Well, I got my new eyeglasses today, with the prescription from my eye exam a couple weeks ago…

…and wow, they must’ve done something with the prescription, because everything suddenly looks three-dimensional. As I may or may not have commented before, it used to be that everything looked relatively flat– some depth, but not a great amount– but now things actually stand out noticeably from the background!

Even weirder… I was just taking my glasses off and putting them back on for comparison, and it’s unreal. Take them off, everything’s flat; put them on, things stand out from the background. Repeat ad infinitum.

Go figure, eh? I wonder what they did to the prescription…

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)

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.

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…

I had considered sending a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Vent” column to some Canadian LiveJournal users, but as I looked at the AJC’s ridiculously intrusive mandatory registration, I realized that its intrusiveness (which I’ve discussed at length before) is not its only fault.

Let me present a screenshot of the section in question:

Notice anything missing? Like, say, an option to select what country you live in? Well, that’s not a good start… just because your paper is published in the US doesn’t mean all your potential readers live there. Heck, when there’s a weekly section titled “Atlanta & the World”, it might be a good idea to, I don’t know, make your site accessible to the whole world.

So, on a hunch, I tried entering an address with a Canadian postal code, in the format A9A 9A9 (leaving several of the later fields blank, so that the registration still wouldn’t go through). Of course, the postal code was rejected, with the response that you had to enter a five-digit number in the field. Entering 00000, of course, caused the error to go away. There’s also the fact that you have to select a US state; I suppose you *could* theoretically pick Georgia, though “Toronto, Georgia” just doesn’t sound right. 🙂

And it’s even worse for Aussies and Brits; in addition to the postal code and state problem (yes, I know, Australia has states, but none of them are listed in the drop-down menu!), the form only accepts ten-digit phone numbers as well.

If the Interface Hall of Shame were still being updated, this would definitely be a worthy candidate for the “globalization” wing…

Edited 2004/11/29 to add: Finally got a response from AJC. Here it is:

Thank you for contacting The Atlanta Journal Constitution. We appreciate your interest in our paper and embrace the opportunity to better serve our valued customers.

We understand that you have been unable to complete the registration process due to a foreign zip code error. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please complete your registration by entering the state of GA and using “44444” in the zip code field and submit. You may also use 444-444-4444 as the phone number. Once you have confirmed your registration, you will have full access to ajc.com online. Again, we apologize for this inconvenience.

So there you have it.

I’d link to the Firefox web site to promote the final release of Firefox 1.0, but as their web server seems to be overloaded from all the traffic anyway, here’s a link to the file server so you can download it directly. 🙂

Well, it’s been a rather busy week for me this past week, which is why I haven’t had much of a chance to post anything…

The main reason it’s been busy is that Thursday through Saturday, I was in Spartanburg, SC for the CCSC Southeastern Regional Conference, visiting a few of the seminars and participating in the programming competition on Saturday. Mercer Team A, the team I’m on, ended up placing first at the competition, having submitted correct solutions for four of the six problems with at least some amount of code written for the remaining two.

In other news, someone at ESPN apparently caught wind of my blog posting in which I mentioned Cheap Seats, and sent me a tape of the episode along with a Cheap Seats T-shirt… and as I expected, it was utterly hilarious. (For the curious, I’m the guy who misspelled “doyen”… that word will haunt me for the rest of my life.)

And of course, thanks to this weekend’s activities, I now have a huge backlog of homework and studying to procrastinate on. Heh. I can be so scatterbrained and stubborn sometimes, I know…

Y’know, listening to old video game music after hearing the “Vote or Die” slogan tossed around one too many times can cause me to go just a bit crazy with Corel Photo-Paint…

…apologies to any of the original programmers and graphic designers, of course.

(Apparently I have more free time on my hands than I had previously thought…)