I was recently surfing the net and came across my government’s Department of Defense website. I couldn’t help but notice the date being off by about 1900 years:
So I was thinking this must be due to some Y2K bug, that somehow escaped everyone’s attention for the last 7.5 years. Fred pointed out that it is actually something to do with the way the site was programmed and it clearly wasn’t tested with Firefox. So I tried it with Internet Explorer when I got to work (no Windows boxen at home), and sure enough, the page shows up with the correct date using IE. The weird thing is, that most of the subpages at that domain work fine in Firefox, so just the front page is broken. It’s a sad thing that even the government isn’t ensuring that their pages are compatible with other browsers. Oh well, it makes for a good laugh.
My girlfriend and I went to go see “Meet the Robinsons” today. The cool thing about it, was that we got to pay an additional $2 each to purchase a pair of 3D glasses because the film features neat 3D effects. At first I was a little skeptical, because I had envisioned those old one-green-eye and one-red-eye paper things that you put in front of your eyes to get a quasi-3-dimensional effect when looking at pictures that have been enhanced with red and green colors around the edges of objects. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a pair of cheap plastic glasses, that just look like sunglasses, and were very comfortable and unobtrusive and even fit over my regular prescription glasses without any discomfort. I was very amazed at the quality of the 3D effects and the whole experience blew my mind. The movie itself was pretty cute and it had its moments. I was really excited because before the movie started, there were a few previews of other 3D movies that looked really cool with the 3D glasses on. I am really looking forward to seeing a recorded U2 concert in 3 dimensions this fall. The best of all was that after the previews and before the feature presentation, they showed a Donald Duck/Chip and Dale cartoon from 1953 (one of my favorites, where Chip and Dale are trying to steal peanuts from the elephant at the zoo). The cartoon was completely done in 3 dimensions to fully take advantage of the 3D glasses!
So overall I was very impressed with how far the technology has come and I hope to see more movies in the future done with the 3D effects. One thing to note, however, is that this whole thing is playing visual tricks on your eyes and I think if the movie were longer I would start to develop a headache, similar to the type of headache you get when your monitor’s refresh rate is set too low. This is probably something that varies from person to person, but something to be careful with nonetheless. Also I would definitely not recommend using the 3D glasses as sunglasses, even though they look and feel like sunglasses, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your vision after prolonged use.
So if you get a chance, check out one of the 3D movies that are starting to be released. It is unlike anything I’ve seen before!
… but at the top of this list are MySpace, Microsoft, and Albany, OR. What do you think the world would be better off without? I’m just curious about what gets other people really riled up. Leave me a comment with your pet peeve.
I’ve decided I will start blogging about some of my favorite applications that may be not-so-well known. So today I’m going to start off with my recently discovered new favorite application: YaKuake. This little app is simply yet another terminal emulator for the KDE desktop, but the thing that is so cool about it, is that it just kind of runs in the background and it gives you an instant terminal, which drops down from the top of the screen, at the press of a button. It is completely configurable for how big you want the terminal window to be and whether you want it to disappear when it loses focus, etc. It is much more convenient than navigating through my applications menu just to find old trusty Konsole just to type in a quick command like df. In Kubuntu, just sudo apt-get install yakuake. Then find it in your K Menu under System. I just dragged it from there into my /home/jabba/.kde/Autostart folder and created a link to it there. Now from the time I log in, anytime I need a terminal I just hit F12 and I have a terminal. Awesome!!! I am not a GNOME user, but I hear you get similar awesomeness from Tilda.
Today, in one of my German classes, we watched a short film and then wrote an essay on it. I thought the movie was great and found that it had made it’s way onto youtube. There is a slight idiomatic play on words in the title, as it is called “Schwarzfahrer“, which literally means “Black Rider”, but really is referring to a fare dodger, just as “Schwarzarbeiter” (black worker) refers to someone who “works under the table” or dodges income taxes.
The film is about 10 minutes long, but the end makes it worth every second of built-up anger that one feels towards that woman.
About Jabba Rants
My name is Justin Dow. My friends call me Jabba, and "Jabba Rants" is my personal weblog of miscellaneous things in my life.
