Saturday, July 31, 2004

A Battle For The Ages

Bill O'Reilly Vs Michael Moore

Never Mind. Bandwidth Limit Exceeded... I'll look for a mirror.

Never Mind that Never Mind, the main site seems to be dead, but the page I'm linking to seems to be just fine.


Blast it all. Everything's dead. Either wait it out for RichWatch.net to come back online or find it on your own. Best of Luck either way.

Instead, here's another battle for the ages: The current @Delphi top 56:

1. sdjunglist 45
2. critch 42.5
3. BKBroiler 41.75
4. bluej 41.25
5. hippos 41
6. supima 41

With the competition ending tonight at Midnight Central, there's no question: sdjunglist will be winning this competition. Just below him is critch, the same guy who knocked me out of the top 10 at the last minute during last month's GMail completeness. We must be two people with very like minds, since we're constantly within just a few points of each other. At third is BKBroiler, a strong player who's constantly in the top 3. There I am in 4th place, just barely edging out All-Time Champ hippos, who is tied with new guy supima.

Like I said, the competition ends in about 8 hours.. so I doubt that there's going to be enough points awarded for one of us to take 1st place away from sd, but other than that, it's a pretty tight race. I don't think I'll be able to overtake critch, but the Broiler might. And if he doesn't, I just need .75 to take his spot and double my prize money.

Then again, all hippos and supima need to do are get .5 and I'm knocked down a peg.

There's a question that just expired, asking us to predict if Adrian Beltre is going to hit a home-run in the Dodgers/Padres game going on right now, I guessed "no." it's worth a whole point: enough to send me into 3rd.

So, unless the admins do some serious weeding through the backlogs of ungraded .25 pt Dailies's.. My prize total depends on whether or not the Dodgers' First Baseman chokes (and whether that question gets graded today, too)

Either way, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be winning some sort of prize money this time around, which I'll channel into paying for a dedicated user account. And with 145.75 points total, I'm definitely going to hit 150 and level-up next round.

And just think: if RichWatch.net had better hosting, you wouldn't have had to read any of that.

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Coke Corrupts Our Kids

A recent Coca-Cola ad describes some teen dude trying to hook up with many a teen chick. Each attempt is thwarted by a) a cuter dude with a cast b) a hotter dude with a car or c) his mom coming to pick him up early.

In the end of the ad the narrator gives the kid some advice: Break a bone, get a car, and stop telling your mom where we're hanging out.

Or at least that's what he used to say. Now every time I see it, he ends the advice with ..and try to get your game on before curfew. Now, It's often the case that a company will air two versions of an ad, each with a different joke or scene or edit. But nope, the actually went back and changed the end of the ad. My only guess is that someone grew concerned with the ad telling this kid, and by extension, every coke-drinking kid in the universe, that they shouldn't tell their parents where they were hanging out at nights.

Maybe I just lived a blessed life with a dad who didn't really worry about where I was, telling me to call if I needed a ride and leaving it at that, but still.. are there really parents out there that think a coke ad joke could possibly lead to anything more dangerous than, say, cavities or juvenile diabetes?

That's No Moon.

..Oh wait. Yes it is. My bad. Sorry.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

College Roomie Story Arcs from Hell!!!

It's come to my attention that the current plot of College Roomies from Hell!!! has been running since September 18, 2003

10 months.

I love you, maritza campos, and the bat wing thing with the girl's plot is a start. But for the love of all that is good and funky. Get These Kids Off That Island And Back Home.

*explode*

That is all I have for now.

Friday, July 16, 2004

IMHOWYSIWYGIRFA

Blogger just ate a post I was working on regarding CNN Headline News.

As losing a post is always quite depressing, I don't feel like typing it up again just now.

I will, however, point out that Blogger's new Create New Post page defauts to a WYSIWYG, rich-text fomat.

For people who already know and ar comfortable with HTML, WYSIWIG sucks.

that's all.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Something just seems wrong about this:

From the Catalyst's Concert Shedule:

ORGY
Ages 16+

$15 in advance,
$19 at the door
Doors open 8:30PM
Show starts 9:30PM

It all tastes the same to me, anyway.

Something I noticed on the latest commercial in Miller's "President of Beers" ad campaign.

The ad responded to the tagline in Budweiser's latest few commercials, one that could be taken as somewhat of a rebuttal to the whole Beer-Election-thing: "Choose on Taste."

Miller responded by saying "How can they say 'choose on taste' when surveys have shown people say Miller has More Taste than Bud!"

Of course.. our good friend The Disclaimer showed up on the bottom and said, quote:

Results reflect which beer has More Taste or Flavor, NOT Preference, Carb Count, or Smoothness
So in other words, the study didn't say people like Miller more, it just said people could taste it more. so: If I gave you two drinks to test... one of mineral water, and one of rancid milk.. and you told me what you thought, I could go off and tell people "Rancid Milk has More Taste than mineral water!"

Then I could declare myself to be the President of Rancid Milk.

...and considering how long it's been since we've cleaned our fridge and washed out all the dishes in the sink, I don't think I'll have that much competition.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

My issues with GMail

As I mentioned in my last post, I've just recently recived that one most holy of blessing, the finest, purest form of Geek Gold in existance: a GMail invite.

Since then, I've had a chance to poke around a bit and I have to say that GMail is not my most favoritest application ever.

I've got a number of servere annoyances, not the least of which is the fact that GMail requires you to have the latest version of your favorite major browser, on your favorite major operating system, with cookies and Javascript enabled. Anything less, and the login prompt is replaced with a notice that your browers does not meet GMail specifications. While it does give you the option to sign-in anyway.. this just sends you to a static page that reads, in its entirety, Loading.... So far, I've hit this brick wall on a W98 box running what seemed to be IE v.5.5~ish and a Solaris running Netscape over CDE.

But I run WXP and use Mozilla FireFox on my home computer, so problems with Solaris and old versions of IE don't bother me that much.. what gets me is the lack of customizabiity. Google wants you to experience GMail in one, specific way, and if you would like to change this, tough noogies.

Click The Image on the right for a screen cap showing some of my main annoyances. First of all: The Text on both the main sidebar and the Ad sidebar is too small, if I didn't name them myself, I'd barely be able to tell what my labels were.. and as for the ads, what good are they if I can't read them? Sure, I can make it a bit larger by hitting CTRL++, but that'll just make my actual emails too freakin' Huge.

Next up, all HTML images are turned off by default. While this is a good tactic for preventing Spammers from going into the kill, when you read graphic heavy newsletters, or even newsletters that aren't that graphic heavy, like Lockergnome here, all you see is a bunch of broken boxes. They've got a link you can click and turn all images back on, but you have to click that link for every message, everytime you view it.

The obvious complaint to make is about the ads. I don't mind the ads themselves, but what I do mind is the CSS layer they use to display them. Everything renders fine when your window is expanded and your resolution is high, but if you're like me and you regularly surf around in a window that doesn't take up the whole screen, the Layers get confused and cover up the actual email content as shown in my screen cap. for added irony, I chose an email where the content being obscured was a Google Search form. To be fair, this isn't just Google's problem, this is a problem with every site out there that tries too hard to use CSS to define one, single layout for their pages.. but that's a rant for another day.

Of course, the main complaint that anyone who is used to nearly any other form of email is the lack of an adress book. GMail has no method of keeping your contacts handy at all. Not a real biggie for me, but I'm sure some office worker or mass-forwarding, 14-yr old, canadian girl is going to be fairly peeved.

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All these issues aside, it's still a free Gigabyte of storage space with advanced search capabilites included.. so I'm glad I have my GMail.

Now that I've got all this GMail-bashing out of the system, I can feel free to look at the more interesting aspects of GMail: It's really less of an email client and more of an.. interpetation of email itself.

It's really interesting from a New Media standpoint, and if I had any more experience in critical analysis of New Media than one quarter of one class here in UCSC I'd talk about it further.

for now though: Pizza.

Sunday, July 04, 2004

so close, and yet...

The results from @Delphi Competition 3 are in, how'd I fare?

11. bluej 25.25
#10 had 27.0 points.. meaning if I was a measily 2 points higher, I'd've got myself a top 10 spot.. and a GMail invite. Oh, and for the record, I missed roughly 52 points worth of questions. Seven of them worth 2 or more points.

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So I didn't earn myself a Gmail invite, but that's okay because I have been Given one from my close personal friend, and fellow Blogger, Autumn. So, while I can't access it at the moment (The browser on the computer here isn't cool enough to interpet GMail's scripting techniques.. a major flaw on Gmail's part, I'll say).. my new email account at gmail.com is "jleveque"
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In related news, in the current competition (#4).. I seem to be tied for 6th... with about 17 other people.

Friday, July 02, 2004

[link] I am a funky porn star* that loves to laugh at dinosaurs.

One of the reasons I tend to frown on Quizilla-type Personality Tests is that the results are so very random. Your categorization is based more on the hash value of your response than whatever it was you had to say.

with that said.. I fully applaud this: a simple little toy that illustrates just how random this stuff is.

DISCLAIMER:
Flash Required.
Some results NSFW.

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PS: kudos to moe4eyedmoe4eyed, whom I belive is the first person from the LJ world to comment on this weblog.

Thursday, July 01, 2004

My other car is a NOT-APPLICABLE

Taking online surveys, this one wants to know about my opinions on car concepts. The thing it asked me was which of the cars on this big pulldown list did I own... thankfully they had the foresight to add a NONE option to both the make and model menus... unforunately.. well.. just look:

How would you describe your role in the buying decision of your NONE None...

Sole decision maker
Involved in at least fifty percent of the decision process, but not the sole decision maker
Involved in less than fifty percent of the decision
Not involved in the decision
The rest of the survey did the same thing... *sigh*