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Friday, April 25th, 2008
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10:56 am - Epic phisher phail
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| Thursday, April 3rd, 2008
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2:46 pm - Four capital letters printed in gold
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| Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
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11:39 pm - Blogging for Autism Awareness Month
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| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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11:12 am - Adventures in Bad CAPTCHA Design
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I was just trying to register for a forum today, and came across a CAPTCHA that looked like this (this isn't the one that I actually failed, but it was generated soon thereafter):
Seems pretty easy, right?
Only one problem: it's case-sensitive. That is, uppercase and lowercase matter.
"X" and "x" look virtually alike, except for size. "O" and "o" do as well. Same with "S" and "s". And when the characters are distorted in size to begin with... good luck.
Let's see... that's five characters that are ambiguous in this particular CAPTCHA... which makes 25 = 32 different possibilities for how this CAPTCHA should be entered.
Oh, no, wait... that third character could also be a zero. That means there are not 32, but 24 * 3 = 48 different possibilities.
Did nobody actually test this before rolling it out?
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[ 8 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
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1:40 pm - The (belated) annual gift exchange post
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Christmas has passed, and my traditional blog entry on the family's gift exchanges still hasn't been posted. That's because we've all been preoccupied with said gifts.
For those who aren't really interested in personal stuff like this, feel free to skip this entry. :)
As a graduate student, I didn't exactly have a lot to give, but I had a good idea of something everyone wanted:
- For mom, my dad and I both chipped in to get a webcam, so she can video chat with me and other family members long-distance.
- For dad, I got a $25 iTunes card, because I knew there were quite a few songs he was wanting to download.
- For my older sister, I got one of those digital photo keychains.
My sister got me a second Wiimote so that whenever I've got people visiting (my niece and nephew, for instance... or my girlfriend...*hugs*) we can play two-player games.
Despite the fact that I really had no idea what I wanted for Christmas this year, other than one little thing, my parents still managed to give me quite a bit that will be of use for the rest of grad school (and some stuff for play too):
So, despite the fact that I had no idea how my own gifts to the family would be received (they all were well liked) and despite the fact that I really had no idea what I myself wanted, it turned out pretty well.
current mood:  merry
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[ 6 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Saturday, November 17th, 2007
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9:18 pm - Well, at least I'll have *soft* clothes...
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Gah. I just realized that, in an utterly spaced-out moment, I accidentally bought fabric softener rather than laundry detergent at the grocery store last week. (For what it's worth, the packages for Publix's generic brands of fabric softener and detergent, both of which are available in unscented form, looked almost identical... so it's an easy mistake to make.)
And I have clothes that need to be washed before Monday. -_-;;
The Save-a-Lot grocery store, the only one that's on the Sunday bus route, only sells the heavily scented stuff. Not good for someone with allergies and sensitive skin. So that's out.
Maybe they've got unscented detergent at one of the convenience stores around campus; I'll have to check... I could've sworn I saw it at one of the stores on Baxter Street. 'Course, I'll also have to pay a somewhat higher price, but it's still cheaper than having to call a cab...
I guess if I were feeling really adventurous, I could walk all the way down to Kroger on Baxter, but I haven't been feeling too good lately and don't want to put myself under more stress than necessary...
It's times like this that I really wish I had more friends who could drive. ::sigh::
Edited November 18 to add: They had one bottle of unscented detergent left at the campus bookstore. Yay. Minor crisis averted.
current mood:  annoyed
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[ 4 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Sunday, October 28th, 2007
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9:31 pm - My Mac has changed its spots (or, Alphonse has a new kitty)
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So yay. I've picked up a copy of Mac OS X Leopard from the UGA bookstore and installed on my PowerBook tonight.
Observations so far:
- Archive and Install worked much better than I expected. All my stuff, even all the applications I've installed, is still there; the only thing that was really affected was what I've compiled into the Unix directories (/usr/bin, etc.).
- Surprisingly, despite what Apple says, Photo Booth will run on a G4 with an external camera. The frame rate is atrocious, but it runs.
- Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator CS2 all launch, though I've encountered a few random unexpected crashes after launching. Not sure if this is because of incompatibility, preferences getting zapped during the Leopard install, or both; I'll have to investigate later.
- Spaces. Seriously, why hasn't OS X had virtual desktops until now? VirtueDesktops was OK, but felt a bit kludgy; this seems to work far more... Apple-like. I particularly like how you can manipulate windows on the 'overhead' view and drag them among desktops.
- Safari 3.0 final seems to load much quicker than the beta version. And it doesn't take ages to display my bookmarks menu (one of the other big annoyances I had with the beta).
- On that note, a Java chat that I sometimes visit seems to run more snappily as well. Not sure if that's because of Safari, Java, or a combination of both.
- How am I only now getting to checking e-mail? Oh, wow, you can sync notes and To Do lists with an IMAP server. This could be very useful for a scatterbrain like me.
I'll probably be posting more here as I discover more about Leopard. I still haven't installed Xcode yet; right now, I'm trying to move the archived Tiger install to an external drive before I even think of installing anything else, but it's going very slowly (and with good reason, since it's 10 gigs or so).
I also need to clear up enough space on my external drive to try out Time Machine... automatic backups, whee! Yet another thing that will be incredibly useful in the long run once I've got it set up...
Edited to add: Ooh, it's always the little things that really make a difference. Y'know how on the newer Mac laptops you can right-click by holding down two fingers on the trackpad? That wasn't possible on PowerBooks and iBooks in Tiger...but it is in Leopard.
current mood:  geeky
current music: Mint Royale - Space Farm
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[ 6 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
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8:22 pm - Murphy's Law strikes thrice
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OK, today seems to be one of those days that everything just falls apart... literally.
First, the sideburn trimmer on my electric razor broke this morning. Now it's...not trimming anything at all.
Then, this afternoon, my cell phone case broke apart, with the belt clip coming detached from the actual case.
Went to Wal-Mart this evening to get a new phone case, and bought a new razor while I was at it; the thing was getting old anyway, it needed new blades (which are about as expensive as a whole new razor), and it was getting worse and worse at holding a battery charge.
And then, when I was cutting the label off the phone case and cutting open the razor box?
My scissors fell apart.
Guess I'll have to pick up a replacement for those at the campus bookstore tomorrow...unless I've got a spare pair buried away somewhere, which I very well might.
Edited to add: OK, I did have a spare pair of scissors in a box in the closet from when I moved in. Crisis averted.
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[ 5 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Friday, September 21st, 2007
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2:58 pm
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| Friday, August 10th, 2007
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2:52 pm - Sick transit, glorious Saturday
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...Just found out that Athens Transit is no longer running bus route 25 anywhere near my apartment on nights or weekends. They're no longer serving East Campus or even College Station west of the Utterly Pedestrian-Unfriendly Oconee Bridge on Saturdays.
And there's no other route that is anywhere reasonably walkable in 100°F heat on a Saturday, particularly one when there aren't any campus buses running. Like, for instance, tomorrow. Not so much of an issue when the campus weekender bus is running...but that won't be till next weekend. Same thing for night routes— the only other night route that runs near those stops starts next Thursday (see update below).
The closest route, therefore, is route 5— but that's about a 3/4 mile walk up Agriculture Drive. And remember, this is in weather approaching, if not over, 100°F.
Did I mention that the stops no longer served by the route are in the vicinity of an awful lot of international students' apartments, and a fairly good number of those students don't have cars?
::facepalm::
Guess I'll just have to stay cooped up in my apartment for the weekend...
[Edited to add: For those wondering how I just found out about this, I've been out of Athens for most of the summer. Just clarifying that, since I know someone's bound to bring it up...]
[Edited 2007/08/11 to add: Whoops, I was misreading the campus bus rider's guide. Turns out that night service starts back this Monday, not Thursday! Granted, that's only three days anyway, but at least I feel a bit safer if I happen to be wandering around campus at night...]
current mood:  frustrated
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[ 11 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
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8:44 am - Why word boundaries are important
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A recent server-side change in Windows Live Messenger was designed to prevent anyone from sending a link to a domain ending in ".info", because so many of those were being used for spam and viruses. Never mind, of course, all the perfectly legitimate .info domains (as few as they may be, admittedly)...MS thought it'd be best to just block them all. Not just the URL, but the entire message containing it.
But that's not the worst part.
The worst part is that there is no check for word boundaries whatsoever in the filter. None.
So good luck linking to anything on www.infoworld.com through Windows Messenger. And forget about sharing any C# code snippets that refer to MessageBoxIcon.Information.
Oh, and even sadder? This isn't the first time Microsoft's done this. A while back, they started blocking any messages containing ".scr" - thus shutting off all discussions about java.awt.ScrollPane, among other things.
(Thanks to the Worse Than Failure forums for pointing this bit of absurdity out to me...)
current mood: ::headdesk::
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[ 3 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Friday, July 20th, 2007
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1:37 am - Another day, another online personality meme...
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...and as always, I came out as INTP (Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving). Big surprise there.
100% introverted? I knew I was a bit shy rather asocial, but... O_o
What was a bit more of a surprise was that I scored significantly higher on musical intelligence than on verbal. Most likely because of the overly universal nature of some of the questions— I do almost always have a tune running through my head, but I only sometimes enjoyed English class and writing (often because of the nature of what I was reading/writing about)...
Also amusing: like several other Aspies/autistics I know online who have taken the test, my worst intelligence, not shown in the graph above but visible if you click on it, is interpersonal. On that, I only scored 5%. Guess it goes hand in hand with the complete and utter introversion.
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[ 1 act of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Saturday, July 14th, 2007
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10:08 pm - Lyrics Meme Solutions
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| Sunday, July 1st, 2007
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2:31 pm - For shame...
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| Saturday, June 16th, 2007
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3:37 pm - Un-Nintended benefits
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1:45 am - Lyric meme via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sparrowrose
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The official rules:
Step 1. Put your playlist on random.
Step 2. Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3. Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
NO GOOGLING.
First off, I had to pick the first 25 songs with actual lyrics... or, at least, with lyrics that aren't just one line repeated over and over (yay electronica!). This was tough, given the sheer amount of instrumental music on my iPod.
Second, I limited things to a maximum of 1 track per album (not per artist, but per album) to keep things somewhat more fair. For some reason, my iPod's shuffling seemed very unbalanced tonight, drastically favoring certain albums while completely ignoring other albums and singles.
And last but not least, yeah, I had to search for some of the lyrics myself to make sure I wasn't committing any mondegreens... or if they were in a language I don't actually speak. Hopefully I didn't screw up any of the ones I thought I was certain of. :-p
With that said, this should be evidence of just how eclectic my musical tastes are. Feel free to take a guess at them in the comments... or just admit to knowing the songs.
There's also a bonus question, which I turned into a bonus simply because I thought it would be so ridiculously obscure (even more than the other obscure lyrics). There may still be some people on my friends list who might get it, though, which is why I left it in.
EDITED 2007/07/14 TO ADD: The solutions are now posted, which is why I've crossed out the rules above. Feel free to play along without posting your guesses publicly, though.
( The lyrics... )
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[ 23 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Thursday, June 14th, 2007
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3:48 pm
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Sign #1 that one needs to take a break from web development: when one sees "</3" in a LiveJournal post and interprets it as a malformed HTML closing tag.
(Yes, this really did just happen to me...)
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[ 7 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Monday, June 11th, 2007
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5:49 pm - A very rough Safari
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Apple's beta version of Safari for Windows is definitely not ready for prime time. Many people, myself included, have found that it doesn't even display text in the UI on some configurations:
Edited 9:15 PM to add: Oh, this gets even funnier. A Bugzilla bug was started over at WebKit to document and troubleshoot this issue... and the consensus seems to be that it's caused by having too many fonts installed for it to enumerate. Not anywhere near the maximum allowed by Windows; simply having over a thousand is enough to cause some fonts to be skipped.
current mood:  blank
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[ 5 acts of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Sunday, June 3rd, 2007
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7:27 pm - The spelling bee ironies continue
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Remember how, two years ago, there was a contestant in the National Spelling Bee whose placard said he was from "Roanoake"?
Well, the placard proofreaders have managed to embarrass themselves yet again. This year, as evidenced by this photo from The Baltimore Sun, there was one speller who hailed from Baltimore, Maryalnd. Yes, that's right: "Maryalnd." (For the curious, here's the article in which the photo was included; however, there's no reference to the typo in the article.)
(Thanks to the people involved in this post on Digg for spotting the misspelling and tracking down the original source of the photo.)
Edited to add: Oh, I had seen this one and totally forgotten about it! The Virginian-Pilot's contestant was from Norfolk, "Virgina." The article from which the photo is taken even makes reference to this unfortunate typo, unlike the Sun article.
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[ 1 act of introspection ] [ spill your mind ]
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| Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
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3:55 pm - New blog!
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amused
