Oh, and wow, I really haven’t blogged in a while, have I? Well, anyway, yeah, I’m back.

So where’ve I been? Nowhere, actually; I’ve been right here at home staring at a computer terminal as always. I just haven’t been blogging. I’ve been too busy doing other things– working on some business web sites, preparing my belongings for college (which starts next week), and fiddling with my nifty new ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 7500 card in the past week (crashing Win98 a couple times in the process thanks to some driver conflicts, heh…).

Sigh. It seems that Microsoft has taken down the official download page for their core fonts package citing repeated end-user license violations as the reason for its removal. [link via MetaFilter and Typographica]

Now what am I going to do to install Trebuchet and Andale on all the old Win98 and MacOS 7 machines I come across? Wait…there are already plenty of unofficial mirrors of the fonts that– ironically enough– are fully in compliance with the above-mentioned license agreement. Go figure.

(Then again, on the bright side, there’s no more link to Comic Sans on Microsoft’s page. Talk about a font that gets severely misused…)

Check out this explanatory text from one of the dialogue boxes in the new version of ZoneAlarm, paying special attention to the last sentence. “Netwoking”…isn’t that what goes on in the kitchen at a Chinese restaurant?

Meet the Lane brothers of New York City, Winner and Loser. Strange enough names as they are, but that’s only the beginning. Contrary to their names, Loser would eventually become a winner and Winner a loser. Confused yet? [found on MetaFilter]

Grah. Apparently the RIAA’s rulings on webcasts have forced WLIR to stop its online stream. Sigh…’tis a shame, too.

Inspired by the "do not disclose this URL" search mentioned some time ago on Need to Know, I decided to do a Google search for "do not link to this page". The results, of course, are strangely ironic…

Also worth noting are "do not distribute this URL" and "do not share this URL".

As if generating random sentences via Markov chains wasn’t entertaining enough, you can also generate some neologisms through the same process. It’s absolutely attifurteriteric!

And more Chinglish, also turned up through a very fruitful Google search: A Sign of the Times.

Badly-translated Engrish, as surprising as it may seem at first, isn’t unique to Japan. Admittedly, with its huge electronic industry and the sheer number of products it exports, Japan is probably the most well-known and most consistent source of bad translations– but by no means is it alone. Take, for instance, the sometimes absurd variety of Engrish known as Chinglish, so named because it originates in Chinese-speaking countries…

Why do so many people seem to dislike the registration required to browse articles on the New York Times’ web site? It’s true that you have to provide some minor demographic information about yourself to register, and you might end up with a bit of spam here and there (though I don’t recall having gotten any because of it). Nonetheless, you don’t have to provide your street address or even your real name to register. It’s a slight hassle, to be sure, but it’s well worth the few seconds it takes to fill out the form, and from what I can see, it’s hardly an invasion of privacy.

No, the New York Times’ registration is hardly evil. What’s evil is the mandatory registration form for that west-coast monolith, the Los Angeles Times— a “feature” which, in fact, was only implemented recently. As I said, I can easily handle giving away a few bits of basic, anonymous demographic information– but being forced to provide my name, address and phone number just so I can browse the day’s news from a paper all the way across the country from me is, in my opinion, more than a bit excessive…