Fixed some bugs in old browsers

Thursday, May 31st, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

Not sure why I bother supporting old browsers, but when I noticed on somebody’s computer that my text links were all spaced wrong in ie6 and you couldn’t see everything, I decided to fix it and a couple of other small bugs.

I tested my site now looks and works the same (as far as I can tell) in:
Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, 7
Firefox 1, 1.5, 2.0
Opera 9.2

Safari 2.04 ( unable to test, but online screenshot looked good)

That means that my site works in virtually any browser with javascript / css support!!!!

What should I have been doing instead of fixing stupid website bugs? Sleeping. It’s 2:30am, I need to get up in 3 hours. Yippie.

iPod Stolen

Saturday, May 26th, 2007 | Life | 1 Comment

#$&^#$%#$LK%J$%LJ$K%L

In a 20 min period my ipod was stolen at a carwash that I frequent. The manager, who knows that I frequent the place, refused to search his people. “It’s not legal for me to tell them to empty their pockets”. What if I call the cops? Then I still can’t do anything about it.

It could only be one of a handful of people. Ask them to volunteer….

Grr… they can’t figure out who all touched the car. Nobody saw anybody vacuum my car!!!! Nobody knows who drove the car when it got through the automatic area…. !#%@#L^KJ$&^L#$K&J#$&L

Cameras???? Yes, but I don’t have access to them, they go to corporate. “Call corporate and have them check in this 20 min period”. They check videos on fridays… only “Why not today?” We can’t. so they filled out a fucking report, but that doesn’t give me back my shit!

It’s a black iPod Video with scratches on the front, 30gb, chrome back, I could describe the contents on the ipod at the time and the name that it will say when you plug it into a computer!!!!!!!

Yet alas, knowing this info and knowing that it was only minutes before that it happened and they still can’t resolve my issue@#^#$&#$&#$

@^JKL#^J#LK^#$J^

Lizard, Lizard, Lizard

Friday, May 25th, 2007 | Life | No Comments

Ok, so I have talked about going further with my climbs every time, but this time was psychotic. Not only did I take all the big rocks to the top, but then I went down a path that wasn’t a path in between the rocks, only to re-emerge home ….. Over 4 hours later.

Damn do my feet hurt.

Well anywho, I didn’t see any snakes in this climb. I did however see nearly 100 lizards. As I started descending the mountain I started to see lizards every couple feet. I was amused by this, and despite how long this was, I enjoyed it all immensely because I brought with me the audio book for Douglas Adams “The Salmon of Doubt”. It was kind of a compilation of things he had written and were jumbled about on his computer since he sadly died a few years back and could not finish them.

Chapter 7 was particularly fascinating and his viewpoints there will forever be part of my own.

Got on a scale when I got home. 6lbs lighter than yesterday. Which means either the scale is screwed up, or that I am very hungry and dehydrated. I am leaning towards the latter and expect to have all 6lbs back again tomorrow ;(

Speaking of which, there is NETH (Nothing to Eat in The House), so I am going to make a Yakisobas run… Besides I need to work on gaining back the weight that I spontaneously lost, not that I want to of course, just don’t want to upset the natural laws or anything.

Doubled the Nintendo Games

Friday, May 25th, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

Damn that took longer than I thought. I figured it would be quick enough that I could do both the Sega Genesis and the NES games in half the time it took me to do one. I suppose I did add 400 more games to the list, that should be good enough to stop my NES game requests for now. They are all in the “unsorted” list near the bottom. There are now nearly 900 NES games. I can’t guarantee they all work, but if they don’t, too bad.

Will add more sega games later, but they take up a lot of space, so not sure how many I will add there.

Answered out, more to come soon.

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

I gave it a good go, but there was a lot of built up questions. I would answer more but the next one seemed more sincere, so I thought I would wait till another day so that I can give a better more thought out answer instead of just saying “because” which is the point I am getting to.

I did 2/3 of the questions tonight, so pending there is no avalanche of new questions tomorrow, I will get through the rest then. I think the problem came in the fact that I spent to much time explaining how fast the speed of light is… yeah… good times…

5:20 - 5:20 sleep.

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 | Life | No Comments

So I have been totally exhausted lately.  It’s trying to adjust to a schedule where I once again get up even earlier.  Well I got home last night, watched an episode of Doctor Who, and then decided to take a power nap before I went out running.  Sure enough I fell asleep and woke up when it got done in 30 mins, however I decided not to get up and proceed with my night. 

Instead I rolled over and went to sleep.  Basically I slept from 5:20pm until 5:20am, which is cool since I woke up about 5 mins before my alarm went off. 

Now I am awake, showered, had breakfest and am running on time for work.  It does however mean that the hundreds of new nintendo games I was going to upload last night will have to wait, but no big deal. 

I mean I don’t actually like going to work, going to sleep and then going to work again… However ya can’t beat feeling well rested!

Spending money

Saturday, May 19th, 2007 | Life | No Comments

So today I decided to be irresponsible, after yesterday I went to Fry’s Electronics, and saw an absolutely crispy looking sharp DLP projector. This thing looked so amazing and it was less expensive than the ones that seemed of less quality, with a 4000:1 contrast ratio. I have been considering getting my own tv for when I get a PS3, as there is no point to get a PS3 unless I have high def tv.

I had some control so I went home and looked up the model that I had seen at the store. I thought I must of remembered the model wrong, because the only one I saw online that seemed to have the same specs was $2249 (and that was on sale at newegg.com). So I went back to the store the next day and asked if I could get any more discounts… nope… Well that doesn’t matter because it was only $1100!!! Yes, that’s right, less than half price of newegg’s sale.

Y? Because the didn’t have any anymore, except the display model. It was “Red Tagged” since they were sold out.

Now I tend to not trust Fry’s open box items, but that’s because people return things that don’t work, and nobody tests them and sticks them back on a shelf. This however I knew what I was getting. A display model that gets turned on occasionally to show people how nice movie theater projectors are as opposed to just getting a big ass tv.

Yes, I bought it. I was considering getting a new tv, but all the ones I liked had been 1900+ and I wasn’t willing to spend that, at 1100 I figured it was a steal.  I get 1 yr manufacturer warranty as well as a 30 day money back one.  Once I grabbed that I did some other deals and traded some things around to be able to get a new high end ps3 with Need For Speed Carbon, for only $500.

Ok, so that’s a hell of a lot of money, and I should of put it towards my debt, but I haven’t bought anything fun in awhile. I have a steady new job, that I was just switched positions to, as well as my benefits (like free insurance) kick in on my next check. I have lost aprox 7 lbs in the last 3 weeks, and well damn it, I am still single, so I can get away with blowing my money on technology for now.

Yes, I still have my debt and shit to pay off, but it’s not an unrealistic amount, my rent is cheap and my insurance is paid up for 6 months.

Since I got the new tv we have been speculating where to put it. We will end up rearranging the house, and most likely my computer will move with the solution we are thinking now which would let us hide my speakers behind my screen. Oh yeah, instead of spending $300+ on a projector screen, I decided to make my own. I bought 3+ Yards of super bright non-see through white fabric and for the moment tacked it up covering my fireplace. You figure with a projector I can make my screen up to 400″ based on distance, and lighting.

The PS3 game I got doesn’t do 1080, but does 720p, which is still really damn shiny!

My computer can hook up to this with either vga or my standard yellow cable. Even with just a shitty old yellow cable, the text is readable, which I am actually surprised by since you can’t really improve composite signal, I believe it only looks better because instead of being in 1024×768 it’s in 1280×768 resolution with more contrast…

Oh yeah, I went rock climbing again yesterday, It was weird because I was super hot, but I was cold at same time. Getting goose bumps with every breeze, which air in airzona when it’s over 100 out is not exactly a cool breeze. I discovered the reason for this when I got home was that I had gotten sunburn. No big deal, it wasn’t that severe, but I was annoyed because while out I was cold / hot, tired and half the water in my bottle was hot by the time I tried to drink it ;( Sigh… now I need to go find an insulated bottle.

Yeah! Ask-a-Smartass is back up and running!

Sunday, May 13th, 2007 | Site Updates | No Comments

I spent the last few days resurrecting Ask-a-Smartass.  The section was taken down last summer due to:
1) Lack of quality questions
2) Lack of time
3) Excessive spam

I came up with a new way to do it.  People will still attempt to spam it, but it won’t matter anymore since their posts just go to the temporary xml file. 

Hell I spent so much time on the new design that the page for it could be a wonderful stand alone website if need be.  I still have a few more features I plan to implement on it, but for now it works great.  Of course there are some IE bugs to work out, and one other weird display bug that only hits for certain reasons. I will fix that later. 

For now I encourage you all to think up good questions and help the site to get one of it’s staple sections back.

Oh, if for some reason you are linking to old feed, I HAD made a hardcore redirect that would display the new feed from the old link, but it conflicted with other things and had to be removed, so please just update your feeds to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ask-a-smartass/
and your direct links to:
http://www.thesmartass.info/writes/ask-a-smartass/

Protected: It slices, it dices, it makes julian fries?

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 | Life | Enter your password to view comments

2nd Snake in 1 week!

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Life | No Comments

So I went a year without seeing a snake in AZ.  Now I have seen 2 in a week.  This time I found a new area of rocks to climb that were more like devil’s lake.  I mean big ass rocks all the way to the top.  Being more logical this time I had brand new shoes and some fingerless workout gloves.  Well that made a huge difference.  My new shoes which are designed for “trail running” have a ton-o-grip.  I was able to walk virtually straight up the rocks (spiderman eat your heart out) so long as I moved fast enough.   I also went another hour earlier, like 5 something.

It was only 10 mins or so into my climb when I saw another snake.  He had thick stripes on him in tan and off-white.  Once again, he didn’t want to fuck with me so he retreated under a rock.  Well whatever.  I guess that makes the climbs even more adrenaline filled.

I choose the most difficult path up the mountains that I could.  There was a couple spots that i needed both my hands and feet and had to go at weird angles and pull myself up.  I could of just gone around those spots, but they are the most fun to me for some reason.  Even though I got fairly scratched up because of how I had to pull myself up. 

My ipod was picking songs perfectly for my climb, and even picked one I had never before by Arcade Fire, called Windowstill.  (yes, I thought it was sill too, but it’s still).  That was the most gorgeous song I have heard all year.  Then shortly there after it played Prozzak’s: DJ (a song not on their albums, that I ripped myself from myspace), which is such a great song.  In that song it says “I believe that all the problems of the world will eventually be cured by a DJ”.

There were other quality tracks from gov’t mule all the way to Jem.  It was enough to make me want to make another compilation cd.  As a reminder, I used to average 13, 80min comp cd’s a year from.  Last year…. I made ½ of 1 cd.  Seems when I got an ipod that I was content with shuffle on it enough to not make any more cd’s. 

Well I will be adding the mp3’s I mentioned here as well as a few more to my mp3 player on my site.  Not right now, but soon.  I just now thought of a brilliant way I can bring back Ask-a-Smartass without finishing my drastic rewrite, so I am going to go do that right now.  I will have it up before end of day, though I am leaving in another 20 mins so I may not have time to add the news feed to the main page, but the function will be done.  I will announce it in another post when it’s back.  Then I just need to get Smartass Recommends up and we will be cookin!