Will wonders never cease! Looks like the coupons opened up again and those of us that let our coupons expire can try again! Yeah! I’ve ordered another at https://www.dtv2009.gov/.
I was looking over my Lorenz Attractor images and wondered how the spiral would look close-up. So, I created another version looking down on the spiral with the tendrils coming up from the it. To make it stand out from the others, I changed the sphere colors to blue and added some filtered transparency to them. It makes them look a bit like beads of glass.
I’ve been a lurker on deviantART for awhile now and decided to take the plunge and upload some of my ray traced images there. Since I tend to use the same alias at all my sites, you can now catch SafePit on deviantART. Normally I use Flickr for images, but since I tend to head over to deviantART for interesting wallpaper, I thought it worth the effort to join. I even uploaded a new version of my Snowman.
It seemed to take me forever lately, but finally made it to 30K. I blame my Halo 3 addiction to the lack of improvement in my gamer score. It seems silly tracking this stuff, but it is fun tracking each of these 5K milestones. It is also interesting looking back over the last few years and see what I’ve been playing and what gamer picture I was using. I’m obviously using NXE’s avatars now. Will be interesting to see if I bother updating it. Next up, 35,000. I wonder how long that will take?
A few years back, I started to convert some of my old ZX81 programs so they could be use in various ZX81 emulators. That project was mostly my way of trying to preserve some printouts from my now faded programs. I was curious if I there was a way to emulate those programs in a web site. Surprisingly, the answer is yes!
Okay, let’s see how old you really are. Anyone remember these trading cards from ’78 back when the “original” Battlestar Galactica aired. I was cleaning out the attic and found this in a bag with some of my other childhood memories. I don’t remember keeping this card, but it sure is interesting to look back and remember a different time. Hard to believe this was issued thirty years ago. I swear, it was yesterday. Wasn’t it?
So, I broke down and bought a new laptop last weekend. No, I didn’t buy an Apple. I just couldn’t see myself shelling out twice as much money for half the computing power. I purchased one on sale with similar specs, if not the same OS and “coolness” factor. I was able to transfer most of my settings making it much easier to get up and running. It did take me a bit to get the “crapware” uninstalled. However, it did provide me the opportunity to try out some new software.
I got around to upgrading IE8 to the latest beta 2 today. Mostly, I wanted to see if they had fixed the float issues. Well, they had — at least the float that was also broke on Microsoft’s own site now worked. However, my site still had a problem. Well, I tracked it down to a very odd behavior with the entity. Unlike most browers, IE8 breaks lines oddly with and messes up CSS width. Unlike other browers, when this happens, IE8 drops the float to the bottom instead of letting it just break the width. Considering that this is the only browser with this behavior, it will be interesting to see if it makes it into the final version.
Okay, I was never a big fan of Apple. I made a decision over 6 years ago to use Microsoft’s Windows Media to encode and listen to my music and it worked well for me. That was, until my daughter wanted an iPod Nano (3G) for her birthday. Okay, that was what she wanted and they were on sale, so why not. Sad to say, I was hooked — and it wasn’t even my iPod.
Sad to say, but I’ve deactivated the Who’s Amung Us map widget I had been using. They’ve changed the way the pins are saved and it is pretty much useless to me now. I enjoyed seeing where I received visits from. Unfortunately, I typically only would have a few pins on the map, including myself. I still have the widget installed in case they ever change it, but for now the map itself is disabled.
I’ve been building web sites for over 13 years and have been escaping HTML for years. You know, converting & to & or " to ". Easy stuff, right? Then why did I completely forget that you have to do the same within attributes? Perhaps I just never had a need or realized that it was required. It is.
I noticed a few errors with my 360voice Dynamic Userbars today, so I decided I should probably fix them. One was with my watched list. I limit the list to 20, but it wasn’t actually working properly for users not watching anyone. The other bug was in challenges where it would stop displaying members after it found the callers gamertag. Fortunately, both were easy fixes.
Well, after I broke one of the strings on my guitar trying to reattach the amp connector, I decided it would be a good time to restring it. I hadn’t played it in so long that it wasn’t in tune anyway. Since the family isn’t home, I’m pretty free to sing and not get heckled too much. The dogs still growled a bit at me.
It’s been busy of late. I’d been on vacation for almost 3 weeks with just a few days of work in between. My parents were in town (hi Mom) a couple of weeks ago. Then I was out of town for my wife’s family. That wasn’t really a vacation, though. But I’m back in town and finally getting around to checking my site and doing a little a blogging. So, here are some random thoughts for the day!