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Question: Do you play games? If so, what kind?

My Answer: I mostly play head games. 🙂 Occasionally I'll play one on my Mac (been playing a lot lately, given that we're working on a game for Freshly Squeezed Software!), occasionally (more often) I'll play one on my gaming consoles. Very seldom do I play a board or a card game.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

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Question: Do you subscribe to your own blogroll?

My Answer: Yep. In case anything goes wrong, I suppose. Testing purposes, y'know.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Did a slight blogroll update, removed a few people, etc. I now have 101 subscriptions, but one of them is my own, so that makes for an even 100. Why do I subscribe to my own blogroll? I guess so that I can see if I've screwed anything up.

Long ago I said that in an attempt to remember more of my dreams, I was going to write them down here. Well, it's been several months since my last dream, but today I had another… Two in fact!

The first was rather short. Tara Reid (the famous person) was apparently my girlfriend, and we were shopping. Normal chit-chat stuff, and about two hours of it. We later stopped in to where I work, and apparently this was the first time some co-workers had ever met "my girlfriend Tara Reid," so they were aptly shocked. So, yeah… Not a whole lot of meaning behind that one. Tara was just on Scrubs, and she's really not my type.

The second dream was about the same person I wrote about last night, and I dreamt that I visited her where she lives. We made up a little bit and it was awkward at first. I don't know how or why I was there, but apparently we'd decided things were okay and we should try to work them out. Probably won't happen in real life, but hey, it was worth dreaming about. Still not really a whole lot of meaning to that one. Wishful thinking, perhaps, and not much more.

I seem to dream more when I go to bed really, really tired or having just felt something really strongly. Of course, this is - what - the fourth dream I've remembered having in a year?

Why is it that whenever you're looking through your iDisk to see what kind of crap you've got on there, and you find an exceptionally good picture of someone about whom you used to care a lot, and truth be told still care about quite a bit, iTunes is playing one of those songs that make you really think about life, about the choices you've made, and about how you wish both you and the other person could have been a bit more decent to each other.

The relationship about which I'm thinking now was not broken apart by myself alone. If I wanted to, the blame lies about 50/50 across the both of us. However, I'm in the mood now that laying any blame is just stupid, a waste of time, and frankly, immature. It is what it is - or in fact isn't - and that's that. I'm sorry for the things done to me, I'm sorry for the things I've done.

There were a lot of good times, and in a very short amount of time. And hey, she was one helluva kisser, too. I'm sorry I won't get to see the kind of person she grows up to be, and I'm sorry that she lost sight of the person I am.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Question: What % of people (in your country, anyway, and between the ages of 18 and 60) do you think enjoy some "self-lovin'" at least once a week?

My Answer: 85%. I made that up, and have no factual basis. I did hear once that those in sexually active relationships tend to do so more often than those who are not.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

As I was driving somewhere today, half-listening to the ol' iPod, I heard one of Britney's new songs, and it sounded a bit… "personal." Is she singing about female masturbation? Yes, by jolly, it seems she is.

When I arrived at my destination, people who'd seen her interview with Diane Sawyer confirmed my suspicions: that Britney Spears masturbates (or at least sings about it). They told me that she brought the topic up herself - without any prompting from Diane - and said "everyone does it, and if they say they don't they're lying. It's a sacred thing."

As if just thinking of Britney Spears wasn't enough, we now "get" to hear her singing about waxing the flesh taco.^*

I'm not ashamed of the things that I dream
I find myself flirting with the verge of obscene
Into the unknown, I will be bold
I'm going to the places I can be out of control

And I don't want to explain tonight
All the things I've tried to hide
I shut myself out from the world so I
Can draw the blinds and I'll teach myself to fly

I love myself
It's not a sin
I can't control what's happenin'

'Cause I've just discovered
Imagination's taking over
Another day without a lover
The more I come to understand
The touch of my hand…

From the small of my back and the arch of my feet
Lately I've been noticing the beautiful, oh, me
I'm all in my skin and I'm not gonna wait
Commence on myself in the most precious way

And I don't want to explain tonight
All the things I've tried to hide
I shut myself out from the world so I
Can draw the blinds and I'll teach myself to fly

'Cause I've just discovered
Imagination's taking over
Another day without a lover
The more I come to understand
The touch of my hand

There's a world undefined
In my body and mind
I won't be left behind
I'm already here

'Cause I've just discovered
Imagination's taking over
Another day without a lover
The more I come to understand
The touch of my hand

'Cause I've just discovered
Imagination's taking over
Another day without a lover
The more I come to understand
The touch of my hand

Hey, hey, hey, oh, oh, oh, yeah
Hey, hey, hey, oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah

^* I asked a female friend if there were any slang terms for female masturbation, and she said she didn't know any. So, here you go, I made one up for myself.

There's something unusual about typing man date into your terminal. Depending on where your mind is at the moment, there are a few interesting ways you can take such a short phrase. But, hey, I digress.

I'm trying to download Adium automatically every day at noon. The format they use is illustrated by today's file: http://adium.sourceforge.net/downloads/Adium_11-14-2003.dmg. Given that, I created this command:

date "+http://adium.sourceforge.net/downloads/Adium_%m-%d-%c%y.dmg"

Unfortunately, that produces:

http://adium.sourceforge.net/downloads/Adium_11-14-Fri Nov 14 08:48:53 200303.dmg

Removing the %c produces:

http://adium.sourceforge.net/downloads/Adium_11-14-03.dmg

Close, but I kind of need that "20". Guess I'll just add it back in. The man page says that yy is the year, and that cc is the century. Perhaps the two are out of sync. That, or I'm losing it. Anyway, it works now.

Said a friend to me today after hearing In the Zone: "That's just pure sex. Britney's pure sex." Indeed it is, my friend. I think that anyone who can get through an entire listening of In the Zone without feeling randier than they were at the beginning is either dead or unusually out of touch with their sexuality.

Question: If you were to plot the number of blogs you read on a graph's y axis and time on the x axis, how would you describe the resulting line?

My Answer: It would start very small, then skyrocket. It would plummet to about 140 when I realized I didn't have time to read 200, then it would slowly decline to the 100 or so I have now. I'm hoping to prune that to 75 in the next week, in fact.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

For years, we've been able to command-drag windows in the background to arrange them without first changing the focus to the window itself. Try command-dragging a Finder window you've got in the background. What happens when you're done dragging? It comes to the front. >:-o

Update: now it seems to be okay. At one point yesterday, any time I clicked on the desktop it selected everything between where I'd clicked and the lower-right corner of my screen. I even saw the drag rectangle. I clicked around to try to get out of it. Switching to another app, switching back to the Finder, and a cmd-a made that anomaly go away.

I've now read two reviews of Mario Kart for the GameCube (Double Dash! they're calling it). In all, I'm disappointed. It seems that very little was done to innovate, aside from having two players on each cart. Heck, they even removed the hop! They removed the hop!!! The tracks are dull, the multiplayer arenas are duller, and unlocking sections of the game is a boring affair, they say.

What's worse: the game has LAN play, but lacks the ability to play others over the 'net! How ridiculous is that? It gets even better: when you're playing a LAN game, you don't even get to choose your characters!

I like Nintendo, I really do. Unfortunately, they're dropping the ball when it comes to the online thing. This, more than the titles they historically produce, are going to put them squarely in the "it's a kiddie system" category. College students play Mario Kart like crazy from what I've heard (and having participated, I can personally attest to it). It's not the games, then, that make a system "kiddie."

I don't play games on my Mac because I've got a PS2 and a GameCube. Finally consoles are getting networkable games - with voice chat and other nifty features - yet the Nintendo console is stuck five years in the past. I remember playing NFL2K1 (I think) on my Dreamcast online, for crissakes!

I may still get the game, but dammit, now I'm just pissed.

So, I gave In the Zone a listen tonight. In the words of the man kind enough to send a copy my way: "I didn't realize how much she was trying to be like Madonna until I heard this." Madonna's left her mark all over this album. You could swap the vocals and most people might not even be able to tell the difference. Britney is now about sweaty sex. Not like "XTina" sweaty sex, but Britney sweaty sex. Britney's gone from the girl in a schoolgirl* outfit to the girl who dresses up in schoolgirl outfits, if you know what I mean.

Every song (every song!!) sounds like it could be played to the sound of the club or love scenes in Fastlane or Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Britney's voice, when she's not doing the sultry whisper thing, is simply too childish to pull this off. She's, regardless of how hard she tries, not Madonna. To be fair, Madonna wasn't Madonna at first either, but emulating someone else - even if they're as successful as Madonna - usually doesn't work in the end. Then again, this is pop music, so it may work quite nicely.

In an interesting twist of "hey, I knew you when" we see the following analogy: Britney : Madonna :: Justin Timberlake : _________ The answer, of course, is "Michael Jackson." Britney's going for "new queen of pop" and Justin's going for the whole "pop king" thing. Do you think this is what they discussed while they were busy, y'know, not having all that sex they weren't having?

* In the …Baby One More Time video.

I've got a mockup of the new FSS site online (here). It looks pretty slick in Safari, Camino, Mozilla, and Firebird. It looks "ok" in Internet Explorer. Of course, it looks pretty bad in iCab. I'm certain it wouldn't look too good in IE for Windows, due to the transparency used in the menu area.

As I look forward to the next step in creating this site, I consider what may be some weak points in CSS. The menus need to follow a certain set of rules. First, they've got to stay aligned in the middle (both horizontally and vertically) in the middle of their respective "container" (the green and grey boxes). Next, I'd like to find a CSS way (no tables) to properly and automatically space the items horizontally (adding margins for each item would be a pain). What's worse, these things have to "hold" while someone changes the font size of their browser (I'd say +/- 2 sizes).

If I'm unable to get this to work via CSS (and I really hope that I'm able to), then I'm going to have to use images for the menu items. That feels like a hack, and I think any goofball could do that. I had hoped to avoid using images. If anyone's got any suggestions, feel free to grab the source from the site and email me some work. If someone comes up with a working solution, I'll send them a brand new set of JBL speakers.