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it's just "uses," dumbass
Oct. 9th, 2007 11:35 amI hate it when people use the word "utilize" when they should use the word "use."
et tu, last.fm?
Sep. 26th, 2007 02:35 pmPandora blocked non-US IP Addresses (except Canada and the UK); I briefly got it back with TOR, an IP spoofer.
Then TOR "upgraded" and I've not been able to get it to work since then.
Last.fm told me today that it needed to "upgrade," so I did that and now it won't play music, only track my played CDs. And it's in Japanese, with no clear way to put it back to English UI. And when I say "clear" I mean that the Options (preferences) doesn't show it in any tab, as well as no language directories in the application itself. That's the method for overriding local language settings in iTunes or Nvu or Inkscape - go in and find the language directories, then change the name of Japanese's directory so it defaults back to English. HIGH TECH! GAH!
I WILL NEVER UPGRADE ANYTHING AGAIN. fuck this futchar.
Then TOR "upgraded" and I've not been able to get it to work since then.
Last.fm told me today that it needed to "upgrade," so I did that and now it won't play music, only track my played CDs. And it's in Japanese, with no clear way to put it back to English UI. And when I say "clear" I mean that the Options (preferences) doesn't show it in any tab, as well as no language directories in the application itself. That's the method for overriding local language settings in iTunes or Nvu or Inkscape - go in and find the language directories, then change the name of Japanese's directory so it defaults back to English. HIGH TECH! GAH!
I WILL NEVER UPGRADE ANYTHING AGAIN. fuck this futchar.
on in-game advertising
Aug. 10th, 2007 08:05 pmFileBlog: In-Game Ads: An Alternate View:
Anyway, I'd prefer to have no advertising in games, but I don't mind product placement if it's handled well. Casino Royale, the movie, brought in US$70,000,000 for in-movie advertising -- before the movie ever opened. Only a couple of instances there were jarring, broke immersion. The rest fit into the world that was presented. If we can manage that in games, I think we'd be looking at a similar acceptance by players.
So Why Should You Care About These Guys Making Money?The response I hear from most gamers to whether or not they'll accept in-game advertising is "Yeah, if it will make the games cheaper." But while games have increasingly cost more to create, let alone promote and market, the retail price of games has not significantly risen in accordance with inflation. Adding advertising in games is a way to ameliorate the development costs in a game.
Good question. Cohen suggests that in the long run this extra revenue can help the industry. Here's his reasoning: games are expensive to make, and with each generation the problem gets worse. That stifles creativity, because when games are so expensive, publishers like him don't want to take risks on unproven stuff. The result is store shelves full of sequels and gameplay re-hashes. But, the extra juice games can get from advertising will mitigate the costs. And assuming publishers channel that extra revenue into riskier titles or better game development (and don't just bonus it out to their executives), that means better games -- and more of a variety of games -- for everyone.
Anyway, I'd prefer to have no advertising in games, but I don't mind product placement if it's handled well. Casino Royale, the movie, brought in US$70,000,000 for in-movie advertising -- before the movie ever opened. Only a couple of instances there were jarring, broke immersion. The rest fit into the world that was presented. If we can manage that in games, I think we'd be looking at a similar acceptance by players.
little stuff that bothers me
Aug. 8th, 2007 11:20 amI dislike the phrase "white trash" intensely. It's racist and manages to get classism in at the same time.
KANYE WEST | STRONGER: my post-lunch-time present to you.
Edit: And iTunes' present to me is to tell me to stick my credit in my ass, because -though it is displayed as the number two music video on the iTunes site- trying to access the page for the video or trying to purchase it through a search result link within iTMS returns a "this item is no longer available in the US store" error. I am hoping iTMS hasn't started IP address range blocking for foreign purchase sales, as Xbox Live Marketplace and Pandora.com have begun. I will be very, very cross.
Edit: And iTunes' present to me is to tell me to stick my credit in my ass, because -though it is displayed as the number two music video on the iTunes site- trying to access the page for the video or trying to purchase it through a search result link within iTMS returns a "this item is no longer available in the US store" error. I am hoping iTMS hasn't started IP address range blocking for foreign purchase sales, as Xbox Live Marketplace and Pandora.com have begun. I will be very, very cross.
WHY DOES MICROSOFT WORD SUCK SO MUCH?
Jul. 20th, 2007 07:11 pm- "Save As..." and then selecting a filename that exists already; every other application in the world, even other apps in the Office suite, and the OS itself just says, "That name exists. Overwrite?" but in MS Word, it pops up an additional dialog with three choices, which is one more than the asshole in "The Lady, or the Tiger?" had to contend with. Basically it wants to know "No, really, how about a different name" or "No, no - really overwrite" and "OK, how about I fold the differences between the two documents into that older document, and let you keep working on the mutant, hellacious, and probably corrupted offspring?" And in my case, it's in Japanese with several kanji I can't read, and thanks to Microsoft, I can't highlight and copy the dialog box text to check it out via a translation software. But choice is good, right? NO, IT ISN'T.
- Highlight some text, and then start typing - again, anywhere else, in any major OS and in any application, the highlighted text will be replaced with whatever you type next. Not in MS Word. Oh, sure: USUALLY it works that way, but sometimes it decides to just take the left of the selection as the cursor point, insert the new text, and keep the old text there, just off to the right. Meaning it has to be re-selected, then deleted. What the hell causes this, and why isn't it consistent?
- And don't get me started on its List function. Especially Numbered Lists. Eww.
[expletive phrase deleted], Adobe!
Jun. 12th, 2007 10:03 amSo I've got Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard on my work PC, but Adobe Acrobat Reader, the free software for viewing PDFs has some neat printing features as of its own ver. 8. That is installed; when I installed it, Adobe also snuck in Adobe Album Starter Edition, an image management application that "competes" with Google's Picasa, ACDSee, iPhoto and the like.
Though it pissed me off that they're bundling it, giving it a priority click-through install, and more or less forcing it on users, I figured to give it a try. I didn't like it, so I uninstalled it.
This morning Adobe Acrobat Reader told me that it needed to update itself. After failing to find a part for itself three times, and having to click through "re-open" as many times, it finally found its parts and started to install. It started by trying to re-install Adobe Albums.
~~ :-|
I canceled that, which took a few dialogs of telling it, "YES, REALLY. I DON'T WANT THAT," and let it proceed to the Reader upgrade. It loaded and started to install that part as well, then says, "Oh, hey. You've got a superior functioning application installed, so we'll abort." All of that hassle, for nothing - for something it should have detected prior to proposing an update install.
GRRRARRR!
Though it pissed me off that they're bundling it, giving it a priority click-through install, and more or less forcing it on users, I figured to give it a try. I didn't like it, so I uninstalled it.
This morning Adobe Acrobat Reader told me that it needed to update itself. After failing to find a part for itself three times, and having to click through "re-open" as many times, it finally found its parts and started to install. It started by trying to re-install Adobe Albums.
~~ :-|
I canceled that, which took a few dialogs of telling it, "YES, REALLY. I DON'T WANT THAT," and let it proceed to the Reader upgrade. It loaded and started to install that part as well, then says, "Oh, hey. You've got a superior functioning application installed, so we'll abort." All of that hassle, for nothing - for something it should have detected prior to proposing an update install.
GRRRARRR!
Looking for mischief, so I must be recovering a little. Apparently it's food-poisoning season, and I drew the short straw. I'll spare the gory details, but there are both gore and details galore. Think Peter Gabriel's "Here Comes the Flood," except somatic. Bleh.
Even with this sudden few moments of coherent time on my hands, I will not be able to catch up with the backlog of LJ posts I've accrued over the last three weeks. What do you peeps do when you get behind on your friends-list?
Even with this sudden few moments of coherent time on my hands, I will not be able to catch up with the backlog of LJ posts I've accrued over the last three weeks. What do you peeps do when you get behind on your friends-list?
For a long while, I worked with Illustrator all day, every day, for the four days a week that I (mostly) worked my way through college. At the time I was so impressed with the Illustrator UI model that I was beginning to wish Adobe would make its own OS; I felt it would trump MacOS for usability. This was the "pre-Photoshop 6 world," you see...
But my one-time prowess has dulled mightily, and even the muscle-memory that is still devoted to chorded keystrokes is betrayed by Adobe's revisions to longstanding keyboard shortcuts, while keeping 80% of them identical. I also find that I'm having a hard time hunting out changes both subtle and gross because my entire fucking UI is in Japanese. So...
Bless these folks' hearts:
Update: After finally getting the drawing the way I wanted it, I find that MS Word 2003 is not willing to import .EPS graphics. It demonstrated this to be by crashing grandly when I tried it, somehow eradicating text that I'd written an hour ago, despite the auto-save feature of Word being set for "10 minutes." This also happened to be the text where I'd had an epiphany of not only how the system I'm designing should work, but how to concisely define it.
So now I'm relegating that drawing to the in-app tools that MS Word has, which suck, and trying to remember what the hell I wrote. It was marginally clever. Honest!
But my one-time prowess has dulled mightily, and even the muscle-memory that is still devoted to chorded keystrokes is betrayed by Adobe's revisions to longstanding keyboard shortcuts, while keeping 80% of them identical. I also find that I'm having a hard time hunting out changes both subtle and gross because my entire fucking UI is in Japanese. So...
Bless these folks' hearts:
Update: After finally getting the drawing the way I wanted it, I find that MS Word 2003 is not willing to import .EPS graphics. It demonstrated this to be by crashing grandly when I tried it, somehow eradicating text that I'd written an hour ago, despite the auto-save feature of Word being set for "10 minutes." This also happened to be the text where I'd had an epiphany of not only how the system I'm designing should work, but how to concisely define it.
So now I'm relegating that drawing to the in-app tools that MS Word has, which suck, and trying to remember what the hell I wrote. It was marginally clever. Honest!
Tech news blog - Gonzales proposes new crime: 'Attempted' copyright infringement | CNET News.com:
Gonzales proposes new crime: 'Attempted' copyright infringement
Posted by Declan McCullagh
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.
"To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.
The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with prerelease piracy. ( full article text )
(no subject)
Oct. 27th, 2006 11:00 amDear Guy on the Train,
When you got on, and I was standing uncomfortably far off to one side of the doorway to make as much room as possible for people to get on, it was not a sign for you to get in and stand right next to me, preventing me from relaxing back into my previous position. That's where, you know, I'm standing with /both/ feet on the floor, and am marginally balanced. So first off, thanks for the little back and thigh workout you necessitated by keeping me shoved off balance to the side.
Secondly, when the train arrived at the next stop, where I needed to get off, you stood there at the edge of the doorway, unmoving. You finally noticed me unsqueezing myself out from my precarious situation, and yet you did not move more than 5 cm further away from me, when you should have been - what? yes - getting off the train briefly, because you are standing smack in the middle of the doorway.
How is it you can stand directly in the middle of a doorway, the only means of people disembarking and embarking on the train, and act as though you are unaware of your own position as a self-willed obstacle? This is not rocket science. You're just an antisocial, privileged piece of inconsiderate human dung. I hope your peepee falls off.
Very sincerely yours,
Me.
When you got on, and I was standing uncomfortably far off to one side of the doorway to make as much room as possible for people to get on, it was not a sign for you to get in and stand right next to me, preventing me from relaxing back into my previous position. That's where, you know, I'm standing with /both/ feet on the floor, and am marginally balanced. So first off, thanks for the little back and thigh workout you necessitated by keeping me shoved off balance to the side.
Secondly, when the train arrived at the next stop, where I needed to get off, you stood there at the edge of the doorway, unmoving. You finally noticed me unsqueezing myself out from my precarious situation, and yet you did not move more than 5 cm further away from me, when you should have been - what? yes - getting off the train briefly, because you are standing smack in the middle of the doorway.
How is it you can stand directly in the middle of a doorway, the only means of people disembarking and embarking on the train, and act as though you are unaware of your own position as a self-willed obstacle? This is not rocket science. You're just an antisocial, privileged piece of inconsiderate human dung. I hope your peepee falls off.
Very sincerely yours,
Me.
(no subject)
Oct. 3rd, 2006 05:18 pmDidTheyReadIt? - a great new tool for stalkers!
I guess some peeps have never heard of Return Receipt, or just don't care about their recipients' privacy.
I guess some peeps have never heard of Return Receipt, or just don't care about their recipients' privacy.
dear lazyweb
May. 19th, 2006 09:26 amThere is a lot of hype about ABC's decision to broadcast its shows on the internet. Cartoon Network, too. Doesn't help me, though; the content is limited to viewers in the USA.
Is there a way to spoof past this limitation?
Is there a way to spoof past this limitation?
(no subject)
May. 5th, 2006 04:05 pmI'm using MS Word to format a document and want to handle page numbers and title with a Header. No problem. But where is that? There is header/footer insert char. information in the Insert menu (I am using the Japanese version, so this is the analogous menu). Nope no adding a header or footer from there, though. I can't find it anywhere, so I google and find that it is in the View menu. The. View. Menu.
Yeah, the headers and footers are ALWAYS there, you just have to go look for them.
Except you don't know that, because MS Word 2003 will hide the Header/Footer menu item as part of the "obscure the complicated stuff" UI theory.
What kind of happy horseshit is that?
Yeah, the headers and footers are ALWAYS there, you just have to go look for them.
Except you don't know that, because MS Word 2003 will hide the Header/Footer menu item as part of the "obscure the complicated stuff" UI theory.
What kind of happy horseshit is that?
Remembering pop-up ads from about five years ago; they used to infect my webcrawling experience at every turn. Sometimes they'd spawn new pop-ups, or even multiple new pop-ups, and I would find myself playing a frustrating variant of whack-a-mole on my own desktop. The damned things are hated by everyone who has ever seen one. Since switching to Firefox, I have pretty much forgotten of their existence, except to laugh when a lingering IE user laments their continued existence.
Then they figured out how to get Flash to auto launch a new window, so I installed FlashBlock; problem solved.
Except for just now. It seems that Tribal Fusion, purveyors of animated, high-bandwidth emoticons with SOUND, and thrice-damned creators of banner ads for same, that will play sounds just if you mouse-over them, have figured out a way to get Firefox to spawn new windows even with FlashBlock actively heismanning that method. Here is what I would like to tell the person who sets their web policy:
Dear Mr. Tribalfusion,
Here's the thing: People that are using a browser with pop-ups blocked, and have even installed an extension that is meant to block in-page or pop-up flash ads are NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE. They will not buy your stuff. Their resolve will not buckle after you heap one pop-up or a dozen pop-ups on them, but will be reinforced and multiplied by each instance you inflict, linearly. Or worse. This is not negotiable, this is human nature. So hear me when I say that you could put an ad in a pop-up for guaranteed salvation of my eternal fucking soul, and a nice condo in the afterlife, and I WOULD STILL NOT PATRONIZE YOUR AD. It is just that simple.
Kindly fuck off.
Me.
edit: corrected rage-driven misspelling.
Then they figured out how to get Flash to auto launch a new window, so I installed FlashBlock; problem solved.
Except for just now. It seems that Tribal Fusion, purveyors of animated, high-bandwidth emoticons with SOUND, and thrice-damned creators of banner ads for same, that will play sounds just if you mouse-over them, have figured out a way to get Firefox to spawn new windows even with FlashBlock actively heismanning that method. Here is what I would like to tell the person who sets their web policy:
Dear Mr. Tribalfusion,
Here's the thing: People that are using a browser with pop-ups blocked, and have even installed an extension that is meant to block in-page or pop-up flash ads are NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE. They will not buy your stuff. Their resolve will not buckle after you heap one pop-up or a dozen pop-ups on them, but will be reinforced and multiplied by each instance you inflict, linearly. Or worse. This is not negotiable, this is human nature. So hear me when I say that you could put an ad in a pop-up for guaranteed salvation of my eternal fucking soul, and a nice condo in the afterlife, and I WOULD STILL NOT PATRONIZE YOUR AD. It is just that simple.
Kindly fuck off.
Me.
edit: corrected rage-driven misspelling.
g(unk)-mail
Mar. 13th, 2006 05:33 pmSpam has started showing up in droves in my Gmail account. While I am deeply impressed with the accuracy of Gmail's Junk Mail Filter-age-ed-ness, it would really be nice to know which of the sites for which I use gmail has provided the bait to lure these sharks. It's weird, because a good portion of it is Japanese spam, which I have never seen before. Most of it is ads for dating sites, while the English language stuff tends toward lottery scams and thinly disguised 419/Spanish Prisoner variants. Contrast this with my work account, which is rife with advertisements for Rolex knockoffs and Viagra Professional or Cial!s soft-tabs at best optimum value.
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