William Langewiesche on the crash of EgyptAir 990. A holistic and well-informed article on the technicalities and politics surrounding the investigation. I must admit to feeling quite sorry for the clean and efficient NTSB finding itself the unwitting target of the Egyptian bureacracy’s unyielding machinations. (Via MeFi.)
Free, free!
My ISP woes are solved for now, with this compromise: AOL free hours for web browsing, Netzero free hours for POP/SMTP access. Netzero’s 10 hours/month should be enough to handle the mail side of it, and I still have over a month to use up these AOL hours before I decide to cancel. For the time being, the internet remains free for me. Then, I’ll probably go with Slingshot Prepaid.
Satellite photo of tornado damage
Satellite photo of the swath of damage from last Sunday’s F5 tornado. Incredible. (Via MeFi.)
Randomizer on the way!
I’ve just finished a basic PHP weblog randomizer — with thanks to Rich for a very helpful snippet of code — and reduced several .txt includes to simple, easily called functions. Now all I need to do is recode these blog indexes.
One down, fifty to go. It’s going to be a looong time before anything new gets uploaded. :P
The Anonymous Thought Police
Make a gross Erap joke, and suddenly the Anonymous Religious Thought Enforcers (ARTE!) are all over you. Fine, fine, I apologize for my tasteless humor, and I deeply regret if any of my posts have brought on the unwanted image of Erap shamelessly sodomizing his overweight son in their luxurious medical detention suite in VMCC.
Now we can all give each other a ginger, manly hug and pop a bottle of strong, manly beer while we beat our chests in righteous, manly self-satisfaction?
Die, AOL, die.
I am really disliking AOL today.
When I first installed AOL from one of those ubiquitous free CD-ROM’s, I had assumed that it would just give me a simple dial-up console and some free hours. Little did I know that this was to be one of the most awkward, obnoxious, intrusive software experiences I had ever encountered.
It asked for everything: name, address, phone number, mobile phone number, credit card number, bank and bank account number. Then, it installed itself — and RealPlayer — into my hard disk, littered my desktop with extraneous icons, and copied several unwanted “FREE SOFTWARE!” folders into my root directory. After that, it took my screen name, made the first letter capital against my will, hijacked my CD Player without asking and made itself the default multimedia app, and started up a nightmarish browsing window covered with redundant GUI elements and unsightly ad popups. Periodically, without even the courtesy of a dialog box or a Cancel button, the same browser would suddenly begin downloading updates for itself, reassuring me that this would not be charged to my online time. The control panel gave no way to rectify this dastardly automation.
Today I discovered that their STMP server has not been relaying mail sent from my external client, despite feeding me “Message Sent” confirmations. Almost no one I’ve emailed in the past two weeks has received my messages.
That’s it. This isn’t even worth the free time I’m getting; I’m going to cancel my account and sign up with a cheaper, more reliable ISP. Even Netzero’s free access is better than this.
Lumbao and an Aircon
Pro-Erap PMAP chair and lead rabble-rouser Ronald Lumbao is getting an airconditioned jail cell, ostensibly for his blood pressure. So the guy leads Manila’s urban poor, and hides from the law in provincial nooks and crannies for almost a year; but now he suddenly turns frail and hypertensive in a warm room?
I was thinking that maybe he should join Erap and Jinggoy in the same detention suite, but he may begin to suffer rectal bleeding as well.
Mozilla 1rc1 and overflow
I’m happy to announce that Mozilla 1.0 rc 1 now supports the CSS overflow property without a hitch. I *heart* Mozilla, even though my page looks terrible in it. But fear not. Big changes are coming.
In the Beginning was the Command Line
In the Beginning was the Command Line. Just posting this link as a reminder to myself to download it later and stick it in my Palm for recreational reading on the run. Belated thanks to Wyclif for this material. For some reason, chatting with him inspires me to good linking.
Britney Spears’ (Cigarette) Butt
Britney Spears’ (cigarette) butt. “She is such a well-known person that we want her to continue being a good example of what it is to be a Baptist.” Um, gosh, even before the cigarettes, booze, and Justin Timberlake, she wasn’t a good example. Seeing her in that early schoolgirl uniform should have been enough of a sign back then, right?