d00dism

All the best to you and yours in 2005. Special thoughts go to those affected by the tsunamis.

The last regular season week of this. After doing it this entire season I’ve decided something. I have to make some software to do this for me next year. I’ll be looking for help from anyone with PHP and MySQL experience (or those with some interest).

• Miami vs. Baltimore
• Pittsburgh vs. Buffalo
• New Orleans vs. Carolina
• Green Bay vs. Chicago
• Cleveland vs. Houston
• San Francisco vs. New England
• Cincinnati vs. Philadelphia
• NY Jets vs. St. Louis
• Detroit vs. Tennessee
• Minnesota vs. Washington
• Tampa Bay vs. Arizona
• Atlanta vs. Seattle
• Indianapolis vs. Denver
• Jacksonville vs. Oakland
• Kansas City vs. San Diego
• Dallas vs. NY Giants

Probably one of the most frustrating aspects of moving from Mac OS 9 or Windows to Mac OS X was the lack of a PDF browser plugin. It can be almost maddening in academic environments such as U-Mass as most assignments and documents aren’t published in HTML. They’re published in PDF because of the guaranteed formatting and handling of special symbols (such as the formulas that plague a young computer scientist).

In fact, it was one of the leading questions in the forums. For a while, the only solution was to feed the file to an external application such as Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) or Preview. This wasn’t quite the experience that users were looking for.

Luckily for all of us, Manfred Schubert stepped in and brought us his PDF plugin. It was free for private and education users. Later versions even brought some of the toolbar options that were part of Adobe’s standard plugin. That filled the void and as a community, we forgot that Adobe had seemingly forsaken the platform. That no longer seemed to matter as both this plugin improved and Preview improved as well.

Adobe suddenly woke up though. Starting with the recent release of Adobe Reader 7 we had a new PDF plugin. For the most part, the fact that the plugin had returned was quiet. In fact, the MacCentral article doesn’t even mention this. So, if you spend a lot of your time looking at PDFs on websites, get Adobe Reader 7. You’ll finally have all those options that you were missing.

Just two regular season weeks left!

• Green Bay vs. Minnesota
• Oakland vs. Kansas City
• Denver vs. Tennessee
• NY Giants vs. Cincinnati
• Chicago vs. Detroit
• San Diego vs. Indianapolis
• Houston vs. Jacksonville
• Atlanta vs. New Orleans
• Baltimore vs. Pittsburgh
• New England vs. NY Jets
• Buffalo vs. San Francisco
• Carolina vs. Tampa Bay
• Washington vs. Dallas
• Arizona vs. Seattle
• Cleveland vs. Miami
• Philadelphia vs. St. Louis

I’ve been fighting comment spam for a long time now. The majority of those sites are selling prescription drugs to fight erectile disfunction and poker sites. I long for the days when spam was ads for pornography. At least I could get some use out of that. But I digress.

These spamming sites have been mostly no name, fly-by-night outfits that don’t have a reputation to maintain. They don’t care that the public at large hates them. They make some quick profit and then die as a company.

This is the reason that you never see these companies being advertised in any other form. That is except DIRECTV. They aren’t doing it directly, but an installation partner of theirs has been busy trying to spam my blog for the last couple days. I refuse to post the URL, but for those of you that are curious the middle part of the domain (between www and com) is three words separated by dashes: direct tv online.

Due to their lack of responsibility in choosing business partners, I will never be ordering anything through them. I’m going to recommend that no one I know do so either. I’ve never been spammed by a cable company and for that, they get my continued business. DIRECTV are a bunch of scumbags for associating with these scammers. I’ve already let them know by sending an email. If you’re feeling saucy, you can do the same, or just passively let them know by never subscribing to their service.