That's the artificial horizon, which is better than the actual horizon.

March 31st, 2003

Shona's sister and her boyfriend came into town over the weekend to help Shona and I paint the living room and fix some water damage on one of the walls. I got to learn lots of neat things like how to patch using drywall parts, how to use sealer and some great painting techniques. It's pretty neat. You can't even tell that the area that was repaired was even damaged and the living room is really starting to look nice. The trim and the mantle have been painted and the walls are mostly done. I just have a few edges left to paint. Of course, those edges are twenty feet in the air. at the corner of the vaulted ceiling and the wall, which makes them not just hard to get to, but also an adrenaline-pumping experience. Maybe I should get phil over here with his climbing gear.
I would also like to point out that today is the fifth aniversary of the release of the Mozilla source code. We've come such a long way and I'm pretty proud of the work that I've put into it. When I started I didn't know C++ or X or Gtk or Motif. Now I've got a reasonable understanding of most of those technologies. (Well, maybe not Motif which I don't really care about.)
Looking back at my original goals when I started working on this project I think that I've mostly acheived them. I wanted Mozilla to work well on Linux because it's such a fundamental part of today's desktop and I think we're pretty close to being there. Most of the rest of the desktop has come together. Gnome 2.x is pretty good technology and I think they are heading in the right direction. Fonts are finally being straightened out thanks to Keith's work and we're going to have a decent vector graphics extension soon, assuming that Keith and Carl keep making progress. If they do manage to do Xr and Xc as they are planning, they will also solve a large part of the printing problem that still exists.
Also, thanks to OpenOffice.org (god, someone kill that fucking name) we've got a good chance of seeing a decent office suite coming together as well - one of the really important ingredients. It doesn't integrate well with the rest of the system at all right now but I'm hoping that a lot of Ximian's recent work in that area will pay off. We'll see when they do their release.
So, in summary, I think that the seeds are there. All we need is some better system integration and to get the right people to follow through on their projects.
The future's so bright I gotta wear shades.

March 24th, 2003

Smooth scrolling landed on the mozilla trunk. It rocks.
Another precious AIM moment:
(23:56:02) IHopeUDieInAFire: hey whats up... you never talk to me....

March 23rd, 2003

Today's AIM users of choice:

(13:47:13) vrockj788: what kind of sn is blizzard
(13:48:03) vrockj788: im gonna beat ur ass
(13:48:09) vrockj788: u better watch ur back
(13:48:12) vrockj788: ur stole my girl
(13:48:22) vrockj788: and i dont like that
(13:48:26) vrockj788: ur going down
(13:48:29) vrockj788: to the ground
(13:48:49) vrockj788: stupid biggins

Also:

(19:18:51) REBELBOY75: come over and play football dip shit

March 19th, 2003

Heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children.
See also: See no evil.

March 14th, 2003

Mozilla 1.3 is out. I think it's a pretty good release and it's probably the first release that has working junk-mail classification. I've been using this on the trunk builds for a while now and I'm pretty happy with it. Sometimes I still get false positives, but they are manageable. Well, except for the time when my wife's email was marked as junk and whisked away. That wasn't so awesome.
Today I managed to get Xinerama working on my machine at home. This means that I have a lot of real estate to play with now. I stumbled across the most awesome bug, though. When I managed to get both monitors up and running I discovered that when I would move the mouse from the left to the right hand monitor that the left monitor would put itself into power saving mode. I shit you not. It would just turn itself off. I have to tip my hat to the XFree86 folks. If you're going to have a bug, that's the way to do it.

March 13th, 2003

jwz has a link to this interesting article about replacing well-known parts of the brain with what are essentially simulators. What really grabbed me in this article was this quote:
    While trials on monkeys will tell us a lot about the prosthesis's
    performance, there are some questions that will not be
    answered. For example, it is unclear whether we have any control
    over what we remember. If we do, would brain implants of the
    future force some people to remember things they would rather
    forget?

    The ethical consequences of that would be serious. "Forgetting is
    the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables
    us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
I never stopped to think about how important forgetting is to our survival but now that I think about it, yeah, it's pretty damn important.
...
Using gasoline motors on bikes.. So here's a good question: why not use hydrogen instead of a gasoline motor? You don't have the range problem - it's a bike, after all. Refueling can be done with canisters instead of a gas tank. It doesn't need to be huge since it's relatively light weight and it doesn't produce any pollution since it's hydrogen.
Seems like a good idea to me. Could be cheap to deliver, too. Start putting the hydrogen economy into place now instead of later. Baby steps.

March 7th, 2003

Today I had some macaroni and cheese with hot dogs mixed in. I have never had this before and I have to say - where has it been all my life? So bad for you, but so tasty.
Been flying again recently.

March 6th, 2003

OK. I admit it. This guy is a little kooky, but he's got a good point. The new airport screening system scares the crap out of me, mostly because it will in fact create a traveling underclass in short order. Repeat after me: The ACLU is your friend.

March 5th, 2003

Last night I had what had to be the finest steak of my young life. If you're ever in Boston, and money is just burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to visit Davio's and order the Sirloin.
Also, my Netflix queue is finally under 100 movies for the first time since I set it up.

March 4th, 2003

<Ryan> Funny thing the captain of the flight from L.A. said:
"At United, we know you have your choice of bankrupt airlines and
we thank you for choosing us."

Also: today is Matthew Good day.