I finally scheduled an appointment to have new tires put on my car, having talked myself into and back out of looking for a 2008 BMW to finance at 0.9% several times over. Since the lobby of Discount Tire is clearly not designed for “hanging out” – they have space for a display of racing slicks, but the waiting area consists of half a dozen chairs crammed in a corner – I went to Starbucks in hopes of finding free wi-fi. Surely an hour at Starbucks couldn’t kill me… right?

I have never once entered a Starbucks without being made to feel like an idiot. I asked about wi-fi, which apparently takes a registered Starbucks card. I didn’t even ask if that cost anything. I’m carrying around a MacBook these days and certainly don’t need my name in a Starbucks database, too. After I paid the guy who took my order and he wandered off, I realized I was supposed to wait near the little round thing at the end of the counter. I was disappointed but not surprised to see that $2.50 at Starbucks gets you a hot chocolate that’s roughly the size of a children’s Frosty. Then again, if you know what size a children’s Frosty is you’re probably not Starbucks’s target demographic.

In Europe are all the tables extremely tiny? Is Europe where Starbucks picked that up from? I am sitting at a table with three chairs around it, and it’s like a TV tray. It’s as if all the furniture in this place was designed by Lilliputians. +10 points to Mac for their dictionary’s simple and shiny confirmation of the spelling of Lilliputian. -100 points from EA for blocking me from playing Spore Creature Creator without an internet connection.

[Update: Typos, begone. Who misspells "Frosty" - seriously!]

As expected, Blu-ray prices have increased since the end of the format war with HD DVD.  Without opposition, Sony has succesfully driven high definition content out of reach for a lot of people.  Their players are, on average, 2-4 times more expesive than the HD DVD equivalent.  The cheapest HD DVD player you could purchase (before the format war was over) was around $100, and that was for a third generation player.  On the other hand, the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market was closer to $300.  Now, however, the same blu-ray player costs $400…that’s a $100 increase since the end of the format war, which was about a month ago.  At these prices, Sony is making it quite impossible to purchase a standalone player since the PS3 is also in that price range and features a built in Blu-ray disc player.  There have also been about 3 good game releases on the platform, so you could get in on that as well.

It boggles the mind why Blu-ray players are so expensive, when they are unable to connect to the internet at all.  That feature is on the horizon for the players, but all versions of the players so far will never be able to access online content for movies or receive firmware updates, which could possibly mean the inability to watch future Blu-ray movies.  One would assume Sony would distribute firmware updates through the mail on a Blu-ray disc to remedy this issue.  Even with this being the case, Blu-ray prices continue to rise.

It is also popular belief that the upconversion on the Blu-ray player does not match that of the HD DVD format.  This has also been tested by professionals and determined to be true.  This being the case, you can easily grab an HD DVD player for under $100 and enjoy a great upconverting DVD player for the same price (or even less in a lot of cases) as a good upconverting standard DVD player.  Hopefully Blu-ray improves this in the next generation of players, as I have an extensive standard DVD collection and would enjoy a good upconversion for all of them.

Considering all of this, now is the absolute worst time to purchase a Blu-ray standalone player.  The costs are soaring, and they will be obsolete by the time the next generation Blu-ray player is released.  If you really need a Blu-ray player, buy a PS3.  This way you spend about the same amount, plus one would imagine that you will be unaffected by the looming upgrades since the PS3 has online capabilities.  I make it a point, however, to never assume anything with regards to Sony.  I am continually let down by their utter lack of interest in what is best for the consumer.

Coffing’s post yesterday reminded me that I chopped an old 11×17″ flyer graphic into a 1280×1024 wallpaper and forgot to publish it. You can download the thing by clicking this thumbnail, if you’re really that much of a dork:

Consider it a preview of cartoons to (maybe) come! You can even buy the full-size poster, if you trust CafePress…

It’s been long enough, I think, since I canceled my World of Warcraft account that I can mock the game without being knocked from my chair by Hypocrisy in some corporeal form.

By any estimation, there are way too many people – somewhere around 9 million active accounts, last I heard – paying monthly subscriptions to play Warcraft for the game to be just a trend. In my case, several friends started playing while we were still in school, and I was glad to join in as soon as I had a job and a broadband connection. The prospect of running around a huge virtual world with the guys, beating the virtual tar out of virtual enemies controlled by lesser nerds the world over, made several months of catch-up seem worthwhile.

And, for a good long time, it was. There’s a lot to Nerdcraft, and we had hours of fun completing quests and picking fights. We’d stumble upon a group of morons tormenting new players, and kick them around until they ran away. We developed quite the skillset for finding the lamest, dirtiest players around, then smashing their faces until they cried and logged off.

The problem came from our lack of virtual dedication: the better your pretend armor and weapons, the tougher your character gets, and when the annoying losers playing the game (it’s a game that attracts more than a few) spend 4-6 hours every day grinding for better gear… most fights are determined by mathematics alone. Um, sure, I’d love to sit at my desk for 30 hours a week clicking 2 buttons a hundred billion times so I could be that awesome. Thing is, I already have a job, so I’ll pass.

I never wanted to play World of Fight This Monster Four Times A Week Until Your Armor All Matches, but unfortunately that’s what the Warcraft developers had in mind for anybody who hangs around more than a few months. I should add that for every complaint my friends and I have about Warcraft it sounds like Warhammer (“Nerdhammer,” to keep the theme consistent?) poses a solution. Until then, if you see one of the Warcraft commercials on TV and think “Wow, that must be the dorkiest thing ever,” ..you’re right!

I remembered to check the “feedback” email for my old website this evening. “Feedback” gets scare quotes because it’s only truly feedback if you consider spam robots visitors and if you count spam as comments. Out of 1000-some odd messages, I’d guess 800 followed the pattern of:

Get you/’re bachelor/’s! Your busines dreams can be realize but only with a degree!!!11!

And then there’s a phone number to call, with gramatically inept directions on precisely how to leave my name and contact information because this offer is too good to miss! I feel bad, really, that I deleted the whole heap before thinking to copy a phone number so I could share the inside line to a fast-track degree. I guess C1al1s S0ftab5 are sooo last quarter. Speaking of quartering, that’s what we should do with spammers! Seriously, if I’m not going to respond to one pathetic email why would I respond to any of the next 30 with the same, exact words from the same, exact place? If you knocked at my door that many times our relationship would progress rapidly to door-slamming and then punching of face.

The one email (again, out of over a thousand) that I saw from a real live person was a request to be removed from my mailing list. Which means, sickeningly, that my contact form has been used recently to spam people other than me, and at least one poor guy thinks I’m the one who did it. “Pissed” would be a good way to describe the way that makes me feel, and “deleted” would be a good way to describe my contact form and anything attached to it. So if any of my site’s four visitors ever want to contact me again… tough, because I won’t sift through trash knowing others are getting it on account of me, too. But hey, that’s the way it goes, Electronic Mass Marketing is a dog-eat-dog industry. I just wish all the filthy rat-dogs would eat each other already and leave my stuff alone.

Today I worked late for the first time ever. It, as anticipated, sucked. Not in a standalone “noooo this is a fate worse than death!” sort of way, but in a “why couldn’t this week have ended four days ago” fashion. Lead-in disclaimer for the following paragraphs: nerdery ensues…

If I live to be a hundred and remain lame enough to write about it in 2083, I’ll still be railing on about Internet Explorer. My distaste for it is such that no matter how many Africans the Gates Foundation provides with food, clothing, and Short Term Single User Software Licenses, Bill Gates will be on the short list of people I irrationally hate. Other members include the guy who decided Mark Wahlberg should choose the monkey over the blonde in Planet of the Apes, and whomever happens to be dating Natalie Portman currently.

You see, the problem I have with Internet Explorer is that it sucks. If you are working on a website, there are basically three phases. Phase 1: Design. Phase 2: Implementation. Phase 3: Fix all of the things that work in every browser but Internet Explorer. In a typical web development lifecycle, Phase 3 lasts as long as Phase 1 and 2 combined, and is far less rewarding.

So it is that this week I’m working on a surprise continuation of Phase 3 in a project that should have been done months ago. Sadly, its original iteration was written in InfoPath, a fine product by – who’d have guessed! – Microsoft. What I inherited was completely wrong for the business process, so I learned InfoPath while rebuilding from nothing. Only when I started trying to test it did I find that InfoPath cannot do math. Addition, multiplication, you name it, InfoPath’s XML processing ruins the living hell out of it. Format it to death and back again and one cent plus two cents will (sometimes, not always) add up to .030000072001 dollars.

Now, here I am, having wrenched the Access backend (can I mention Access without writing a separate paragraph of my hatred for it? -maybe!) into shape and the fronted into semi-functional ASP. Turns out my initial testers are incompetent beyond compare and didn’t mention to me that half of the friggin’ totals are calculated completely wrong. They also mentioned, only in passing, that any data entry mistake causes the main form to be completely reset in Internet Explorer.

The first issue, I could fix… if someone would, you know, tell me how the totals are supposed to be determined. The second, to my delight, goes to the very core of how Explorer processes ASP code, and is probably going to require a very ridiculous and painful amount of data retrieval. And only now do we get to this post’s title -

Sweet, sweet relief! In the middle of my crappy day yesterday, I noticed a poster in the hall about the office next door selling ice cream this afternoon. In the middle of my crappy day today… I had to leave the building just in time to miss out on ice cream. And then it was 5:30 by the time I got back downtown. And boy, was that the perfect way to end the week.

Are they going to try to regulate Internet free speech using McCain-Feingold? Well, yeah. And anytime “they” refers to a Federal entity (in this case the Federal Election Commission), they’re going to do what they want unless a whole bunch of someones do something about it. I think it’d be safe to call this the Fuss of the Week around the blogosphere – there, I said it, I hate the word but there it is – and I think it’d be equally safe to say it ought to be. There are an awful lot of smart Americans who have realized during the past election cycle that, thanks to a half-dozen blogging services ranging from ‘free’ to ‘free and annoyingly ad-filled,’ the Internet really is a great marketplace for discussion and ideas. If the FEC decides to treat every Joe and Sally the same as NBC or Fox, a lot of us will be up the proverbial creek without a paddle (proverbial or otherwise).

First Amendment, First Amendment, First Amendment. For all the carrying on you hear about it from the attorneys of terrorists and Martha Stewart, here is a situation where a Federal bureaucratic agency is seriously targeting First Amendment protections. We’re not talking about millionaire nutjobs pouring dirty money into dirty politics here (ok, we’re not as long as you exclude moveon.org), we’re talking about insightful working men and women who take the time and energy to lend their own unabashed perspective to daily events. I, for one, enjoy that right, mostly because I like reading what they have to say. A lot. Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters has posted a letter to Congress, and La Shawn Barber has a good rundown of the subject from top to bottom.

As far as open letters go, here’s my own much easier, dumb version:

McCain-Feingold must not be applied to the Internet. Would it be just – or within the intentions of the original legislation – to treat private citizens the same as NBC or The Washington Post? This is a dangerous swipe at our freedom of speech, and one that I’m counting on you and other Republican members of Congress to block. Thank you and God bless.

The Internet is, in addition to giving nerds such as myself someplace to write as though people were reading, a great resource for reaching our elected officials. If you’ve got a minute, send a quick message to your state’s senators. If you’re blessed to be an Ohioan, visit the contact forms at Voinovich.senate.gov and DeWine.senate.gov and drop a few sentences through. Otherwise, visit senate.gov and pick your state from the dropdown list.

Oh, by the way, those links to George Voinovich and Mike DeWine’s websites? In the months prior to an election, they’d probably be considered illegal in-kind assistance if McCain-Feingold were stretched to cover Internet communications. Yikes…

I’m not a conspiracy theory type of guy, and today is no exception… but let’s just consider something for a moment. I realize the average person is not too familiar with the gory details of web design, so I’ll try extra hard to tone the nerdage down enough that the typical reader (I say ‘reader’ in the singular because I know I’ve got only one, and that’s assuming mom figures out how to turn on the computer) can relate.

Ok, so… Microsoft. Whoa! See what I did, I used up around 90% of my allotted nerdiness just by mentioning the big M-word. Ah well. Anyway, we’re all familiar with Mr. Softy and the fact that, as a whole, the company sucks. Graphical, icon based operating system? Apple. Mouse? Apple. Web browser? Netscape. These are not three little things. If you have used a computer any time since 1985, it’s likely that these three things are the aspects of the PC which you are most familiar with. Microsoft, despite controlling a gigantic share of the operating system and browser markets, pioneered none of the most basic components of the home computer.

I should point out that I’m a Windows XP user. It is stable. It is smart enough that my camera, mouse, etc. work the way they are supposed to as soon as I plug them in. And until Service Pack 2, it didn’t even try to do too many things behind my back. In other words, no, I am not a disgruntled Mac user. Just a disgruntled web designer.

Obviously not all Microsoft products are horrible. Regardless of what anyone says, you don’t get into an industry dominating position without some degree of quality in whatever it is you’re selling. Internet Explorer, though, is pretty thoroughly horrible. See, following several years of “browser wars” (this is an actual term, I promise I’m not that much of a loser) between Netscape and Microsoft, several organizations came together and decided what we needed were concrete standards for anything meant for the Internet. This way, programmers could be confident they would not have to design 17 different versions of each thing they built, and Joe User could see content the way it was meant to be seen.

How do you think Microsoft felt about this? Having won the browser wars mostly on account of packaging Internet Explorer with new computers, it’s fair to say Microsoft saw little reason to comply with standards. Why allow for new competition when you control 85% of the market? This, apparently, was Microsoft’s reaction. Now, years later, Firefox is finished. And it’s free. And it’s faster, more secure, simpler to use, has better features. Now you can see where I’m going with this.

Firefox is better from the Internet user’s standpoint, and it’s nice to people who build websites. If you design a page, and your design is good, and you put it together the way you’re supposed to, that should be it. End of story, ship it out, open for business. Nope! Because Internet Explorer breaks or at the very least briskly jostles numerous attributes of even relatively simple designs, it’s not uncommon to spend twice as much time fixing IE errors as you spent designing the page from scratch.

“Woops,” Microsoft might say. “Couldn’t fix that whole not-working-the-way-it’s-supposed to thing. We’ll try and get that straightened out by version 8 billion.” In older versions, there was actually a weird sequence of commands that you could use in order to trick IE into doing what the other browsers were doing already. In the latest editions – this is it, this is the conspiracy, this is my evidence that this post is not completely out of left field – Microsoft fixed the workaround. The errors caused by their crappy program are still there. One of few options that web designers had for fixing them: GONE.

What can you do? As a designer, you can’t put something together in Firefox and tell Internet Explorer users to piss off. They are, after all, 80-some percent of your audience. Which is why, if you haven’t already, you should download Firefox. And tell all of your friends to do the same. And, while you’re at it, put a copy on your parents’ computer; as long as you import their favorites, they’ll hardly know the difference.

Those of you who might be normal, sorry. Somehow the 20-page MIS paper I’ve got hanging over my head has put me in the mood to write an entry that’s technical and nerdy. If you’re reading – thanks a lot, Dr. Yen. Is technical and nerdy better than nothing? Probably not. But here it is. Maybe I’ll write something interesting… next month?

When I order something or register with a website, I normally do not want to hear from them ever again. Did you send me what I bought? Can I login when I want to read something? Ok then, thanks, have a nice life. When they do email me, as even the more trustworthy companies insist on doing once every 4 hours or so, it makes me mad. Usually the first thing I will say at the sight of another “$10 off your next $3000 order” message is the name of the offending company, followed or preceded by a gentle expletive of some sort. In this sense, I am no different than your general garden variety nerd.

Not lately. Lately, I’ve been trying to teach my computer the meaning of “spam.” As such, I’d love to get some emails about political commentary or upcoming sales or general developments at websites I enjoy. I spent half an hour yesterday subscribing to the mailing list for each of my favorite bands and news sources. Why? Because that would be something to train my computer to like, versus the billions of true garbage messages I get about transexuals and poodles and transexual poodles.

Is anyone here familiar with Bayesian logic? Yeah, that’s what I figured. Apparently it’s fairly effective as an email categorizing technology. You set up a handy program to classify your email on its way to your inbox, and then you create a filter in whatever (Eudora, Outlook, et al) you use for reading mail. The classification program keeps track of every message it processes, and a browser-based interface lets you categorize new messages so it knows which ones are good and which are bad. Meanwhile, the filter in your email client shoves the ‘bad’ messages into a junk box or straight to the trash. Doesn’t that sound nice?

It is pretty nice, and I’m going to use it right this time around. See, when I originally set up iamthathero.com I was glad to finally have a .com site. I put my new email address on every page, and never thought twice – or even once, to be honest – about the fact that dirty, stupid, inconsiderate people (‘spammers’) make a living by selling email addresses to other dirty, stupid, inconsiderate people (‘other spammers’). And they have automated scripts that exist for the sole purpose of pulling email addresses off of websites. As a result, I was soon getting roughly 1,000 junk emails to every .6 real ones.

A close friend and superior nerd set up SpamBayes on my laptop, and I was on my way to enjoying trash-free email browsing. Or so I thought. As it turns out, SpamBayes develops a deep identity crisis when you classify several hundred emails a day as “spam” and one email every few weeks as “ham” (a simple but amazingly confusing slang term for good email). But that’s what I did, and instead of spending the summer sifting through metric tons of junk email I spent the summer sifting through metric tons of junk email and then telling SpamBayes that each one was junk. Don’t do that.

I’ve just started using SpamBayes on my new computer, and when it correctly classifies a message as spam I just discard it. Because why mess with its database when it’s getting the categorization right? If you get a lot of junk mail and are nerdy enough to try and fix it, check out spambayes.org for the free software and better explanation. While you’re at it, search the web for ‘spam trap’ to find articles and tricks for killing spam robots that visit your own site. Oh, and if you know someone who sends mass unsolicited emails for a living, kick them in the teeth.

Think of your favorite movie. Now, what is it that makes this movie so great? Unless it’s a comedy where the plot is secondary, more than likely “good” and “evil” are involved (even if it’s a ‘I hope she chooses the guy who’s not a jerk’ chick-flick). And they are not playing nice. My favorite movie, when I’m in too serious a mood for The Princess Bride, is the final entry into the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Talk about an enormously popular series of films… we’re talking worldwide popularity to a degree that’s nearly universal. And what lies at the core of the story? Deceptively imaginary good vs. evil.

It should come as no surprise that this is the sort of movie people will watch again and again. Whether we realize it or not, there is more truth in the Lord of the Rings movies than in every chainsaw massacre, softcore pornography, and annoying documentary film combined. Right and wrong are deeper and stronger than laws or traditions; we know that the honorable should win and the cruel suffer defeat. The special effects are stunning, the acting is great, the directing is masterful – but these are only means to the end. When you watch these movies, you identify with the characters and hope for their safety and rejoice in their victory. Deny it if you will, but you have witnessed possibly the best ever cinematic depiction of the battle between the greatest powers in the universe. And I don’t mean mythological heroes and dungeon monsters.

There are great powers in the universe, and they are greater than nature, and they are as obvious as the sun. Belief in God is popular, but only under the most watery and least reasonable definitions of Him. As plain as movie-screen good versus evil, there are only two paths in life. One of them is with God; the other, without. We can see these only poorly, if at all. Our scientific stubbornness cannot ‘know’ that God exists at all. But should we expect to? A God behind, below, above and beyond the scenes of an everything-sized movie is awfully big. What character, conceived in His mind and drawn by His hand, could possibly understand Him? Would J.R.R. Tolkein’s fictional dwarves and elves, brought to bigscreen life but existing only on film, discs, and paper, have any reason to expect a handshake and signed photograph from the director?

So this is where faith comes in. We fuss and argue about religion until nobody knows what ‘religion’ means, but FAITH… faith is a word that actually makes you think of something. Faith is belief in an incomprehensible “big picture.” It’s something hard to explain, yet simple – either you take a step and have faith, or you do not. Reality does not leave footnote space or empty lines to fill in with an Eastern religion of your choice or a doctored defintion of God. When I say ‘faith’ I mean a thoughtful belief in the God of the Hebrews, the Father of Jesus Christ; the Creator. Everything else I’ve tried was an escape hatch to pride and self-reliance.

I hope you’re with me here. If not, there isn’t much I can do. Read some C.S. Lewis (he was a friend of Tolkein’s, by the way) or meet with a local pastor. Think about why you look at the world the way you do; hold up your favorite alternative to God against the light of an ordered universe complete with thinking, emotional beings. Should you choose atheism or something else, live your life for awhile and honestly consider how that goes. If there’s a point to something as complicated as life, how could it be as bland as ‘to be happy?’ If there’s not a point, how could someone as smart as yourself be so hung up searching for one? Honestly, you may think I’m stupid but scratch out God and you’re missing the show.

Yes, a truly good movie is a great thing. But how sad it would be if that were the greatest thing… a scripted course of events starring a cast of fake characters, all designed to evoke emotions that serve no other purpose. How easily we forget that God is here. His amazing plan is for our greatest good: and every day, we forget. I can glance in awe at the sunrise. I can take in the comforting, powerful words of the Bible. I can enjoy a beautiful song that doesn’t scratch the surface of God’s vast power… all while completely overlooking the facts that I am an adopted son of a God who does not make mistakes or concessions, and that I live in a world poisoned by Evil. Does God love his children? He gives us life and choice, and I can’t think of grander, better gifts. But I shuffle along feeling bored and unimportant 300 days out of the year.

Only once in awhile do I vaguely glimpse the plot. I really don’t know what is planned for me, let alone how I’ll get there. I know enough to see, at last, that Christianity is never a set of rules or a class on self improvement. Following Christ is a doorway opened, not to a quiet pasture or a golden road but to everlasting life… through a world at war. Good is fighting evil, but in our storyline we rarely choose a side or even realize the lines are drawn. I am often burned out because I want to tell my own story, with the entire thing planned and scheduled and padded for safety. I want to serve God, but I’d like to have a 12-step program or something to hold onto.

I should be holding onto God instead. This is GOD we’re talking about here. Outside of time, space, every other thing that restricts us. Awesome and creative and loving enough to put romance deep in our hearts. He made this world and if He chooses, He can unmake it. He will not die: at the perfect time, God will conquer. Think back to Return of the King and try to picture the horrifying odds; while enjoying the outcome, remember the theological relevance and beauty of that miraculous final victory. I cannot imagine – I cannot begin to imagine – the unbelievable God I claim to know, but I conveniently assume He’ll take care of me while I do my thing and try to be nice. This is not true.

In appreciating the good we must not forget the evil. Every day can bring me nearer life, or nearer death. If I insist on standing still, it will not be long before I’m shaken. I will try to ignore it, but many times I’ll have to choose: trust God to lift me forward again, or trust myself and fall to useless pride? Life lies at the handle of a bright but heavy sword, offered selflessly to undeserving hands. Dare you turn away and deny your loving King? Will you draw, but fight only for selfish glory? Darkness creeps in powerfully and in many forms. To share in victory, we must kneel and grasp Truth with a humble warrior’s heart. Not merely in one dramatic instant, but throughout our lives, as battles rage both inside and out.