mostly empty room has left me with plenty of time to think and not all that much to do.

To make matters worse, I never got around to sleeping last night, so I'm running on a sort of hyperactive-overtired energy run that will leave me wide awake for an indeterminate amount of time before I simply fall over from exhaustion. Not that I mind, but it'd be nice if I had something to throw my energy into besides this post. :)