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I peeked ahead to the end of my 2002 Far Side calendar - the last Far Side yearly calendar they'll be making - and proved correct a theory I had in January: that every day's comic involved someone or something dying, already dead, or being fatally injured.

I'll miss the Far Side daily calendar, but what a great way to go. 🙂

From the "Should I Care?" department comes this gem: Jef Raskin, creator of "Macintosh," has begun work on an open source GUI to replace Aqua on Mac OS X. He's called it the. Yeah, that's a proper sentence... His project is called "THE" - an acronym for "The Humane Environment."

How much advice should we really be taking from a guy who built his SourceForge page title "About the Humane Environment" with 28 separate GIFs. Witness the e and, better yet, the space characters. While I totally respect everything Jef Raskin has done, I've simply gotta ask: What have you done for me lately?

An article on the Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003 got me thinking. It's near to New Year's, and so I've decided to forego my New Year's resolutions in favor of building this list: Top 10 Mac Mysteries for 2003. Some we may find out, and some way may never know...

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This article, which talks about women in the draft (or more correctly, women not in the draft, makes several good points. I find it fairly paradoxical that for all of the "women's lib" stuff going on, women have never said "we also want to be forced to go to war!" But whenever I mention this to a woman, she typically pulls out the "hey, buddy, we already give birth, and until you're forced to do that, you can go to war for us."

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I like this quote:

I'm a pretty smart guy. The problem with being relatively more intelligent than most people is that 90% of the time, they have no friggin' clue what you're talking about.

It's from this article about how standards bodies... suck.

My friend Kelly once told me that "if everyone were as smart as we are, we wouldn't be smart anymore." And y'know, that's true. but then again, there are an infinite amount of things about which I know nothing, too.

Well, it's the day after Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... not even Flint the wünderdög.

I spent a decent amount of time hacking up MovableType yesterday. Listened to some music, putzed around. I'm trying to make the site look as good as possible without using any graphics. And screw Omn - it's dinosaur-like CSS engine leaves it pitifully far behind. Actually, it doesn't do too bad... but Chimera is the only browser I've got in my dock.

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This article at plasticbag.org is an interesting one that puts forth the notion that Apple not only cares what people do with the digital content they may acquire (putting songs on their iPod, burning DVDs, etc.), but that Apple doesn't care about software at all. I'm not sure I agree with the latter premise, and as to the prior, I think it's one of the bigger reasons to own a Mac right now. People can whine all they want about "proprietary" this and "proprietary" that, but open standards are the way to go. The computer - the software - is what organizes and displays your data, be it email (mbox format) or documents (XML, etc.). It shouldn't be what restricts your data.

I'm listening to a book called "The Physics of Christmas" by Roger Highfield, and it's simply amazing the things which get consideration in this over-commercialized season. The book, having already covered the history of "Santa Claus" and his use in Coca Cola commercials, his effect in Denmark, and all sorts of other things, is currently talking about the science of shopping.

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Who the hell would want to clone the XP interface? Apparently a few people want to do so. XPde.com is set up just to do that, in fact. The funny thing is, at this time, KDE and Mac OS X are both beating XP in their "Which desktop environment do you think is the best?" poll, and all of their screenshots show Apple's "Aqua" (actually called "Water") desktop picture! WTF? Cloning XP? I guess there's just no accounting for taste these days...

If this isn't an easy victory, I don't know what is. Ahhh, the spoils of victory and the joyousness of conquering the world on Christmas day.

Today is very much like any other day, except that I don't plan on talking to anyone but my dog. I'm at a very decent place in life right now: stable income (ha ha ha), car, apartment, dog, some friends that I plan on completely ignoring today (ha ha part deux). This could be the most productive day of the year... but somehow I doubt it will be. I think my GameCube is calling me.

I might even drive around just to see how Jewish the area in which I live really is. How many stores will be open today? Is CompUSA open? They didn't sem to be... could I get a Logitech MX 500 Optical mouse today if I really tried? I wonder...

Merry Christmas to all, and to all... you know the rest. 🙂

Merry Freakin' Christmas! It's 12:01am on December 25, 2002. Heck, in about a week it will be 2003! Ack!

So what am I doing? Writing code. I spent entirely too long today trying to figure out how to get smileys to work in this darn blogging system ( 🙂 >:-o O:-) 😉 🙁 they work now see?). I've just now found some code that should definitely help us figure out how to add a bunch of font support to Adium 2.0.

I think I'll fire up a copy of iConquer now and see if I can take over the world. Again. Some other people really need to buy this so I can play against them... Though I wouldn't expect them to be online at 12:10am on Christmas day! 🙂

(Oh, by the way: it's 76 degrees right now.) Happy Holidays, everyone!

This Register article talks about San Francisco's recent ban of Segways (the drastically overpriced scooter designed by a weird egomaniac) on city sidewalks and bike paths. The article also touches on "the average American" and describes them, in the words of various authors, as "fat."

Guess what? The average American is overweight. We're a society of excess. A society of McDonald's. A society in which I actually have to try to persuade my friends to walk to the pool hall that's literally 500 yards away instead of driving.

Are there thin people in the US? Yes... you just can't see them because all the fatties are blocking the way.

Santa ain't the only one that could stand to lose a few pounds. 🙂

From a 1998 rec.humor.funny post:

better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town

cat /etc/passwd > list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice > giftlist
santa claus town

who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good }

Just some random things to make up for my complete lack of posting yesterday (The Steelers whupped that Tamba Bay Buccaneer team right good, I done say.)

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Apple is pushing the "Switch" campaign to developers with this article on porting Win32 apps to the Mac. Geared towards "those first steps" with recommendations for the HIGs, some basic information on how the event models are different, and so on. Check it out and start coding, Windows guys. Oh, and welcome aboard.