Alternate.org

In a 20/20 type internet expose, CNN has put together a rather bland story about a young female alcoholic. The main goal of the story is to try and hint at a genetic disposition in some people toward alcoholism. That’s fine and interesting, but what’s truly amazing is that this girl consumed on average 216 drinks per week. That comes out to about one and a quarter drinks every hour of the day. I can hardly fathom this. If nothing else the financial repercussions would be so enormous as to inhibit this. I’m sure frat boys across the country consider this a challenge.

They say good things come in threes. 1, 2, 3. I’d have to agree, I mean, I am salivating and frothing over the possibilities of my Cinema Display and the new 800mhz G4 PowerBook with DVI and 1280 rez. Mmmmmmm. Portable when necessary but with upwards of 2800 pixels across when at home plugged in. Fuck yeah.

NYTimes: The Workaround: 32 Steps to Frustration




The phenomenon affects some so-called standard-format DVD movies, including “The Mummy” and “The Bone Collector.” While some might argue that this is not so much a bug as a critical response, portable computer users are told that each time they wish to watch such a movie, they must follow a nine-step procedure that involves first viewing the DVD’s bonus material.



Viewers of certain wide-screen-format DVD’s have no such option. Gateway advises them to try to track down the standard-format version. To date no known workarounds exist for those who have been unable to finish watching the Mariah Carey vehicle “Glitter.”




Sounds like a feature to me. Any interesting workarounds that you’ve seen? I can’t really think of anything too heinous recently… Except I remember Conflict Catcher a few years ago used to cause extension conflicts itself. And NAV telling me that a virus definitions file it itself downloaded was infected with a virus.

So due to SU’s persistence, this site now looks halfway decent in Mozilla. No word on OmniWeb, Opera, iCab or any other .01% browser yet. :P

So part of the deal I’ve got with a new client includes my working down in their office. Their first strike is that they’re in the Tech Center. Their second strike is that I was supposed to use NT of all OSes, and the third strike comes in the form of fucking Freehand 9.



Jesus christ. I almost shoved a fork in my eye just so I’d have a decent excuse to not do the work. But as it turns out, there was a G4 450 in the corner being used as a print server. So I suffered through a hockey-puck mouse and Illustrator 7. A lesser of two evils, I’m sure. Tomorrow, I’m bringing in my pro mouse, at the very least.



And now I know the answer to that age-old question: If offered an otherwise perfect job but you had to use Windows, would you take it? My answer is ‘Yes, but I’d make them need me first and then whine until I get a Mac.’

Oh. Oh, yes.

This just about knocked me off my chair tonight.

Lovely miss Love. Remaining Nirvana members are trying to have a court prove what we have all known for years, that Courtney Love is a fucking lunatic.

I am personally one of the not so few who thinks she had Kurt and El Duche killed.

If you, or someone you know has kids, then you should be intimately familiar with Blue’s Clues. Apparently, the host (one Steve Burns) was quite popular with the soccer mom crowd in his day. Now he’s decided that he’s done with all that kiddie stuff. He just wants to rock.

The thing is, he’s actually incredibly talented at the whole rock thing. See, he did one of the most intelligent things ever, and enlisted the help of the Flaming Lips. If you’re still thinking that they’re the annoying band that did that mid-90s “Vaseline” song, and not the brilliant band of the Soft Bulletin, then I feel very sorry for you. Or maybe I’m jealous, because you have something brilliant to go experience, and that’s always a good thing.

The Lips’ influence is very apparent in his work, and there’s just nothing wrong with that. I just never expected someone who could have been this generation’s Mr. Rogers to go and rock out with his bad self. Enjoy the weirdness. His website is almost this year’s Wesley page, in the surrealness factor. Steve just seems like a swell guy.

…And I know we’ve talked about Apple a lot lately, but god-damn if I just didn’t fall in love with whoever put together Darwin Streaming Server. Jesus christ on a stick.



After puttering around with Shoutcast, Icecast and some streaming servers written in PHP for a client, I came across the mother of free streaming server technologies: DSS4.



First off, this is totally dorky tech-talk but you don’t have to be a dork to understand the implications of what I’m trying to do, which is put together an internet radio station for Milehighhouse. Pretty cool, and totally useful. Anyway, it’s not a secret that I develop on MacOS X, and so I try to get anything I’m going to use live working first on my development machine. Duh. So I download the official MacOS X port of Shoutcast. And there is one. I install it, get the server running…. and look online to see what else I need.. and you need WinAMP. A MacOS X version of which there is not. Cool. So they ported the server but not the required client to get the stream working.



Then comes Icecast, which is actually worse… Their versions wouldn’t even compile on Darwin and required libraries I couldn’t even find.



Then comes the almighty Darwin Streaming Server. Which (due to my download of QuicktimeSS requiring OSX Server) I installed on Linux. What did I have to do? Type “./Install”. That’s it. The rest was web-adminstered, with a web interface to fucking die for. My client will be able to drag and drop from a list of files on the server to a playlist pane, click save, click play and voila. Another MP3 stream. Why has this technology not gotten more press? Apple simply blows anything out of the water in this arena, and it’s running on a platform other than theirs, to boot.

How come no ‘insider’ info on this one? Heh.

“Mac… has a level of simplicity and transparency in operation that allows it to get out of the way and just let me work. That’s something Windows never does.”



It took this guy this long to figure that out? Haven’t we all known that for years? Link via submission.

Apple released MacOS X 10.1.4 today. Use the Software Update feature in your system preferences.

Mmmmm, lovely. You absolutely have to read this one, it will make you paranoid to click ‘update’ ever again.

…But for you legitimate software-users out there: Adobe Announces Photoshop 7 Shipping. No mention of an XP version, but now, you didn’t care about that anyway, did you?