Spam subject line of the day:

Find out if Francine is a real man…

Well, I certainly hope she isn’t!

Thirty new entries in The Proofreader’s Hall of Shame. See? I said I’d update it before the year was out…

Late sleepers of the world, arise! As someone who prefers to wake up some time around 10:00 or 11:00, this is a site I totally support…

(via Presurfer)

I know, I know, you’re all wondering… what did I get for Christmas?

Well, this year had a heavy focus on the video games. I expanded my GameCube collection with Paper Mario… but the big surprise was, well, another system entirely. Specifically, my parents somehow managed to luck out and find a new slimline PlayStation 2.

But of course, a PS2 isn’t much without games. Thus, I’ve started off with DDR Extreme, Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, and the inexplicable yet addictive Katamari Damacy. They’re all fun– hey, that’s the reason I put them on the Christmas list in the first place, heh– but of course I’ll have to go and get my dance mat from my apartment to really enjoy that first title. And yes, there was a memory card for the new system to be found in my stocking.

I also got a DVD burner for my computer, but I’m going to be returning it and getting a different model that my parents and I had seen. The one I got has only a USB 2.0 interface, which would’ve required buying yet another card for my laptop, and in addition I didn’t care much for the Iomega software that was included; the one I want has both USB2 and FireWire connections and includes the latest version of Nero. So we’ll probably be going to exchange that tomorrow.

Aside from that, I got several sweaters and a new pair of jeans, as well as some pairs of socks to replace the increasingly worn and torn ones I had; a desk calendar, to help me keep my schedule just a *bit* more organized; and the latest Far Side wall calendar (of course!).

So, there you have it. Now, to get back to rolling around clumps of stuff…

More fun with hilariously mangled bootleg DVDs: check out the nonsensical subtitles and blurbs found on a bootleg version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

And via BoingBoing, a column by blogger Jon Rahoi on Chinese bootleg DVDs, featuring some great photos of the insane Engrish that shows up on them.

An article about useless clutter on web sites– on a site with a uselessly cluttered design. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said…

(via J-Walk)

For the Windows-using instant messaging addicts out there, the new free version of Trillian has been released at long last. I’ve been trying it out, and it’s quite an improvement over version 0.74.

Among other things, the new version finally supports Unicode, which is one of the biggest annoyances I had with the old version. I got so annoyed with the messages about users sending characters that I couldn’t display– with the new version, those seem to be gone for good. Plus, it means I can type fancy special characters like ♫ and ♥, not to mention the occasional word in 日本語 or Русский… (Interestingly enough, MSN Messenger and GAIM properly handle Unicode as well, but the official AIM client still can’t. Go figure!)

Now I’m just curious how the file transfers work, but to really evaluate that I’d have to try it with someone on another subnet… if file transferring is compatible with either GAIM or the official AIM client, though, I’m definitely recommending it.

There is one new feature I can’t stand– but it can easily be turned off. That would be the feature that creates hotlinks for any word with a corresponding Wikipedia entry. And the option to turn it off is Preferences → Message Windows → Underline words with encyclopedia entries in green. Some people might find this particular feature useful… me, I just find it annoying and clutter-inducing, and I’m glad it can be turned off.

Well, I’ve turned 22 years old today…

…and I don’t feel a day older than 16.

Seriously, though… yeah, it’s my birthday. And my present? Final exams. No, seriously, I got the games “Klonoa” and “Astro Boy” for Game Boy Advance, which should be keeping me busy for at least the rest of the week.

For the curious, also born on December 13 were Amy Lee (lead singer of Evanescence), Morris Day (lead singer of The Time), Jamie Foxx, Dick Van Dyke, Ted Nugent, John “Hollywood Squares” Davidson, and Steve Buscemi, among numerous others listed at Scope Systems and the Internet Movie Database. What can I say? Birthdays make strange bedfellows.

A seemingly useless but potentially useful fact about Windows file names: In Windows 2000 and XP, file names cannot start with the characters “con.”– that is, the word con followed by a period. See for yourself: try renaming a file to, say, “con.huge.co.txt” and watch what happens.

This technically held true in other versions of Windows as well, except for one minor catch: Because of the way that the DOS-based versions of Windows (95, 98 and ME) stored filenames, it was possible to have a file whose name started in “con.” if and only if there were a space, a non-ASCII character, or more than eight characters in the name. Even those names, however, are no longer legal in 2K/XP.

I discovered this while trying to migrate someone’s documents over from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. A number of the files were notes for a Constitutional Law course, with names along the lines of “Con. Law 1.doc”. It took me the longest time to figure out why those files wouldn’t copy to the Win2K machine– and then it dawned on me that it might have something to do with the fact that “CON” is a reserved filename in Windows. Indeed, my hunch turned out to be entirely correct; that was exactly the reason that the files wouldn’t copy!

Of course, now I’ve got to find a machine that’s not running Windows 2000 or above that has support for USB drives so I can rename them… -_-

Just edited to add: Oh, of course! The PowerMacs in the music building! I’ll have to go there tomorrow, I guess…