Word of Nathan

Couple of things. First, I successfully tested for 5th kyu in aikido this evening. It’s about time, since I’ve been studying for a year and a half now.:-P

Secondly - if your ass jiggles uncontrollably when you walk, please avoid wearing stretchy pants of any sort. This applies irrespective of gender, but women seem to be guilty more often than men. That is all. Thank you.

Since last night, I’ve noticed that whenever I try to access a cached version of a site on Google, I’m getting an error saying that the “cache:” search “did not match any documents.” An odd few seem to work, but the majority are broken. Am I the only one?

For a few residents of a small Connecticut town, the land of the free doesn’t seem quite so free any more.

With the backing of the so-called “eminent domain” doctrine, the town of New London has decided to confiscate property from landowners near the Thames River. This would be less odious if it were for some public good, like a badly needed water purification system because everyone would otherwise die of thirst (to pick an example completely at random).

But no, the real reason:

…to clear the way for a private development project that would include a hotel, a conference center and offices. The city has argued that redeveloping 90 acres along the river and near a new Pfizer research plant would give a much-needed economic boost to the city of about 26,000 people, where the unemployment rate of 7.6% is about twice the state’s rate…

To reduce down to the essentials, private citizens are having their homes confiscated by the government in favor of corporations.

All arguments about the benefit to the town aside, this is completely unfair to the people being expelled from their homes - some “generations old” - and undoubtedly the corporate developments will gain much more out of this than the people of New London, who will have no ownership of the new developments. Smells like economic fascism to me.

I was checking my mail earlier today and I picked up an advertisement for Bell Canada’s DSL service. One of the key features was “Parental Control” - the filters that block supposedly inappropriate content from your “kids.”

Of course, no such advertisement should be without an example of the type of inappropriate content blocked. You can see for yourself at adrants - it’s the female body.

Other people have made note that this is a textbook and adrants suggests that Bell is saying education is bad. While I agree that there is this connotation, I find myself astounded that the female body would be used as an example of “inappropriate content.” C’mon people, this is not Taliban-run Afghanistan.

Now, I’m anti-censorship in any form, but it seems to me that a more suitable example of inappropriate content for children might be Neo-nazi propoganda sites, if you must have censorship. But it’s just like a major corporation to bash women - the latest statistics say that corporations still don’t have that glass ceiling problem solved yet. Way to go, morons.

So lately I’ve been really busy. Stuff on my plate:

• Been working on my new novel. It’s at ~20,000 words now. If there’s any interest, I can post a teaser chapter for you. Let me know.
• Doing another editing pass at Alice - the final one, I hope. There are a few grammar errors in there and silly spelling mistakes which I should have caught the first time around.
• The Earth: 2025 rewrite is coming along. The basic economy and war engine is done. A million little nitpicky things to do. I’m hoping to run an alpha server by the end of March.
• My first aikido test is Monday Feb. 28, and I’ll be testing for 5th kyu. Lots of turning-people-into-pretzels goodness.

Other points of note:

• My sister will be halfway through U.S. Navy bootcamp on Wednesday. Wish her the best.
• My blog is now linked at matthewgood.org - cool!
• I have three cats demanding attention. Time to run!

I was watching the video for Iio’s song “Rapture” and found that it reminded me strongly of the character NG Resonance from Deus Ex 2. I know the two look entirely different, but something about the holographic-woman-dancing thing just immediately reminded me of the game. Anyway, a great song and a great game. And for what it’s worth, kidneythieves did the music that you hear in Club Vox in DX2 (where you first meet NG Resonance) - also some great music which I’ve had on my playlist for a couple of years.

Obviously Spain builds better skyscrapers than the USA [WTC 7 anyone?]

So I was reading this article on Browser Speed Comparisons and I found out that apparently IE outperforms most other Windows browsers on just about everything except for scripts.

I responded, somewhat naively:

I suppose the fact that IE has all sorts of nice direct access to the Windows code with god-knows-what tricks embedded to speed it up helps. Firefox is bound by what any non-MS program can do with the API. That is not to say that I find Firefox slower - but thinking about it, I believe the Firefox interface (especially tabs and yes I know it was Opera first(?)) speeds _me_ up. So my perception is that using Firefox is generally faster than using Internet Explorer, even though it may be in actuality slower.

The great thing about Slashdot is that you won’t be allowed to stay ignorant for long, so I was quickly informed that*:

• Nice try, but how does that explain IE being faster than FireFox under MacOS X as well in some areas?
• The fact that IE leverages a lot of Windows services is a feature of IE that Firefox chose not to implement (for portability reasons). So Firefox takes longer to start up. This isn’t because Microsoft is cheating; its because it’s not a cross-platform browser

and

• Nice try, but no. Mozilla/Firefox made the decsion to add a heap load of bloat as a portability/skins layer. So they run everywhere, slowly. It’s pretty funny that you accuse MS of using “tricks” when the GUI of your browser is written in frickin JavaScript. (Secret MS Speed Trick #1: Don’t use a scripting language). If they wanted to, they could have coded a native Windows app right to the documented Win32 API, and it’s very unlikely that you’d see any difference in startup speed. (See Opera)

Considering that the comments are spot on, I was probably half-asleep when I posted, ‘cuz I just didn’t think it through carefully. Either way, I still find it intriguing that despite technical superiority in speed, IE still feels significantly slower than Firefox for me. I haven’t voluntarily used IE for probably a couple of years now. Firefox’s interface is just that much better.

(* The people who wrote these comments own them, bla bla.)

Things that caught my attention today:

• George W Bush and the 14 points of fascism - it’s a pretty interesting look at news, mostly old, but each article is linked to a point, and there are a lot of articles. Worth scanning, at least.
• musicplasma.com - not something I was using today, perhaps, but I’ve been using it lately to locate things to listen to, such as the…
• New additions to my playlist: Lamb - Between Darkness And Wonder, Juno Reactor - Labyrinth, ATB - No Silence
• Scam of the day - Blockbuster is claiming that they don’t do late fees anymore. Instead, if you keep a game/DVD/whatever more than 7 days, they’ll just assume you wanted it and bill you full retail price. You have 30 days to cancel - but if you do, they will tack on a “small restocking fee.” This, to me, translates out to “delayed late fee”. You won’t get screwed quite as badly this way since your overall late charges will probably be lower, but it will be more of a headache if you happen to be late in the first place.

Tomorrow, I’ll be playing Mahjongg with Cass’s family for (slightly late) Chinese New Year fun. It’s a funky game, a bit like the card game “rummy” but with tiles that sorta remind me of oversized dominoes. Lotsa fun.:-)

My Earth:2025 remake is coming along nicely. Have to finish spy ops, add the public & private markets, and the game itself should be largely done. I’m hoping to be able to launch some sort of limited alpha game in a few weeks. We shall see.

This is a Firefox 1.0 screenshot of the 2005 Business Blogging Awards website. The site works fine in Internet Explorer. Note the wonderful misaligned background shifted too far right.

Nifty, eh?:-P I would’ve thought by 2005 people would be doublechecking this stuff. One of my pet peeves, I guess, given that when I design I’ve found that you don’t have to go to any very great lengths to be sure that it works fine in Mozilla variants as well as IE.