Homeless Man "Not a Doctor"

7 comments (closed), posted on march 27, 2003, tags: random

New York, NY — Today, a crazy homeless man announced what non-homeless people have feared for years: bread causes diabetes. The announcement came at 10:37PM near the register of the Gourmet Marketplace, a small deli located on John Street in southern Manhattan.

"You can't eat so much bread!" the man yelled out suddenly, scaring a nearby woman. "It will kill you. My momma had diabetes, she dead, my sister had diabetes, she dead. Now I gots it." Even without being asked, the homeless man continued his story: "It's the bread, man. Believe me. It ain't sugar. That's a lie. It's carboes. That's what do it."

Shocked and disgusted by what he was hearing, the cook preparing 'home-fries' for the homeless man began to toast a bagel. Almost immediately, more warnings were heard. "You listening to what I'm saying to you? I ain't a doctor. I'm no MD. I got no reason to lie. Stop with all the bread!" He then managed to walk in circles for almost two minutes, mumbling something that sounded like, "bah-bah-dah-dah," although exactly what was mumbled is unknown.

Upon receiving his finished home-fries, the homeless man made sure everyone in the deli, which is rather large, knew he was "keeping it real," and that there wasn't anything "phony" about him. He reaffirmed his anti-bread statements, requested a fork, and then left without paying.

Neutered

4 comments (closed), posted on march 25, 2003, tags: me

I expected the place to be nicer. Walking down 50th Street a few minutes before, I was starting to feel quite comfortable with the area and confident with the quality of architecture and people I saw walking on the street. Hell, even the pigeons seemed courteous—stepping to the left, allowing me to pass without the fluttering of filthy wings—and the smell was nice too. On the way over (only two blocks), I passed a lovely Medical Office. I assumed the place would be along the same lines. Cheery. It would be the opposite of other animal hospitals. The animals would all be free—no cages—and walking around casually, meowing or chirping or, if inclined, drinking tea and eating biscuits.

Then I saw the West Side Animal Hospital across a busy Ninth Avenue. It was not what I had been hoping for. In fact, it looked like a damned converted pizza place. My expectations suddenly changed, and I imagined myself walking into stalagmites and stalactites, animals being lashed and doing heavy manual labor whist being forced to drink Shasta and RC Cola.

The lady buzzed me in. It wasn't that bad. It was quiet, actually. Seemed alright. I requested my two cats and was told that Felix, "the black one," was a real pain in the ass. He managed to scratch the "living hell" out of the Vet's arms. Good for him, I thought, if someone tried to cut my testicles off I would do the same. I gave a half-smile and waited patiently for the cat carrier to arrive from the back room, crammed full of two very unhappy cats. Oscar, "the gray one with the funky tail," had apparently been really nice but did not want to be put back in the carrier with Felix. "He's pissed off," the lady kept saying. Do you remember what you just did to them? I kept thinking. I was told not to feed them until tomorrow. That's a long time without food. Over 36 hours. Could I handle that? I don't know. Does having your testicles removed make you more hungry or less hungry? I hope I never find out.

They were silent on the subway home, much like they had been in the morning. I got them home and opened the cage. I tried to fill the room with lots of It's okay and See, we're home!, but I knew they weren't going to like me for a bit. It didn't last long, though, and soon they were lying on the couch, following us with their eyes—their sleepy, filmy, drugged-up eyes—and accepting of petting and kissing.

Now I think the medication and experience has caught up with them. They've been sleeping for the past few hours. When they awake, randomly, their glossy eyes attempt to focus on whatever it was that stirred them. But it doesn't last. Their secondary eye lids creep up, followed by their furry outer lids. And then, quickly, they are fast asleep once more. They'll probably be up and running around in no time. Especially in the middle of the night.

And Suddenly

8 comments (closed), posted on march 25, 2003, tags: software

The browser war between Camino and Safari is getting really great. The latest leak of Safari, build 67, contains an updated pref pane with tab settings and a functioning auto-complete feature that utilizes the keychain properly (including a new toolbar button that will fill out forms automatically (just like IE for the Mac) that's still a little buggy but getting there). Safari also seems to be faster at both starting and rendering. That's never a bad thing.

The surprising part, however, is that Camino now feels faster. One of Apple's largest argued benefits to Safari was that it started, rendering and handled Javascript faster than any other browser on the Mac platform. I agreed with this until today, when I downloaded the nightly build of Camino (2003032408). The new builds are now based on the Mozilla trunk (1.41 I believe), rather than the stable 1.2 branch, so the new speed increases in both rendering and startup that I've been seeing on my PC are now even more apparent on my Mac. It's fucking fast. Amazingly so.

Also, Camino has a new bookmark manager that mimics Safari's. This is a bold move on Camino's part, since everyone has been comparing the two as enemies. That's not to say that Safari hasn't been using Mozilla code, because it has. Licensing allows for this, and I think it's a benefit. The unfortunate thing is, with the screwy Mozilla licensing scheme, Mozilla can't use Safari code. Maybe in the future this will be fixed (I believe they're trying to relicense right now).

The great thing about these two browsers is that the principles of their development each have a weblog (Mike Pinkerton (Camino) and Dave Hyatt (Safari)), and development has been rather quick over the past few weeks. I'm really looking forward to more.

Busy Bastard

1 comment (closed), posted on march 24, 2003, tags: me

Work has been really busy lately. Because I'm really the only developer there, I usually handle all of the work (including design), for every client. The last few weeks I've had to finish up large projects for several clients—all of which include lots and lots of work—so I haven't really been in too much of a "work on websites when I get home" mood. This site has suffered because of it. For that I apologize. But until this website starts doing my daily work for me, it will have to deal with being left alone from time to time.

Stupid Shit

3 comments (closed), posted on march 20, 2003, tags: site

You may have noticed that for the past few hours my site has been freaking out. That's mostly due to the fact that some stupid sons of bitches "hacked" it, putting up a message about stopping the terrorism and war. Really? Should I? Because I have anything to do with it? And I like your method—fuck other peoples' shit up to prove your point. You basically just committed web-terrorism you stupid fucks.

Anyway, it's fixed. The forums are down for a little while longer, and there might be little problems here and there. I'm working them out. Sorry.

Update: Even better! After I fix the problems, my host deletes Perl modules like they're going out of style! MT broken! Stupid broken site for hours! Lovely! At least things are fixed now. Whew. Bleh.

48 Hours

6 comments (closed), posted on march 17, 2003, tags: me

So. Bush says 48 hours. Hussein has to leave (and his sons, no less) Iraq within 48 hours, or we will remove him with military force. Is it even worth writing about how much I despise Bush? Is it even worth mentioning that he's possibly the worst public speaker in the world? That he's willing to go to war because he wants to, regardless of what others think (even his own citizens), or whatever evidence comes forward, or whatever the UN does or doesn't do? That he's saying the US is being made safe from attacks (give me a butt-fucking break)? I mean, what's the fucking point of saying anything anymore?

So. In 48 hours, it's possible we may hear Blinky-McGee say the words that no one in the world should ever have to hear. It's possible, within 50 hours, that we could, for the first time in over 50 years, declare war. Is anyone else in "what the fuck is going on in the fucking world you bunch of stupid mother fuckers, we only have one fucking life you stupid sons of bitches—no matter where the fuck you think you're gonna go afterward, you only have one fucking life—stop all of this bullshit and let me live mine" mood right now? I sure am. I don't even want to write anything else. It's not worth it.

At least they raised the terror alert to 'orange'. That'll save us. They should have raised it to 'we're fucked.'

Let's Catch Up

4 comments (closed), posted on march 17, 2003, tags: random

Hello. My name is Garrett Murray. I run ManiacalRage, found at http://www.maniacalrage.net, the site you're currently reading for one reason or another. You may have found this site because of my Winamp 2 plugin, CurrentlyHearing. If so, good work. Enjoy the plugin. Or, perhaps, you found this site by clicking a link on some other website (MorrisonFilm, Exploding Fist, What Do I Know, SomethingNormal, etcetera) or even from a very random Google search. It doesn't really matter now, though, because you're here.

Found herein is a multitude of various writing. From Movable Type tutorials to movie reviews to absolute uselessness (this entry falls into that category), ManiacalRage is jammed full of all sorts of goodies.

If this is your first time here, feel free to browse the archives or simply leave immediately (many of you do). If this isn't your first time here, please accept my apology for this completely ridiculous entry containing nothing whatsoever.

And thus ends one of the most URL-heavy entries ever. My fingers hurt.

Hack, Cough, Spit

3 comments (closed), posted on march 14, 2003, tags: me

I've had the lovely experience over the past two weeks of being sick. It's some sort of bronchitis or chest cold or something else like it that causes constant coughing and general discomfort most (if not all) of the day. Since I don't have medical insurance, I have the pleasure of self-diagnosing and self-medicating (crack), and I also don't have the benefit of getting a prescription if that's what I need. Oh well. Until this goes away, I'm pretty much just lying around.

External Links

14 comments (closed), posted on march 9, 2003, tags: site

A few days ago, I made a change to my link colours. Now, every link that will take you to another domain or site is green, while all internal links are the same familiar blue. A few people have asked me how I did it. To put you at ease—I didn't do it by hand. Rather, I used Javascript. It's actually much simpler than you might think. Here's how you do it:

Make sure you have at least two link styles in your style sheet. The blue colour on my site is the default link style (a), and the green colour is called 'ext' (a.ext). Here's the Javascript function you need to put in the head of your document:

function makeExLinks () {
     for (var i=0; i<=(document.links.length-1); i++)
     if ((document.links[i].target == '_blank') || (document.links[i].target == '_new')) {
          if ((document.links[i].className != 'nav') && (document.links[i].className != 'int')) {
               document.links[i].className = 'ext';
          }
     }
}

Okay, here's what the javascript does: It loops through all the links on your page and checks their target values. If it sees a target equals _blank or _new, it changes the link's class to your ext class. Notice this will only work if you have your external links set to open in a new window. If you don't, you can tweak this to work for you, but you won't be able to use it as is.

Notice also that this will change all links with _blank or _new targets to the external colour. If you have internal links (like, say, images that open in a new window), you'll need to add another style to your sheet called 'int' (a.int) that matches your default colour. Then, each time you create one of these links, you'll need to specify the int class. That will keep your internal new window links the proper colour. As you can see in the function, I've also included a check for links with a class of 'nav.' That's because a few of my links in the sidebar open in a new window, but I don't want them to be coloured for ext (and they also can't take on the int colour). Feel free to add more exceptions.

Now, to get this all working, you need to add some code to your body tag, as such:

<body onload="makeExLinks();">

That's it. I know this isn't something for everyone, but I think it adds a little bit of user-friendliness to your links.

Referrers

9 comments (closed), posted on march 9, 2003, tags: site

I've been noticing a few common search queries on this site lately are "refer," "last 50," "where came from" and "statistics." I guess that means people want to see something like, oh I don't know, a list of the last 50 referrers. Up until today, I've used my own custom-written statistics script (see image). I will continue to use that script, but for the visitors of this site who are curious, I've also installed Dean Allen's Refer script. From now on, you can find a link to the last fifty referrers at the bottom of the side bar. Feel free to look and click and whatever else you want to do.

Enter Camino

8 comments (closed), posted on march 6, 2003, tags: software

Finally, after much waiting and legal name-changing trouble, Camino 0.7 (formerly Chimera) was released today. There are plenty of needed changes and additions (namely a better download manager and much faster history functionality), but since I usually download nightly builds every few days at work, there was nothing new for me (except a new splash screen featuring everyone's favorite font, Myriad).

Regardless, it is a step in the right direction, as well as toward that ever waiting one-point-oh. Recently, I had a conversation about browsers with Shawn—mostly about Safari's promise and future possibilities—in which I mentioned that Camino's development is something to look forward to, but for the most part only because of improved stability. I say this because Camino is based on Mozilla and incorporates most of its features already. Therefore, unless they branch out and begin creating new features for Camino separate from the Mozilla center, the browser is limited by Mozilla's development. Basically, if you use Mozilla on your PC, you're using the PC version of Camino (albeit not as pretty or smooth feeling). So, the future for Camino doesn't seem all that bright in terms of fantastic new features.

The nice thing is, there are some Camino only features in action right now. One example: if you right-click (or command click (or just click and hold)) on Camino's dock icon when the program is running, you'll see a list of your toolbar bookmarks ready for the clicking (see image). A great addition to this feature is that you can actually tell Camino which group of bookmarks to use for this popup list*. These little additions are nice, but only go so far.

Safari, of course, is inherently different because it's being developed by Apple. They've got first-hand and inside knowledge of OS X and it's future, enabling them to actually create new features from the ground up if they wish. That's a power Camino will never have. It's unfortunate, but doesn't make Safari a better browser by default.

Aside from radical new features, though, there are a few things I would like to see Camino implement before hitting gold. I'm sure I'm not the first person to point some of these items out, but I've been thinking the past few days about what I would really like this browser to have that it's missing.

• Ability to enable "Check Spelling as You Type" feature. This is built-in functionality for Cocoa applications, and I'm not sure why Camino hasn't used it yet. You'd be surprised how nice it is to have your spelling checked as you type into textareas (like when you comment on this site, for instance).
• Reload Tab / Reload All Tabs options in tab contextual menus. This already works in Mozilla proper, and probably isn't in Camino only because it's using the older Mozilla milestone. It's a nice feature, though, when you have four weblogs open for a few hours in the background and you want to refresh them all. Sure, it only saves a few seconds, but none the less.
• Preload in background abillity. Mozilla for Windows allows you to enable an option that loads Mozilla upon startup into memory, making for a faster first launch time. I know I can specify Camino to be launched at startup via OS X, but I don't want to do that. I don't because I don't want to load the whole program at startup. Something that would load a majority of the code would be nice, though, so if I never actually use Camino in a session it doesn't waste as much time, but if I do the first load would be faster.
• Form auto-completion. Mozilla for Windows allows you to save common form entry (like your name, address, etcetera) for reuse later. This is obviously useful.
• Option to remove the splash screen.
• Give me all of Mozilla's options and functionality. The preferences dialog for Camino is so slight and bare compared to Mozilla proper. Put at least some of the more important stuff in (like the Helper Applications and Popup Window Exceptions).
• Flash. Handle. It. Better.
• Allow me to view my history in different ways (order visited, alphabetically, time spent, etc).
• I really love the Safari activity window (shows errors, loading information and more). Something like this would be nice (or at least show me javascript errors).
• Allow me to right-click an image and get its properties (again, this is built into Mozilla). Sometimes this is very useful.

From time to time I might add to this list. I apologize to everyone who reads this and doesn't have an Apple computer. I'm not trying to waste your time, I just wanted to get these thoughts down. If you do have an Apple machine, and you use Camino, feel free to post your ideas. I'd be interested to see what others think this browser is lacking.

* To change which group of bookmarks is used for this contextual menu, simply choose any bookmark folder, Get Info, and check the box that says "Use for Dock Menu."

Money Pit

8 comments (closed), posted on march 6, 2003, tags: me

The last few days have been a ridiculous ride. Aside from more phone trouble (I once again have no active phone line—I Hate Verizon!—until Verizon decides to send someone out to fix it), we've also just recently started receiving power again after a few days of problems.

Yesterday was the worst, as we didn't have any power all day long (it eventually came back on at 10:30PM last night). Not having power meant we also didn't have heat or hot water. All the food in our refrigerator was crammed into the freezer, and we cooked whatever we thought would go bad. I spent $10 on candles. Then we played Scrabble (and I won!) by candlelight. Also of note is the fact that I took a shower using three pans and hot water mixed with cold tap water. That was really fun.

For some reason I get the feeling Brooklyn is trying to make me leave. Why? Why doesn't it like me? And honestly, does it think this will make me, a person who absolutely hates moving, move again? Well I won't. So go fuck yourself, Brooklyn, I'm staying right where I am.

Just please stop making me cry.

Easy Friend Links

3 comments (closed), posted on march 4, 2003, tags: movable type

Note: This is really outdated and I don't suggest you use it. It can slow down MT quite a bit.

I've received plenty of requests lately to write a quick tutorial on how I use MTMacros to automate common friend links on this site. For instance: Shawn Morrison, a complete link to Shawn's website, is created by simply typing shawnmorrison in the MT entry textarea. Simple and efficient.

This is based on the tutorial I wrote before, called MT Macros & Acronyms (which has been updated, by the way, to be more efficient), but only in principal. You can use this tutorial completely separate from that one, or vice versa.

» Continue reading Easy Friend Links

Better Category Sorting

posted on march 2, 2003, tags: movable type

Right, so I was supposed to write that tutorial about category sorting using PHP. I must have forgotten. Better late than never, I suppose. Here goes: Ellie was creating a new section for her website—a photo blog—and came across a bit of a problem.

She wanted the front page of this section to show the most recent photo from each category. The important thing was that these photos were listed by last update, descending. That means newest photo on top, oldest photo on bottom. The problem is, MT doesn't seem to allow you to organize categories in this fashion. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get them to display in any order other than alphabetically by label. That wasn't going to work, so I set out to find a solution.

» Continue reading Better Category Sorting

Theater Trip

4 comments (closed), posted on march 2, 2003, tags: entertainment

I saw Daredevil on Friday. Meh. After a film like Spiderman, this film just felt so dry. The feeling of grandeur that usually comes from a superhero story, an immenseness almost, was completely missing. I felt as though the entire story of Daredevil took place within a 5-block radius, in one of the most aesthetically boring parts of Manhattan. Some of the effects were well done, but most of them were terrible. Apparently ILM and Manix Entertainment are the only CG companies capable of matching black to black these days. Whoever did this film made some really bad mistakes. Also, frankly, Daredevil's story and abilities are sorta boring. I mean, the radar vision was well handled and cool, but the fact that they claim his heightened sense of touch allows him to jump 40 feet in the air and fall from buildings and land on his feet is just bullshit.

Also, yesterday, I saw Shanghai Knights, which was good but not as good as the original. Jackie Chan felt a little old in this film. There were no stunts, and the movie jumped around a little too much. There were still some amazing scenes (one involving a revolving door, Chan and five police officers, the other involving Chan, a bunch of umbrellas and street thugs), the kind of which make you wonder how someone can do the things Jackie does.

Having not seen very many movies lately, I was happy to be in a theater for these two films—but I wouldn't recommend spending the money to see either until video.