Forget this nasty, evil Halloween holiday where you give candy to all these creepy people dressing up as the ugliest creatures they can think of during some odd celebration of darkness... It's the day before National Novel Writing Month! In exactly 57 minutes (as of that timestamp), I start writing. But as the day's finally upon us... Is there anyone that I know, personally, who's also doing this?

I know Paradox is... That's about it. Anyone else doing it, too? So I don't have to be doing this by myself? Toiling on for 30 days without anyone to share my misery with? Anyone who reads this and is writing this year, too, GIVE ME YOUR PROFILE AND BEFRIEND ME! I demand it of thee!

I honestly don't go out of my way to dig this stuff up... Personally, I like Windows. It suits my needs. I'm a gamer and I wouldn't use another OS until one gets the stuff I want to use. As it stands right now, nothing else offers anything I need. (With the exception of Debian Linux, which I use as a router.) I use what I use, you use what you use, there are pros and cons to each thing, and the more people that understand that, the better! Someone else uses Mac, it suits theirs needs... Someone else uses Linux, it suits their needs...

That being said, when I come across something like this, I have to make a post! By Wired, an article entitled "Best of Leopard Is Yet to Come: Innovative Third-Party Apps". I'm not really aiming to be anti-Mac here, more of a... "Are people really trying to push Macs so hard that they resort to articles like this? Isn't there anything else you could be talking about?" (No? Like... No huge changes to make note of? Time Machine, maybe? Hmm... You mean... Mac finally has a version of Windows System Restore? That Microsoft feature that's been around since Windows ME?) This is like saying "Best of Vista Is Yet to Come: DirectX 10 Apps". Oh wait... People call that a superfluous argument and a marketing gimmick. (Okay, so I guess I am being a bit anti-Mac.)

But it's pretty much "hey! You know what's awesome? Leopard! But you know what's even more awesome? The programs that are going to come out on it, yay!" Well, WOW! What a revolutionary statement! Geez, I'm taken aback here. You mean people buy operating systems to use... programs made by people OTHER THAN THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE OPERATING SYSTEM? Lunacy! Blasphemy! The very fabric of reality begins ripping to shreds by the mere fleeting thought of such a thing! Oops, wait, I lied...

I would sure as heck hope Leopard's going to get third-party applications. What use would an OS be if you could only run Apple products? Or Microsoft products? That would be the world in which Linux would flourish! This is like saying... "The best of living is yet to come! YOU GET TO EAT!" Seems to be just a silly, needlessly "GET A MAC" write up with no substance. I would personally expect third-party apps. That's no sale point... It's EXPECTED. You shouldn't have to go around and say "you should buy us because we let you write your own programs!"

Oh, in case you haven't noticed, I got Twitter working again. I don't know what was the problem, but AIM would respond... At all. I signed up the first time and verified my AIM name, and it responded, and I made a post, and it processed... But the next time I posted, it didn't do anything. So I asked for "help", and it just sat there. I deleted it, and reverified and it didn't respond to verification. Yeah, that wasn't good...

But then I decided to incorporate my Google Talk account into Gaim and verifiy Twitter using that and, voila! Works perfectly. I even call for "help" every so often just to make sure and it always wakes up. Yay! Now, I don't know how Twitter works exactly... I know you can "follow" people and their updates will pop up in your IM window or phone or whatever you verify, but I haven't bothered with that, and I might not. It's just a neat thing I wanted to experiment with to have a sort of second tag line. You can "follow" me, if you want, though... If you really want to.

Well, I decided to poke around with the cool new widget system for the Wordpress sidebar and I saw some widgets for Google AdSense, and I remembered that I have an account with them from long, long ago! So I log in and see that I earned 17 cents from the month or so that I had on my ancient site, and I thought, "hey! Maybe I should try this again for fun. My site's more popular now, and I get spam comments like you wouldn't believe... Maybe I'll get some money per page load!"

It took me a while to get it to work... I thought maybe the sidebar was stripping javascript but, uhm... I forgot I had AdBlock Plus running, and it was hiding the entire ad to begin with. Yeah... If you ever want to try adding ads, be sure you turn that off!

The ads I might not keep, but they're buried at the bottom of the sidebar, so if it remains distracting, I'll take them off... But I might keep the referral buttons for Firefox and Google Pack. I prefer to use Opera now, but even Firefox is better than Internet Explorer when it comes to rendering pages properly, and Google Pack has Skype and OpenOffice and Google Earth, and those are neat, so I'll probably keep those, too. But, we'll see... I'm just bored... I should probably go read my A+ book. (Except I can't pull myself away from this really neat music, hmm... Such a dilemma.)

Sorry, yes, I know how to spell the word leopard, but in a Slashdot article I read (I'll spare the guy any direct ridicule...), someone was so excited about his copy of Mac OS X "Leapoard" in the mail and how he was looking forward to install it when he got home. Geez, man... Learn to spell your idol operating system.

Anyway, in the wake of the news of the (delayed) release of Leopard and how simply amazing it is that it's surpassing 2 million sold copies (indeed, I'm sure that all 2 million Apple users would go out and buy it... Maybe even twice! How is this amazing? Tsk tsk), I thought I'd toss out this little gem:

"A Second Look at the Mac OS X Leopard Firewall"

Looks like Apple messed up! But according to Slashdot... hey, you can't expect Apple to get everything correct, right? Heheheh... Indeed. Can you imagine the reaction if Microsoft did that? Oh, wait! If you're old enough to remember the pre-SP2 releases of Windows XP? The firewall had trouble and Microsoft got charred over it. Now Apple's firewall doesn't block incoming traffic properly (like, the entire reason you would even want a firewall) and everyone's going "pfft, a minor mistake."

Honestly, it's like dealing with left-wing liberals. Not to be saying that all Macintosh users are like left-wing liberals... Two people that come to mind (who aren't crazy, I mean) are Capella and Iaian7. Pretty much the only two Mac users I know personally. (If we "fight", it's all in good fun.) But like they say, the most outspoken people are usually the most crazy... And I'm sure the majority of Mac users have a good head on their shoulder and aren't rabid and ignorant like the Slashdot and Digg environment is.

I might as well place a spoiler warning here, before letting you read this post. Every comment so far has complained about it, but I really wouldn't consider what I disclose a major spoiler warning... More like information to encourage you to watch and to give you an idea of what to expect. If you're already truly planning on watching it, and you want it to be a complete surprise, then don't read this. But if you still haven't decided if you want to or not, then go ahead!

(more...)

Behold! A brand new layout! Only, it's not entirely brand new... Obviously my Okami layout with a few changes. The major change being that the entire site is fluid size now, meaning you can resize your window and the text will expand to fit! (Also with a minimum width, so not everything crunches up and implodes.)

I tested it on all major browsers: Internet Explorer 7 (if you have 6, upgrade now... There's no excuse not to), Firefox, Opera and Safari. (I guess that nasty, awful beta has a use after all.) As far as I can tell, they all work flawlessly and very much the same. Even my old Okami layout had some minor text discrepancies between browsers... Nothing especially evil, but they didn't look the same when you put more than one browser side-by-side.

This time, instead of writing it from scratch, I took the Kubrick layout bundled with Wordpress 2.3.1 and changed everything while keeping the more modern approaches to things like the widget sidebar. And, speaking of which, I can now easily resize the sidebar's width to cater to whatever thing I want to put inside! I was experimenting with a last.fm display, that was formerly too large to fit, but it worked perfectly! Still waiting for a NaNoWriMo counter, though... Hopefully they still have them.

I decided to leave out the Twitter feed for the moment, since there seems to be massive lag when updating via AIM, which was the entire reason for getting it... I don't want to load another website just to snap-update by blog... If I wanted to load a website, I might as well load THIS. So until something gets worked out, it stays out... Believe me, I'm as disappointed as you. (But you're probably not disappointed, so nevermind!)