Election '08 Results: President McCain!

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

The more astute of you may have realized that this exceedingly well done piece of satire was just that.

The Onion had fallen off my must-read list several years ago due to some fairly lackluster offerings. They really reach their apex, as far as I'm concerned, with their first issue back after September 11. In the past few months, however, as I've walked past their distribution boxes downtown, I've literally LOLed some of the headlines. (That one about the Wikipedia editor is funny because I share a similar sort of pride for a recent news event of some note.)

The above video constitutes only the second time I've watched an ONN report, but I'm confident I'll be coming back if they stick with this level of quality or {shudder} improve it.

Super Tuesday of the FUTURE

We're getting really close to the future of the internet I saw coming over a decade ago. Check it:

Watching TV. Multiple channels of it. At once. Without commercials. Themed. On my computer.

Extra bonus: Uploading a video for you to see it!

Badges of honor

I'll dust you too, pokey.

24

Also, this should come as no surprise.

77% Geek

Calling all CSS-enabled geeks: Solve this! Or, Liveblogging a debugging session.

So, for at least the past week, I've been unable to read Wonkette. Not because of the Cheney story (though I'm sure it wouldn't have helped matters any). No, I can't actually see the text. I thought maybe there had been some kind of attack on the site that horked and broke things. But after (at least) a week, I have to assume this is some kind of conscious design decision on their part.

What in the world am I talking about, you ask? Well, here's what I see when I go to Wonkette right now, in Firefox:


Funky, eh? Doesn't really make for good reading.

I went with a hunch I had and checked the site in the other two browsers I test stuff with, Opera and IE. The results, in Opera:

Some text is readable, but the font rendering is horrible in what little is there.

In Internet Explorer:


Huh. Right as rain. Oddness.

I checked out the source of Wonkette's main page, and then went to the stylesheet it refers to (which you can see here). There was this line, which I suspect is at least part of the problem for FF and Opera users:

font-family : "Hoefler Text", Georgia, "Times
            New Roman", Times, serif;

The default font is something called Hoefler Text. I launch Word to see if I have this font and what its dilly may be. I do have it, and here's what it looks like in Word:


So, wazzupwitdat?

A quick web search took me (where else?) to the Wikipedia page about the Hoefler Text typeface. There we learn it was created by Apple to display some thing or other that was awesome about the Mac OS in 1991 (I think the tech on display at the time was OpenText, but I'm really taxing my recall of ancient issues of MacWorld for that info). So, the font came from the migration of data I made from my Mac to this Wintel machine a couple of years ago. (Sidenote: Are they gonna start calling the new Intel-based Macs Wapples? Dibs on coining the term, btw.) Apparently, this particular font doesn't behave well in a Windows environment. So off I went to the Fonts folder.

Long story short: I ended up pulling everything named Hoefler out of there, and the page now looks the same in Firefox and IE, as they're both now using Georgia. Opera still has rendering issues, but I never use Opera for general browsing.

Whatever. What a waste of a perfectly good morning.

So, code monkeys all, I call you to this question: Am I correct in thinking that I just have an incompatible version of the typeface? Or is it something more dastardly with the way Firefox and Opera render pages?

The Web pulls a Cool Stuff hat-trick

First Score: Last.fm. From November 2003 until last March, I ventured into the world of personal music charts with the Milboard iTunes Top 40. It eventually became too much of a task compiling the thing, though I did have a considerable system for getting songs ranked. The big failing of the chart was that when I went through a period of not listening to music at all, a weekly chart becomes pointless. So the chart went away. Almost a year later, thanks to last.fm, the chart is nearing a return.

Last.fm will, provided you install a plugin to your favorite music player, keep track of what you listen to, and give you daily updated rankings of your favorite tracks and artists, as well as checking out what folks who have similar listening habits are listening to. The database is fairly comprehensive, and updates almost live (recently updated tracks appear within about a minute of their playing).

You may not get as excited about music charts as I do, but trust me, this is awesome. On the Awesome scale, this is easily a 9.6.

Assist on the first goal goes to Grandmaster Strobe.

Second score: The South Park Studio. The character to the left is my own interpretation of myself in South Park stylings. All the elements are there in the Flash-based Studio to do the same for yourself, including outfitting yourself in a Butters t-shirt weilding a light saber. Awesome scale reads: 9.1.

Third score: The Advertising Slogan Generator. Plug in what you want to sell, click Sloganize, and voila!

My favorite result has been to Sloganize Grandmaster Strobe's name. The results are a fitting tribute:

• You Deserve a Dann Brown Today.
• Pure Dann Brown.
• Only Dann Brown Can Prevent Forest Fires.
• It's not TV. It's Dann Brown.
• The Curiously Strong Dann Brown.
• etc. etc.

Awesome scale reads: 9.9, provided suitable input. Hours and hours of fun. Kevan dot org gets the assist.

Huh III

Huh.

No words for this one. You're just going to have to watch it. There's a bit o' language for you sensitive types. So turn your speakers down for the love o' Pete.

I'm a bigger geek than you. Well, not you Lincoln.

I'm such an enormous geek, in fact, that this blog can no longer contain it. Behold: Checkypantz.

This new blog is the exclusive home of my travails in learning ColdFusion. Not the scientific process, but the software. I set it up to prevent the great majority of you from getting bored to tears by my upcoming discussions of parameters, behaviors, problems with the Verity engine or whatever else I happen to be struggling with that day. You can thank me later.

Anyway, if you're a glutton for punishment, it's located over here.

I have seen the future, and it will be... (The Italics Entry)

Part 1, Aperitif: There's yet another new thing over in the sidebar: A little button that says "Skype". If you have Skype installed, it will dial me up. Skype is sort of like Vonage, except there's no actual phone (you need a microphone attached to your compy), and it's free. If you need to know more, it's over at their home page. (Skype is one of those awesome web technologies that will eventually get bought by Google and made perfect, but it does the job pretty well right now.) Caveat: You have to be on my contact list to get through, or I won't even know you called. Email me at "s c a m p i" at gmail dot com, removing the quotes and taking the spaces out of the stuff before the at sign. Then Skype Me.

Part 2, Meat & Potatoes: Back when I was hell-bent and purposefully striding toward a career in broadcasting (circa 1988-1993), I always imagined that I wanted a radio show of my very own. How cool, I tantalized, would it be to have a microphone and studio and all the trappings of a radio show all subject to whatever whim I was harboring that particular moment. There was a certain cache to having the power of the mic at my disposal.

Heedless of any regard I had for the unique power of the voice that I had, technology has now made that power meaningless. Everyone and their mom can (and do) have their own radio shows now. They're called podcasts, and I'm just now getting hip to them.

I'd heard the term bandied about 'round about the time that the iPod started making them popular, but being the old geezer that I am I was content to let this newfangled bit of technology pass me by (as I have with other whizz-bang acronyms like PSP, HD, XM, RSS... the list goes on). Then I came across a news item on one of my chief geek-out sites that led me to this site, that led me to realize that anyone can have a radio show. I don't say that in a necessarily derogatory manner. Just stating the facts.

Anyway, at tfrollout, there's a podcast that they recently introduced where four guys (in four georgraphically disparate locations, sit around discussing stuff that may or may not interest anyone else. And there was a link to get their podcast, and it opened up this whole new world. In iTunes, it popped open the Music Store, which I generally avoid, and then popped to their Podcast section. Also, this new category popped up over where the playlists are kept, called (shockingly enough) "Podcasts". What you see when you get to the Podcast area of the Store, though, is what enthralled me...

Hundreds... nay, thousands of people with their own radio shows. As of this writing there are 417 podcast shows in the Politics category alone (with 21 categories total, like Travel, Arts, Education, Audio Blogs...). Some of the titles are awesome: 101 Uses for Baby Wipes, KCRC Airchecks, and Awful Podcast Showcase, of which I'm downloading an episode as I type.

The whole notion is actually thrilling. I mean, here's just thousands of people sitting around talking - for the most part - to their computers. Sometimes they're all by theirselves, sometimes they have friends "in studio". And as long as they have something to say, regardless of Production Values (or lack thereof), they're entertaining. That's not to say that all of the entertaining ones are my cup of tea (I probably won't be checking out the baby wipes one), but... just damn. How freakin' cool.

I heartily endorse the time wasted browsing around in the iTunes Music Store for the (largely) free podcasts.

Wayback Machine: SU

Remember when Susquehanna's web page looked like this?

I do. It was the very first web page I visited, likely in the spring, but definitely the fall of 1995.