go...

learn to digg

No one who needs help will ever read this, but I just wanted to complain about people who digg down comments and then respond to them. This forces me to search through the page and find the aforementioned comment and then expand it to see the context. You shouldn't digg comments down because you disagree, but rather because they are not germane.

PANDORA.COM

I really enjoy using Pandora to listen to music. But lets face it, sometimes it plays shitty songs and you can only click the skip button 5 or 6 times per station in the span of an hour. Oooh Oooh Sophie B Hawkins just came on.

Anyway...

You can get around this limitation by clicking on another station and then right back to the station you were on - you don't even have to wait until the song loads. A stations playlist always advances by one song when you open a station.

I hope they don't wise up to this...though It could be done on purpose.

Help me, Help YOU!

Just when you thought the world was safe (aside from the steady decline that Al Gore so brilliantly described in his award winning documentary)
....

http://www.bravotv.com/blog/thedish/2007/01/jesus_h_cruise.php

Before I really get in to it....

I'm back.

I'm going to make a few posts to recount the trip but I need to tell you that I've had a hell of a time getting into the swing of things since turning the key in my lock early Monday morning.

Monday night I watched five hours of 24 with Sean and Tanja to catch up on the action. It ended up being a late night and I was determined to go to bed early last night to make up for some lost sleep. After catching up with Karen over a burger and a few Stellas (the only decent beer I've had in the past month) downstairs, I turned in for the night.

Around 1am I woke up to what sounded like the Bears defensive line blitzing my apartment door.

And I'm thinking:
"Fuck!, I'm being robbed - couldn't this have happened while I was away, or at least on a night where I hadn't left a maze of shoes in my hallway. Christ, well at least I don't have a boner. You can't defend yourself with morning wood. I hope I didn't forget to shake when I peed - a male burgler might understand a wet spot down below, but if it's a crew of women - jesus - they'll think I pissed myself!"

I grabbed my baseball bat and tiptoed to the front door in my slippers and holy underwear, anticipating the chaos. A fight? Guns? Here we go.

I was just in time to greet four NYC firefighters who were about to break my door in with a crowbar. There was smoke in the hallway but it wasn't my apartment. Some ass downstairs left a pot of food on the stove for four hours and nearly burnt the building down.

Welcome home.

Apple, iNC

All this recent talk of Apple, Inc. and the iPhone reminded me of an interesting article I read about music licensing agreements with the iPod and other portable media players.

But back to the iPhone for a minute, I would like to see a post about all the intriguing issues surrounding it, though: single-carrier model (Cingular); no 3rd-party apps?; use of wi-fi, etc... I’ve never used a comparable device and don’t know enough about technology to offer up anything intelligent, so maybe someone else can volunteer. I’m wondering if this is the next big thing or just Apple leveraging its name in attempt to control my lifestyle.

Okay, so music licensing agreements. This isn’t breaking news, but Microsoft agreed to pay Universal Music Group $1 or so for every Zune player it sells, with about ½ of that going to the artists. This is in addition to the cut Universal will get from downloads at the Zune music store. Microsoft didn’t agree to the $1 per device out of the goodness of its heart; Universal demanded the $1 from Microsoft in exchange for access to its music catalogue. Microsoft’s hand was forced as it needs to do everything possible to give Zuna fighting chance. But does this set a precedent for other media players and their content licensing agreements? I know Apple’s agreement with Universal, a cut of the sales from itunes, is set to expire shortly, but will Apple shell out a $1 per iPod as well? Universal may as well try because it can always go back to the current deal should Apple fail to agree with the new terms. There’s no way Universal would sever its relationship with Apple and leave money on the table, right? You could then argue that makers of all other portable media devices, that also operate music storefronts, would have similar leverage with the record labels if forced to enter a fee-per-device agreements - so unless Microsoft views the fee-per-device model as a strategy to potentially bankrupt its not as well-endowed competitors, isn’t this just locking Microsoft into a money-losing deal and dooming any potential financial success for Zune? And if Microsoft were pursuing the bankrupt strategy, it’s assuming the record labels could force its competitors into a similar deal, but surely Apple would succumb to this? Hasn’t Apple been pretty rigid on keeping downloads on itunes at $1?

I can’t really blame Universal for trying to get a bigger piece of the pie – they’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of the fee-per-device arrangement when first negotiating with Apple. I think this is just a case of Microsoft being late to the party and paying for it.

But does it even make sense for the record labels to receive a share of revenues on a device? The article suggests the labels view this “tax” as reparation for revenue lost to illegal-downloads. It’s kind of presumptuous and scum-baggish for Microsoft and Universal to charge us a $1 for our alleged illegal-downloading; it would be a bit more palatable if they didn’t come right out and say it like that. But this brings up another issue, does paying the $1 mean I have free reign on Universal’s catalogue? So okay, sorry guys for stealing music from you all these years, here’s a $1, excuse me while I go download music that I’ve now paid for. Maybe this isn’t such a bad deal.

Illustrator Help

Does anyone know how I can get rid of or increase the size of the rectangle around my image? The rectangle doesn't appear when I past the image to a document, but it is cutting off portions of the image as you can see:

This is the view from the "Save for Web" option.

Thanks.

Download file

Opera vs. Firefox

After Firefox crashed for me a few times in the last couple weeks I began experimenting with Opera. I have not used it enough to really get a full feeling for the differences between these two browsers, but here are my initial findings:

Firefox and Opera both have different default settings for new window and link clicking behavior in tabs. I am trying to not mess with the default settings in this case but instead play with each browser's default settings to see which I prefer (I imagine the developers set the defaults to what they think is best for their browser). So far, they are just slightly different in ways that I am actually finding quite difficult to describe but neither one stands out as significantly better or worse than the other.

For a web developer, Firefox is the clear choice, not only is the end user far more likely to be using Firefox than Opera (including Safari users, whose rendering engine I have been told Opera uses), but Firefox's robust extensions tool-sets has been employed by users to create many useful and painless-to-install features. A few of my favorites that I have not found Opera replacements for are:

IETab - mimics Internet Explorer's rendering engine (actually don't use this too often, because of various complications behind the scenes I'm guessing the IE rendering isn't spot on, and you can't toggle it between IE6 or 7. Also it seems to have a decent chance to crash the browser - still, a cool idea)
lori - displays Length Of Request Info in a compact part of the status bar. Includes response time, total page load time, page size and number of requests. Really great for getting a general sense of how your pages are performing.
Firebug - an indispensible Javascript debugging tool. Firefox comes with a classy Javascript console which does a very decent job but Firebug is as far ahead of the built-in option as the built-in is ahead of Internet Explorer.

Opera's competing technology, widgets, seems more geared for wizbang shit that really just tends to annoy the web's more savvy users. Opera definitely comes with more functionality out-of-the-box than Firefox does but my purposes, Firefox's extensions more than make up for it.
update: I'm not sure how up-to-date it is but this here is a list of the most popular Firefox extensions and how to mimic their functionality in Opera. Nowhere on the list however is lori, and one of Opera's responses to Firebug is "bookmarklets" which doesn't seem like a very clear answer...

Firefox's latest update to 2.0 included a graphics overhaul that got the browser looking real shiny, but Opera's extremely simple theme updating options and attractive library kick ass. I'm using the Lix theme and when I go back to Firefox now it looks like just another dull window.

When it comes to speed there's no question - Opera loads faster, doesn't require advanced customization to prevent it from hogging memory, and crashes less frequently. Depending on your usage you may or may not ever notice this. I tend to keep a lot of tabs open and push pages and servers by putting as much stress on them as I can so for me this is the main point in Opera's favor and it's a big one.

I haven't checked the RSS aggregators on Opera yet but I'm sure that they have something for people like me who prefer a slim version (I use Sage in Firefox) as well as anything in between all the way up to your most demanding user.

Shooh, short answer: "Yes" with an "If," long answer: "No" --with a "But."