Phew. All fixed! It was actually easier than I thought it was going to be. Turns out it only affected pages where I had images in my posts that were wider than what the stylesheet specified. Firefox is fairly intelligent and just resizes those images so they fit the stylesheet. IE sees that they’re too big so keeps the image there and pushes everything else down to the bottom. I’ve resized the offending images and everything is all happy again.

Ok, time to prepare for the MOAB…

I just found out that my site doesn’t look right in IE. My navigation column is way down towards the bottom. Either you are all already savvy and using Firefox where things look right, or you all are just too kind of let me know that my site looks like crap. :) Anyway, I pretty much suck at writing CSS so it’s going to take me a while to figure out what’s wrong. If you’re here and this site is a complete mess, chances are I’m trying to “fix” things.

No time to do it tonight though. I need to get some sleep. I’m taking the day off work tomorrow to do the MOAB. More details tomorrow… if I’m still alive…

Woot! I indeed have had issues with a short battery life on my iPod, but don’t really use it that much that I ever gave it much thought. According to http://www.appleipodsettlement.com, I should be eligible for a fix or a $50 credit for Apple goods. Now hopefully I can find my receipt…

I’m sure many folks have been receiving a bunch of German spam messages thinking why the hell is all this coming into my inbox. Sadly, despite working in the computer industry and getting a ton of these daily (mostly to random administrative addresses that I’m a part of), I didn’t even look into why this is happening until tonight after reading about it on a friend’s blog.

If you’re looking to find out what’s behind this operation, follow this link. If you’re running SpamAssassin and you’re looking to stop these messages, put me into your /etc/mail/spamassassin directory. You’ll need to restart spamd if you’re running it.

In other news, I went with another friend to a local church carnival. I’m pretty sure none of the folks that were attending the carnival also attend the church. Lord help the next generation of youth coming into this world. They’re a scary bunch. Anyway, in celebration of losing weight, I cowed out tonight carnival style. Cheese curds, corn dogs, donuts, french fries, chicken nuggets… and then I went home and ate a full dinner of two plates of spaghetti and garlic bread. Ahhh, the good old days. Now you know why I gain 20 pounds in just a few months time if I don’t watch what I eat.

What is the huge deal with Google Maps? Sure, I think that their maps are prettier than some other sites, but their whole “new” satellite photo thing really isn’t that revolutionary. I’ve seen that before on various other websites? And it doesn’t even cover all regions. My fourth attempt at pulling up an image brought about the website saying that it didn’t have enough imagery detail to display that location.

I’m not saying it’s not cool, because it is. I’m just saying it’s not new and am not sure why it’s making the headlines in the news.

It’s bad enough that World of Warcraft has been out for as long as it has and that it’s still extremely buggy and unstable (from what I’ve been hearing - I haven’t been playing that much lately). But their patching system uses this annoying BitTorrent based crap which basically kills my connection. Generally speaking, I’m fine with peer to peer applications and file sharing and what not, but it should be done at my own discression - not for something that I’ve already paid for, that I continue to pay for on a recurring monthly basis, and for something that I have to download in order to play something for which I’ve already paid for. Why should I have to donate my bandwidth so Blizzard can save money by not buying more patching servers and bandwidth to distribute the patches themselves? Grrr…

With inkjet printer prices being as low as they are, it pains me to shop for a new inkjet cartridge which usually ends up being a significant percentage of what a brand new printer itself would cost. My HP 932c was out of color ink and a new HP cartridge was going to cost me $30 for the 19 ml one and almost double that for the “full” one. While walking around the mall, I saw a kiosk for Island Inkjet and stopped by to see what they had to offer. They offered to refill my cartridge to the full amount for only $20. I figured what the hell. A full cartridge for 1/3 the price? I might as well try it.

I came back home and installed my newly filled cartridge in my old printer. It had all sorts of streakiness and what not when it was printing though. Despite performing “cleaning” operations on it from my PC (who knows what that actually does), I couldn’t get it to start printing correctly. Skeptical, I took a look at the information sheet that they gave me along with my refilled cartridge:

Problem: I have run 2-3 clean cycles and still have streaks.
Solution: Remove the cartridge from the printer. Fill a small dish with 1/2″ of hot tap water and stand cartridge upright in water for 5 minutes. Wipe dry gently, re-install and run through one clean cycle.

I honestly didn’t expect anything to really happen and that I be taking a trip back to Island Inkjet to ask for a refund. But I did as they suggested, and voila! I now have a full color ink cartridge for a significantly less price. I’ve only printed out a couple of things since then so I can’t speak for the longevity of their ink, but so far so good. If you’re in the market for some new ink, it might be worth a shot.

Go download this, NOW!

I’m reworking this site because I realized that it doesn’t render quite right in Safari. Please excuse the mess while I try and fix it.

In the past week or so, I’ve been getting a bunch of comment spam here on my site. Yes, the spammers have sunk to new lows and now not only spam my email accounts (which I filter out pretty sucessfully with RBLs and SpamAssassin) but also leave me comments here telling me where I should play video-poker and look at pr0n.

As such, I looked around for a tool that would help me get rid of this pesky problem. I came across this link that can be installed in Wordpress and uses a “captcha” test before you’re allowed to post a comment here. So, for the people that read this site you may notice that the comment form has now changed. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I didn’t see any other good alternatives. :???: