4:16 PM
Did you know that when you explicitly set a 100% table width with CSS and align it next to a float, stuff breaks? Oh it breaks, and it breaks bad.
Firefox will spread the table's width to fill the page, completely underlapping the float and ignoring the dimensions of any parent container. IE will throw everything at the bottom of the float, leaving you with a huge whitespace above it.
I've spent basically a week pulling my hair out trying to resolve this simple-seeming problem, and the solution was to put a table (of display type 'table') with a 100% width inside of a container div with a specific margin width to account for the float. And oh yeah, you need to clear:both; right after the container div, or everything breaks in even more exciting ways.
It's browser retardedness of the highest order, and it's an inelegant solution, but holy hell it works and after banging my head on the wall for so long I'll count it as a victory and move on.
11:55 AM
Last night I bought a video game for myself. 'Bought' - as in 'spent money on.' For the first time in years! And I didn't even have to leave my couch!
The whole "Microsoft Points" system is an ingenious way to inject a little confusion into the buying process so that you're never really sure how much money you're spending, and are therefore likely to spend much more. $1 = 80 points.
Those free downloadable Xbox360 Marketplace demos will be the end of me. I shelled out points for Bejeweled 2, Jewel Quest (for Tammy,) and of course Geometry Wars which is just brain-meltingly awesome and absolutely worth the five bucks.
Oh Microsoft, you'll make an honest gamer of me yet. Of course once that firmware hack is out in the wild, all bets are off. But for now you win!
9:39 AM
Oh god..."ArtieTSMITW", I don't know who you are or where you came from, but you do an awesome Willie Wonka. And sassy black woman. And Captain Picard. The list goes on. ACTOR EXTRAORDINAIRE!
9:32 AM
A month ago I bought an Xbox360 for Tammy. I really did get it for her and not me. I wasn't too excited about the 360 but she really wanted one! And who am I to argue about a new toy for both of us? I was afraid to mention anything about it here 'cause I was pretty sure she'd read it!
Since she loved Morrowind so much on the PC I wanted to get her Oblivion, the next game in the Elder Scrolls series. Unfortunately it didn't hit stores until yesterday, so I kept the Xbox wrapped up and hidden in a closet for a month...because what good is a new game console if all you have are mediocre launch titles like Gun, PGR3, and King Kong?
Tracking down a 360 was the easiest thing ever thanks to the Untitled Tracker. It checks the Best Buy and Circuit City websites every five minutes to find inventory in your local stores. As soon as something gets delivered you get a popup on your desktop and a text message to your cell phone.
Those blueshirts at the Fullerton Best Buy didn't know what hit 'em. "Sorry, dude. We don't have any in stock. I just checked." "CHECK AGAIN BASTARD. You just got a shipment 15 minutes ago." "Well I'll check the computer, but I don't see...SON OF A! How did you know?"
Of course finding a 360 now is a trivial affair. Microsoft says they're tripling their shipments of 360s this week, and last night I saw two pallets full of 'em at Costco.
I guess I probably didn't have to bother tracking one down last month. But the thrill of the hunt kept me going!
4:08 PM
Sometimes I don't know why I bother getting smoothies for lunch. I know they're mostly healthy so I try to do the right thing for my body every now and then and stop by Jamba Juice or Juice it Up or Juice Stop or Tropical Smoothie Cafe.
Even if I go for the gusto and bust out the 32-ouncer, I still get hungry three or four hours later. And not just a little hungry either - I get ravenous, jittery, and irritable.
1:37 PM
Team Xecuter is promising to do what those 360 hackers wouldn't. For a "company" that built its reputation designing and selling modchips for the original XBox, it's rather noble of them to not only spend time working on a software-based hack but also to promise to release it free o' charge.
11:50 AM
Tammy was in Seattle last week, so after work Friday night I drove out to my parents' house and spent the night.
I really enjoy spending time with my parents now, maybe even more than I did when I was younger and living with them. When you're an adult you really start to appreciate everything they did for you and how much fun they can be to hang out with. It's like you start to love them on an entirely different level.
Even if all we do is sit around and drink and watch TV and catch up, it's good vibes all around. At least that's how it feels for me. I think I'm pretty fortunate to have such a great relationship with my parents. A lot of my adult friends have moms and dads out there that are emotionally abusive or distant or just jerks in general, so sometimes I feel like I won a lottery somewhere.
Saturday morning I went to check out my brother and his fiancee's new apartment in Redondo Beach. It's on Broadway - just two blocks from the beach. It's big, spacious, a little old maybe, but the location is awesome. I'm jealous.
Driving through PV is excruciating sometimes. I miss living there so much. The clean air, the incredible views, the unending greenery, and the gigantic eucalyptuses make it one of the nicest places to live in LA county. And also one of the most expensive, so I don't see myself going back anytime soon. If money was no object, I'd move back in a heartbeat.
6:19 PM Desktop Earth is a Windows wallpaper application that "updates your wallpaper with an accurate representation of the Earth as it would be seen from space at that precise moment."
12:11 PM
Happy Saturday! The Xbox360 firmware has been hacked.
Supposedly.
The team that did it isn't releasing the code because they "don't want to encourage piracy"...or provide proof of their claim!
They did release a sketchy video that shows a 360 booting and running a DVD-R of PGR3, but what they don't show you are the video inputs on the back of the TV.
3:07 PM
NASA's predicting that the biggest solar storm to hit the earth since 1958 may hit us near the end of this year and will grow in intensity until it peaks in 2011.
In 1958 we didn't have wireless gizmos up the butt like we do now, so it'll be interesting to see just how this impacts...well...everything!
8:42 AM
So far I haven't seen a whole lot of games on the Xbox360 that interest me. Developers usually take the easy route and wind up making FPSs, racing games, or sports games, and I can't stand any of those.
The first screens of Viva Pinata were released today, and I have to say it looks pretty durn slick.
It's nice to see next-gen hardware being used to create environments that don't mimic real life for a change. I guess it all ties in to the Blue Sky movement. Colorful fantasy worlds almost always look cooler than real-life approximations.
10:04 AM
If you've got an old Xbox running Media Center but you really prefer the look and feel of the Xbox360's blade interface, some people are working on it.
The Pogues are back together for a brief sold-out tour in the US. I really did think that Shane MacGowan had died in the 90s, but I guess I was wrong about that!
12:59 PM
If you find yourself on the receiving end of a large sum of money and decide to pay off a large chunk of your credit card debit, you may find yourself the subject of a homeland security investigation.
I'm pretty sure that just because this blog post has the phrase "homeland security" in it my name is being put on a list somewhere.
10:58 AM
Being an Internet company we sure have to put up with a lot of credit card fraud. I've been dealing with it a lot lately, and I've noticed that like...90% of it comes from Vietnamese 'hackers'. We do what we can to minimize the fraud that makes its way through, but they still manage to find ways around our automated checks.
Usually they just sign up without bothering to put up a website at the domains they register, so it's more of a way for them to test if a card number is valid or not. Sometimes they'll upload a few Vietnamese music videos or whatever, but mostly I just see empty directories.
We usually find out about these sites because the real credit card holder calls or emails us and is all like "Who are you guys and why are you charging me $119.40?"
Usually they're very understanding about what's happened and we go ahead and just refund the charge.
Sometimes they get pissy though- "Oh I could give two shits if you refund the charge, bastards. I've already sent this to the cops and you're going DOWN. You can't just charge people if you don't have their card." I feel like saying "Hey welcome to 1996! You can buy things on the Internet now." We refund them anyway, but man. You'd think that people who have their credit card numbers stolen would be a little more appreciative of the situation.
5:55 PM
Bank of America has a little alcove/kiosk thing in the corner of my local grocery store. Most grocery stores seem to have these mini-banks nowadays.
I wonder what the people who work there say when someone asks them where they work. "I work at the bank" they might say. But that's a bit of a lie isn't it? "I work at the grocery store." Closer. "I work at the bank in the grocery store." That's long and awkward to say. And maybe they get a little guff about it, too.
12:05 PM Re-Imagineering is a blog I've started reading recently. The posters are all Pixar and Disney employees on a tear about what's wrong with the current state of Imagineering and most of Disney's more recent theme park attractions.
They're hitting so many nails on so many heads that it'd be a real shame if the right people weren't reading. There's some truly informed arguments getting posted over there by people who have watched things change over the years and they're not missing a beat or pulling any punches.
![[Powered by Blogger]](http://buttons.blogger.com/bloggerbutton1.gif){kind=small}
