Every once in a while I go through my spam boxes to see if anything legit falls in to them. It doesn’t happen too often but I have caught it happen a few times…but I digress.
I normally don’t pay the spam much attention since 75% of it is for penis pills, and another 24% is fake account notices. But once in a blue moon I come across gold.
I’ve removed the names and numbers so that no one can use them and get scammed.
I am Miss [FUCKING DOUCHE-BAG SPAMMER]. A computer scientist with central bank of Nigeria.
I am 26 years old, just started work with C.B.N. I came across your file which was marked X and
your released disk painted RED, I took time to study it and found out that you have paid VIRTUALLY
all fees and certificate but the fund has not been release to you.The most annoying thing is that they cannot tell you the truth that on no account will they ever
release the fund to you. Please this is like a Mafia setting in Nigeria; you may not understand it
because you are not a Nigerian.The only thing I will need to release this fund is a special HARD DISK we call it HD120 GIG. I
will buy two of it, recopy your information, destroy the previous one, and punch the computer to
reflect in your bank within 24 banking hours. I will clean up the tracer and destroy your file,
after which I will run away from Nigeria to meet with you.If you are interested. Do get in touch with me immediately, You should send to me your convenient
tell/fax numbers for easy communications and also re confirm your banking details, so that there
won’t be any mistake.for phone converstion,please call me on [removed].Regards,
Miss [FUCKING DOUCHE-BAG SPAMMER]
There a site that parses the text on your blog to make an estimate of who you are and the style you write in. It’s called URL AI.
Well it got right off that I’m a guy between 26 & 35 (I’m 33), but it said that my writing style is angry and personal. I had to laugh because I can see where it gets that idea. Hell, I have a lot of posts bitching about Firefox on here.
Well I come with great news to offset that today. I’m closing on a house and will be moving in the coming weeks. It a pretty big deal for me because I’ve always lived with my folks. I finally felt I’m in a good position to go it on my own.
I’m also going to make this an opportunity to try and get my life back on track. That means internet & computering will be a lot lower of a priority. Also I want to my health back on track, which should help a good deal with a lot of the creativity problems I’ve had the past years. I plan to manage my time, for once actually.
So if it seems I’m not around as much or as long, this will be the reason.
Until next time, stay happy!
That way a web site can’t tell you you’re angry most of the time. 
So the new Windows logo has been announced and been done by Pentragram, and naturally there is a really mixed reaction to it.
It’s really plain, monochromatic, and generally not Windows feeling. I get what they were going for but I personally feel the new design needs the splash of color like every logo from Windows 3.1 to Windows 7 has had.
So it’s obvious that some would want to design the logo with their own touch, and there are others that fall in the camp of “it’s good BUT it could be better”.
Well 99Designs deiced to put folks creative juices to work and made a contest!
I’ve only browsed a few pages of the entries so far and they range from ‘ridiculously horrible’ to ‘you do know what a WINDOW is right?’ to ‘pretty damn slick’ to ‘the same but different’
There’s one that I really liked, by Urohe on there. It takes the Pentagram’s idea, mixes in the classic Windows 1.0 window panes, and then throws a bit of the familiar RGBY colored window panes.
There of course are a number of “parody” logos that poke fun at Microsoft, and almost all of them are really shitty MSPaint jobs. The ones I don’t get are the ones that omit the window icon altogether or try to make something HUGE using the 8. In fact there are a LOT of the “let’s forget about the Windows part and solely focus on the 8” which look great other than it’s WINDOWS 8 and not 8-Something Else. There are also a fair share of “Let’s make windows ROUND or some other shape!” logos, including butterflies (let’s leave that to MSN mmkay?), boats, dragonflies, hearts, lines, dots, rings, spheres, triangles, abstract shapes, arrows, blocks, flags (missed the point Pentagram was making in the first place), pie wedges, and folders (I get the reasoning but it’s still not a window) WHAT THE HELL, MAN? I can understand rounded rectangles to a degree but to completely ignore the history of the logo or even what a WINDOW IS?
So from a design aspect, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be wowed, and you’ll be confused. It’s a contest and it’s just for fun. So there’s bound to be some really awful designs there amongst the good ones. I almost forgot that half way through this writing. But then again I am looking at them from purely a design aspect.
Bacterion Alpha ODN
One of the first fonts I started working on. It was inspired by the bitmap font used in Gradius III.
Bacterion Beta ODN
Similar to Bacterion Alpha ODN, this is also a Gradius font. This one comes from the PlayStation 2 version Gradius IV, which used a smooth version of the bitmap from Gradius III in the menu screen. Note: The original arcade version used a bitmap similar to the first 2 Gradius games.
Bacterion Gamma ODN
This came as an idea while going Bacterion Beta ODN. It’s not based on any of the Gradius games, but the lettering is heavily inspired by them.
Bacterion Delta ODN
(No preview image yet, I haven’t completed enough of the lettering)
Bacterion Delta ODN has similar roots to Beta. This one is based on the bitmap lettering from the first two Gradius games but smoothed out.
Bacterion Epsilon ODN
(No preview image yet, I haven’t even STARTED this one)
I haven’t decided what this one will end up being based on. I’m leaning toward doing a bitmap version of the Bacterion Delta ODN font. The other idea is to do something with the lettering in Gradius IV, which is a cross between the first 2 games with some stylization from Gradius III.
Nintendoized Advance ODN
A lot of the GameBoy Advance remakes of NES games used a squashed version of the lettering from their original games. I’m guessing it was due to the different resolution of the GBA screen. This font in particular got its start after playing ‘The Legend of Zelda’ on the GBA.
Nintendoized Classic ODN
It’s the font used on the Nintendo Entertainment System and the packaging of it’s peripherals. Not much else to say other than, “Now You’re Playing With Power!”
Paisano ODN
Mostly based on the logo of ‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii’ (specifically the Mario Bros. part…the Super is a different style), which its self is based on the title screen font from the original Super Mario Bros. I do plan to do a separate version called Paisano Alt ODN to cover the different lettering the ‘Super’ part of the logos use.
Super Nintendoized ODN
I’ve already shown this one off, but a little information on it. Ever take a REALLY good look at the Super Nintendo logo? You might notice none of the lettering is consistently drawn. Different angles, different inside radii, different outside radii, it’s really a mess design wise. To get the best quality I could, I used the lettering on various SNES product boxes. It got me most of the letters I needed and a decent angle for them overall. It also appears that someone at Nintendo noticed as well and updated the logo to be more consistent.
I will actually finish a freaking font! I have actually 13 that I am actively working on, but none of them are to a point of being “done”.
Paisano was previewed a while back, but I haven’t really shown much more than that. So I’m going to be adding pages for the fonts on here soon including the new one, Super Nintendoized ODN, which was recently improved thanks to a kick in the pants by Badger for his new project.
I’ve narrowed down all the memory and crash problems I’ve been having to one single thing; plugin-container.exe.
I changed the config to make Firefox NOT use it and so far I’ve seen a great improvement in performance & stability.
There is one major downside to doing this… If for any reason Flash decides to crap out, it will take ALL of Firefox with it. I have not had this happen yet.
Okay it’s time for me to talk about Firefox again, but this time with less bitching.
I’m using version 6 now and I do have to say it’s been a lot more stable and quicker than Firefox 4 & 5. However, this does NOT mean I don’t have something to bitch about.
It seems there still is a problem in the way Adobe Flash and Firefox work together. After a little while of having Flash stuff open Firefox will stop responding until the plugin-container process is manually killed. I’m not sure if this is something with Firefox or with Flash, I suspect it’s a combination of the two, but it’s really freaking annoying.
Alright Firefox, you win. You bloated fat sack of shit, I give in and am crawling back to you.
Here’s why. Mainly PLUGINS. Chrome’s plugins suffer severely from the “It’s like the Firefox plugin but…” syndrome. Most of them seemed to be severely impaired versions of their Firefox counterparts. For example AdBlock Plus. In Firefox ABP allows you to search for specific elements in the site’s HTML to block. In Chrome, you click boxes and HOPE one is the one that has the offending code.
Really about the only thing I tried that didn’t suffer from this was TweetDeck for Chrome, and that’s only because there IS NO TweetDeck for Firefox.
So here I am back using that buggy ass, bloated, crashes too damn much, piece of shit Firefox.
Oh I did try Maxthon before hand and was IMMEDIATELY put off my it’s chunky ass side bar. :ugh:
At one time before Firefox was out, I was staunchly opposed to switching from my beloved IE6 to the Mozilla browser. It wasn’t until Firefox 2 (and some nudging by SkullDaisyGimp) came out that I decided to make the switch, and at the time I was happy with Firefox and its plugins.
Then Firefox 3 came out and for a while it was even better than Firefox 2, right up until they released version 3.5. From here things just started to go downhill. My experience was frequent memory overload and frequent crashes, this even when not running any plugins. It was supposed to be fixed when version 3.6 came out. But things just got slower and more unstable.
Then big promise everything will be alright when the released Firefox 4. And it did seem like things had gotten better for a little while. It was still a memory hog, and by this point Internet Explorer was better at handling memory with versions 7 and 8.
You might note I haven’t mentioned Chrome or Safari by this point. That’s because I really never considered them to be an option…especially Safari. More on that later.
By now IE9 had come out, seeming to wipe out the mistakes made in the past by Microsoft. But I held fast to using Firefox, mostly because IE’s plugins are just crap. I was now experiencing cache corruption and memory overload regularly with Firefox, which would frequently cause my browser to crash trying to view any site. Which in turn required clearing out the cache regularly because Firefox simply refuses to do it itself.
Again a new version was coming out, Firefox 5, only 3 months after version 4 came out. And again, we were promised that everything that was wrong with version 4 would be better. And again, it got worse. I found version 5 slower than version 4 and it seemed to crash way more often than it did previously. After one night having too damn near reinstall the entire thing, I had had enough.
During this time I was hearing a lot of good things about Google Chrome, now that their EULA debacle had been straightened out. So I’m giving it a go, and so far I quite like it. I think I just might stick with it for a while.
You might ask why did not consider Safari for Opera?
Safari, for me, seems to be more geared towards being a Mac browser and was really unfriendly towards Windows users. Plus none the tools I used on Firefox seem to be available for Safari. Overall Safari was just an unpleasant experience. It felt like using IE6 all over again.
Now as for Opera, I don’t know why but it just seems to be silly. One of the top plugins for it was a Spirograph clone when I tried using it. It just never felt comfortable when using it, and at the time it didn’t seem like any of the plugins I needed were available for it either.
Now don’t bombard me with a bunch of comments saying X is better than Y, or that I’m just too stupid to use Firefox. I shouldn’t have to be a certified systems engineer or a programmer to make a browser work right. Firefox simply feels less like the “community” browser from its early days and more like the “corporation’s” browser. You might chide Microsoft for IE6, but they have immensely improved since then. Mozilla seems to be doing the opposite.
I’m not TOTALLY done with Firefox just yet. I’ll keep checking in on it… after all they do have version 6, 7, and 8 getting ready to come out. No, I am not joking about that either. Maybe one of them can win me back, but for now I’m sticking with Chrome.
Note: This has been edited from its original version. I had dictated it to my smart phone while at lunch, so things didn’t quite come out as I thought. I also expanded on a few things here and there but all of my original intended statement is still there.
Finally after breaking my kneecap, multiple remodeling delays, family emergencies, numerous internet problems, and other general crap… I am finally getting set back up behind the double HD monitors.
There still some minor touchup work to do in the remodel, but everything is pretty much is being put in it’s final place (until I get bored and decide to rearrange). There’s also a possibility of dropping AT&T as our internet hook-up and going back to cable due to the fiasco we had (which we’re STILL not getting the speed we’re paying for).
I’m not quite sure when I’ll jump back into updating stuff, probably after the finishing touches of the remodel are done. But I’m now officially BACK.
Cross posted from Infinite Unreality.
