Damn trees

The Pacific Northwest is a wonderland of tree hormones as of late. All the trees are flowering, leading other on with a deft wave of a branch, spreading pollen through the air in voluptuous clouds.

The side effect of all this is that I am sneezing pretty much all the time. And when I'm not sneezing my lungs out, I have a sinus headache.

Originally I thought this was a side-effect of imbibing too much Collaborator Pre-Prohibition Lager, a fine beer and an example of what American beer was like before the evils of drink were discovered, banned, and later re-established.

Currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which feel a bit like Jane Austen writing Harry Potter books, with a side-trip into Little, Big.

Hard to believe this is her first novel—I'm really looking forward to many more.

I'm all out of B

Metafilter has some fascinating maps about religious beliefs in America today. That explains why Good Friday was so quiet at work, though. Everybody in non-heathen Stumptown evidently had the day off.

OMG. NEWSFLASH!

Tom Cruise and his receptacle Katie Holmes have spawned!

How have I lived without knowing the origins of the name Suri before this? (As Olbermann put it on Countdown this evening, "If you picked 'Suri' in our pool, you are the winner.")

There was a thing on The Daily Show the other day about how most of the President's sentences follow the following construction:

We are here to A B. We are B A'ers.

Given his weak-ass defense of Rumsfeld today, there was a silent thing today. "I am the [thing] decider. And I decide what [thing] is best."

Nah, it still sounds pretty weak.

Most incompetent unpopular President ever. Hoover should rest peacefully knowing his position as worst ever is now firmly in second place.

Design driven by lawsuits

First off, just for fun.

This totally needs to be on a t-shirt. I would buy it in a heartbeat.

If you're the kind of person who still uses IE and you've noticed that things are starting behave weirdly today, you've just been given another reason to switch to Firefox.

Microsoft is in a patent lawsuit, and today they released a "patch" to ActiveX, which basically breaks every embedded player for Flash, QuickTime, WinMedia, etc.

The ActiveX update makes a very simple change. It prevents you from automatically interacting with an embedded object - like a flash movie. You have to activate it first.

In general, and contrary to what many people have speculated, it only prevents interaction with embedded content. If you add a flash movie to your site, it will play, but you cannot interact with it. That includes any mouseOver effects.

This was supposed to go out in June 2006, but it was released today with very little fanfare.

Safari, Opera, and Firefox users remain unaffected by these shenanigans.

The Wayback Machine

For some reason, I decided to start playing StarCraft again this weekend. (Mebbe it was the Blizzard April Fool's Day prank about playing Wisps in the World of WarCraft expansion...)

Oddly enough, the install discs constructed in 1997 or so didn't do very well when I tried using them on OS X. Thankfully Blizzard had forseen my problem and invented a Mac OS X installer, thus saving me from having to boot into Classic just to play a game. (I still do that with Total Annihilation, though.)

Anyway, the game has held up pretty well. I find that missions that I once found impossible are not too bad, and I have this disturbing tendency (born of many LAN games, no doubt) to have "kill everything that isn't you" as the only victory condition in my mind. So while I could have rescued General Duke in like fifteen minutes, I instead built enough Goliaths to wipe out every Zerg on the map.

More as it develops, if you're interested in that kind of thing. Or even if you're not.

In other news, Daylight Savings Time is upon us. Remind me why we do this again?