Eh, this one’s been making the rounds on various blogs, so I’m going to go ahead and blog it as well:
Abi-Station Icon Maker

Basically, it’s yet another of those sites that can be used to generate personal avatars for forums, instant messaging software, LiveJournals, and the like. It’s based in Japan, so the icons have an anime-inspired look that’s reminiscent of many old-school video games.

Here’s my attempt at trying to create an avatar for myself using the site. Those of you who actually know what I look like, feel free to comment on its accuracy… 🙂

Grr. Lately I’ve been working on a new site design for a non-profit organization, and I’ve decided to go the CSS route rather than using tabular layouts and other such kludges. Overall, it seems to have been a good idea so far, but I really wish Microsoft would fix these very broken CSS rendering bugs in Internet Explorer; it would make the development task so much easier.

Then again, I suppose it would be a bit amusing, given the typical design issues I’ve encountered around the web, if we ended up having a site that rendered perfectly well in Mozilla and Safari but was horribly broken in IE. :-p

OK, so I knew that the song in the first Mitsubishi “See What Happens” ad was “Ballroom Blitz” by the Sweet. That was all fine and dandy. But Mitsubishi recently released a second ad in that same series, this one set to a different tune.

And worse, there wasn’t exactly much to go by in the ad as it aired on TV; all that was played was the intro, with a guitar riff and some “yeah-yeah-yeah”-ing. Not very good for a lyric search, you’ve gotta admit. And Mitsubishi’s site offered no song ID either.

However, more of the song in question is played in the commercial on the site, and I managed to make out a few lyrics, namely “scream and shout” and “out of control”. (Cursed auditory processing disorder…) Anyway, that seems to have been enough; Googling for those relatively common phrases, coupled with “lyrics”, led me to a lyric transcription that seemed to fit– namely, Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge”. I thought it sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it…

And thus, we have another mystery solved for all those people out there in Google-land searching for Mitsubishi commercial music. Woohoo. 😉

If you were having some trouble accessing this blog last night or this morning, there’s a reason: the server on which Zone38 is hosted was running so low on disk space that it was unable to fetch the blog entries from the database in order to display them. The problem’s been fixed now, and the site’s back online once again.

For those of you looking for a web host, I highly recommend JaguarPC (www.jaguarpc.com); I’ve been using them since I started my site, and I’ve been quite pleased with the experience.

Well, I’ve finally gone ahead and made the switch from MovableType to a different blogging system, namely WordPress. You’ll probably notice that the template looks a little different (though I tried to keep most of the design elements from the old layout), but there’s a lot more that’s new here than just the look and feel. The comment system’s completely new (obviously, since it no longer uses MovableType), the URLs are a bit cleaner, and post formatting is a bit easier and more automatic on my end as well.

And yes, I know I haven’t posted here in quite a while. I’ll try to change that, too. 🙂

If you encounter any problems with the new blog, just drop me a line at blog @zone38.net letting me know where the error occurs and I’ll try to fix it as soon as possible.

Hah! I always thought Nickelback’s latest hit sounded suspiciously like their first… well, I’ve found some definitive proof that I wasn’t just hearing things.

Ooh, this is interesting: Wikipedia’s list of company name etymologies. Find out where such trademarks as Apache, Corel, and eBay originated. (via Languagehat)

An ode to old-school computing, found via Fark.com: Hey, Hey, 16K

Oh, how I remember the old VIC-20, TI-99/4A, and of course the TRS-80 CoCo I used so much as a kid… Yeah, I know, I know, I was a geeky child. 😉

Is it just me, or were the alternative rock charts so much better seven years ago than they are now, in terms of variety alone? I was just thinking about this earlier today while listening to the local alt-rock station when they played a few ‘retro’ tracks… some of the songs on the charts now are so repetitive and have just gotten so tired, whereas I could listen to most of the alt-rock chart-toppers from ’97 for hours on end even back then.

Then again, it also doesn’t help that the aforementioned station is owned by Clear Channel…

Now this is cool: Darren Stone has ported at least some of the modules from Jamie Zawinski’s XScreensaver from Unix to Windows. Gotta love open source– especially when it’s used for utterly pointless desktop toys like these. Though it doesn’t include any of the text effects (probably due to font rendering issues) or some of the more recent hacks such as AppleII or Wormhole, it does include the excellent GLMatrix, BlockTube, Flurry and Sproingies.

Speaking of screen savers, perhaps the best fireworks simulation that I’ve seen is Skyrocket from ReallySlick, a Windows screensaver which has also been ported to Unix.

Oh, yeah, and exams are finally over for me this semester. I’m moving out tomorr– uh, well, technically today…