Concerning Ulujain.org - irregular news and ramblings
For my current projects/work and my personal journal, go here and here respectively.
All of the below information is here for posterity. I've no mind to update any of it.
2006-04-17
I saw the Peter Jackson film King Kong today (2006-04-17), on DVD. I didn't think a whole lot of it, to be honest. Overlong, lacking in dramatic impact, re-treads material covered by the Jurassic Park films. A reviewer at the IMDB called it a great 2 hour movie trying to struggle free of a mediocre 3 hour one. Fair call. The insect pit was well done, though.
2006-04-27
Silly little easter egg inside of Paint Shop Pro v7.x. Do Help --> About. When the logo comes up, double-click on it, hold down SHIFT and CTRL and type in jascsoftware.
2006-04-30
Finished George Orwell's 1984 today. Didn't think it was that great, mind you. A lot of the ideas he presented back in the late '40s when he wrote it are very passé today.
2006-06-08
I haven't done a whole lot with this website lately. Been too busy wasting my time playing games, mainly online ones such as Horizons and Silkroad Online. I've covered the former elsewhere on this site, albeit in an obsolete way, but Silkroad Online is one of those games that has a ton of promise. It's a beautiful looking game (q.v) but it's not without problems. It's free to download and play.
2006-07-18
I don't play either Horizons or Silkroad Online any longer. Horizons got old fast (yet again) and it really does feel like a game in its dying moments, even if it isn't. Silkroad Online just got pushed aside for Everquest II. EQ2 is better in many ways to its predecessor, if not as revolutionary. It certainly holds your hand a little, but I like it so far. Some screenshots.
2006-07-31
I don't make New Year's Resolutions as a rule, but one I did make and actually adhered to at the turn of 2006, was the promise that I'd write a book and actually finish it. I finished the story about late April, I've just been doddering about for the last few months playing games and doing other things. but I printed the entire 203 A4 page, 176,000 word thing out the other day and read it through. Needs some work, that's for sure, but I can proudly say I have a viable and entertaining story here.
2006-10-24
Internet Explorer 7 was released officially and to make it happy, I removed the PNG background that was causing the browser to scroll slowly and jerkily. It definitely supports a few more HTML and CSS standards than its predecessor but it still falls short of Firefox or Opera.
2006-11-03
One of the things I encounter online, that never ceases to amuse me, is people who try and put on a superior air, usually by belittling someone's apparent lack of knowledge or trying to second guess them. Quite often, the superior individuals come unstuck in their pedantry.
Case in point. In the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html in message ID 5fhk2lgia3sbughtijlmoo1okcjvtd76p@4ax.com, regular offender "Spartanicus" had this to say in response to someone legimitately accusing him/her/it of not answering a question:
What you are demonstrating is that you've not understood neither the question, the answer, or usenet. Oh well.
Let's dissect this nonsense with some silly pedantry of our own. Spartanicus uses "you've" and "you are" in the same sentence. Style guides strongly recommend you use all contractions or none at all in your dialogue constructions. It's not a grammatical error, just a minor style blip. But Spartanicus is asserting itself (I don't know the sex of the poster) as a knowledgeable individual, so it should know better.
Neither requires two choices, not three. Neither also requires "nor". Spartanicus has used "or", which is grammatically incorrect. Oh, and there's a double negative in there. Double negatives are grammar errors in English, unlike say, the Slavic languages, where they are a requirement.
Usenet is a proper noun and English proper nouns are capitalised.
There's a tense change midway through the quote too. Starts off present continuous and ends up present perfect.
Spartanicus, like a lot of people trying to be very smug and clever, writes in the passive voice. Avoid the passive voice in this day and age. Few people can use it effectively, and it comes across as overblown and pompous. But that was Spartanicus' intent.
2006-12-19
Blinky the Sad Elitist. An individual who names itself (sex unknown) Blinky has a page, where it deems that using Google Groups to post to Usenet is an egregious crime above and beyond all others. Well, you'd think so from reading it. Page in question. Note that this is an archived version. The original no longer exists.
Sorry, but Blinky comes across as a curmudgeon lamenting the fact that time has marched on and has shown that his precious Usenet out to be the antiquated (and increasingly irrelevant) medium that it is.
Yes, Usenet is antiquated. Once upon a time it served a unique function in bringing remote and disparate people together, as well as providing a common repository of files normally limited to BBSes and the like.
But, there is nothing, and I mean nothing that can be found on Usenet that isn't available on the WWW itself. Discussion, binary, image or code sample. Forums have rendered much of Usenet superfluous, BitTorrent and P2P for files, Skype, AIM, etc, for discussion. Why screw with Usenet, when you can obtain your information using newer and more comprehensive methods? Exactly. Fewer and fewer people are screwing with it.
So, playing advocate for installing and configuring a newsreader comes across as nostalgia.
One of the quoted people on that page laments that Google Group users aren't likely to hang around once they have their information and contribute to the group. That's not the fault of Google Groups and it's absurd to ascribe to it that failing. It's human nature. Most people are not participants by nature. The majority of people will go to a source of information, obtain it, and then leave it again. Including the Blinky's of this world.
And the guy who claimed Outlook users have little to say - all I can say is that supporting your arguments with such bigotry isn't likely to advance your cause. Except to a fellow bigot of course. Judging people by the software that they use - wow, what a novel thing to do.
I could say that this Blinky page is a diatribe written by narrow-minded folk for narrow-minded folk. I'd probably be right.
2007-04-19
Flashman. I'm a science fiction and fantasy reader by habit, and rarely read outside of those two genres for a variety of reasons - some of which I can't truly put words to.
Enter George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman. A dashing Victorian-era poltroon and cad of the worse kind. His adventures, based on true historical happenings, like the Crimean War or the Anglo-Afghan Wars, are uproarious affairs. He runs and hides, cheats, wenches and bullshits his way through the 19th Century world with magnanimous aplomb and emerges a happenstance hero.
All of this would mean nothing if the author wasn't equal to the task and Fraser is.
His writing style is first class and you're buoyed by the confident method. It is continually engaging and, dare I say it, but the Flashman books are wonderful page-turners as a consequence.
One of the most side-splitting things I read in Flashman was when Flashy was presented to Queen Victoria for a medal. When told he was as dark as an Afghan, Flashy spoke some - a phrase used by soliciting harlots. The Duke of Wellington pipes up and tells Queen Vicky "it's a Hindu greeting, marm."
Click on the picture for a good look at Flashman's self-assured and dastardly smile.
