I came across this little bandwidth test in the App Store and decided to install it, just…because. For all that my cable connection is slow (and 5Mb/s is their second tier–they offer 3, 5 and 10, all for arse-rape prices), at least I’m not stuck with only Edge! That was one of the iPhone’s selling points; I wasn’t sure what 3G was, or whether we had it here (and indeed, we don’t–it doesn’t exist yet in this area), so I wanted a phone that could use wifi as well. I’d thought the iPhone was really cool right from the day L. sent me the video “tour” of it, but when he said that it would still be perfectly useable even if I had no wireless data plan at all, I really got interested. I do have unlimited data, of course, because it comes with AT&T’s “default” iPhone plan if you don’t specifically state that you don’t want it, and because P. wanted the phone to be as much fun as possible, but given the speed and latency of Edge (it was at five bars for the test, but dropped one when I moved to another room), it’s easy to see why I use wifi any time it’s available!

(Blogged from my phone, over wifi, of course, or the images would still be uploading!)

EDIT: Gawd, I just looked at the Edge screenshot and remembered something. The first time I took my phone out to the park (day after Christmas), I’d had it for less than a day, and since the last time I’d had a mobile before that was ten years ago, I knew so little about modern wireless phones as to be essentially nothing. I had put Fring on so I could use MSN/Google chat, and L., bless his iPhone guru heart, “went with me” (virtually) to the park. I wanted to test connectivity, so he stayed on IM, talking to me as I moved around. I remember asking him whether I should turn on the 3G because at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what it was (except for faster), and had no idea of how much coverage AT&T might have in the area, and he told me to go ahead because it was worth a shot to see whether there was coverage. There wasn’t, and I distinctly recall asking him, “What’s the blue E?” I suppose I might have clued in after a while because I knew from the wifi symbol that the spot was for information about the connection, and I’d have to be pretty stupid to not get “E for Edge” eventually, but he didn’t bat an eye–just said, “Edge”. Hahaha! I’m a lot more up to speed on wireless now (mostly just whatever the iPhone uses), but god it’s funny to think back on how patiently he’d answered what were impossibly stupid questions. I really didn’t know, though; hadn’t had a mobile phone since (I think) 1998, and hated it when I did have one back then, plus I’d read many horror stories about US wireless companies, so I wanted nothing to do with them now, and I remained deliberately ignorant.

I was reading comments on a short article about (whatever Trent Reznor said about recording contracts). I don’t remember what Trent said because the blind stupidity of this comment took over my attention. The guy was calling fake on the article, and here was his reasoning:

Did anyone else notice that the date on that article, 07/04/2009, is almost 3 months into the future?

God, this makes me want to roll my fucking eyes so far back in my head that they stick there. Here’s a heads-up for the dumbass Americans (no, not all of you, just the dumbasses) who somehow seem to think “USA is the only way!” You’d better sit down because what I’m about to say will probably come as a shock to you. Ready? Okay…there are other countries in the world, and (are you sitting?) sometimes, they do things…differently! I know, I know–it’s unbelievable! Not only do they use weird, unpronounceable gibberish words that aren’t even English and call them “languages”, but they spell English words like colour and tyre and realise wrong, they use English words with incorrect meanings (like calling soccer “football”, calling a sweater a “jumper” and saying “made redundant” for being laid off from work). They use some ridiculous system of measurement that is based on the number ten instead of entirely random numbers, (everyone knows the average car gets forty rods to the hogshead!) temperatures with a freezing point of 0 and a boiling point of 100–silly, base-ten numbers that any sensible person knows ought to be memorised as 32 and 212–and they write dates all out of order. My god…what sense could it possibly make to write a date with the day first, then the month, then the year? Pffft! Putting the smallest unit (days) first, then the next largest (months), then the largest (year)…whatever for? I’ve even heard that some of those crazy Europeans put the year first, then the month, then the day…they call it ISO 8601 standard or something. Largest to smallest units, and it’s called standard, as if that somehow might make it understood the same way all over the world…what a stupid idea! It makes so much more sense to put it in the order of month, day and year because (of course) that is the American way, and we all know that’s the only correct way, don’t we?

Christ. I know the US is a big country, but FFS, even if you can’t get outside its borders physically, surely you have a computer and might manage to get a bit of exposure to something non-American?

I dunno. I got a bit bored this morning and played around with e16 some more. I don’t know whether I’ll ever use it enough to go dicking around with menus, especially since it’s actually both faster and easier to just fire up xterm and use that to start whatever I need instead of poking about through menus. For that matter, I can just keep one open in the iconbox. On the plus side, e16 is lighter weight than Gnome, though to be fair, that is in part due to all of the extra stuff I have on my Gnome. Also a plus is that it looks cool–I like that clean appearance–and even without enabling any Compiz at all, I can have menu animation, and I like the way the windows flip and kind of “dive” to the iconbox. It’s a pain in the arse to append -no-desktop to Nautilus every time, and for some reason, using Thunar seems to mess with my desktop wallpaper, but I just installed PCFileman, which I like anyway, and it’s very lightweight. Figuring out why Conky appeared to refuse to start was simple enough…it logically thought I wanted it to show on the first desktop space, but I was on the second. Oops. I might have to adjust .conkyrc for e16, though, since it doesn’t seem to be refreshing correctly. Aha…nope, just had to change the pager’s behaviour. Screenlets work fine, though I’m using only the clock and calendar because when I started all of the ones I use with Gnome, it looked too cluttered. Meh. Dunno. The theme I’m using is okay; can’t say I’m in love with the background, but it’s inoffensive, and I’m sure that adding custom backgrounds is as simple as finding the directory and copying (maybe symlinking would work, too) suitably-sized files from somewhere else. For now, this will do. Sloppy focus is enabled, but I need to find the option to give new windows focus so I don’t even have to click once to start typing in a terminal; that kind of annoys me. It’ll also take time to get used to a left close button.  I guess I’ll have to play with it for a while and see whether I like it as much as Gnome, or not, or perhaps I’ll like them equally. I’m more used to Gnome, of course, but the point of having different WMs and DEs is choice, and WMs like Enlightenment are designed to be user-configurable right from the ground up. Enlightenment (and Blackbox, and Fluxbox, and…) are specifically intended for people who want as much control as reasonably possible over the appearance and behaviour of their WM, and yep, I’d be one of those people. 🙂

Heh. I just had a thought. P. is having some trouble with one of his drop-down menus; it works in IE6, doesn’t work in FF3.1b, doesn’t work in IE8, doesn’t work in the latest stable FF for Windows, but does work in the latest stable FF for Linux (and Opera for Linux, too). Last night, he was using the various browsers on my desktop and laptop, trying to figure out what was wrong, since he’s been using the same code all along and it’s always worked. I don’t think he fixed it, so I’d imagine he’ll be working on it again tonight. I do believe I’ll just leave my desktop session as e16 for now, since Dirty Jobs is on tonight, so I’ll probably be in the living room with my laptop (and iPhone–it’s never far from me!) when he needs to do browser tests. I’ll just tell him to go in and do whatever he needs to do with either of my computers. I know he’ll sit down at my desk, look at the screen with no icons and nothing even remotely resembling a Start Menu (and the only thing that sort of looks like a toolbar is actually just for paging workspaces and it’ll freak him out if he clicks one of the arrows) and won’t have a goddamned clue how to make anything happen, not even a reboot to get him to old familiar XP. It’ll be interesting to see whether he just looks at it, thinks, “WTF?” and walks away without saying anything (in an effort to have me think he did what he needed to do), or whether he asks me to come in and get him to something he’s at least seen before. I won’t even if he does ask, though; I’ll just take control of it from out there with my phone (because I can, and because doing it with another computer would be less impressive). That’s not evil…not my fault he’s got himself convinced that he “doesn’t have time” to learn anything different. It’s not that he doesn’t have time–he has time to watch crappy movies on TV, read badly-written paperback novels, and run college basketball and NASCAR pools, FFS–it’s quite simply that he doesn’t like being in the position where he doesn’t know how to do something, and that’s exactly where he is when you take his Windows away. That’s what makes it funny. Heh.

Ooooh, I just had another thought–Gnome Do. It’s called Gnome Do, but in no way depends upon Gnome, so if I had that running, I’d have all my familiar shortcuts instead of fucking around with e16 keybindings. Hmmmm. Then again, there’s always a potential re-do of Gnome using AWN instead of panels. Not sure…don’t like those huge icons much, and besides, I’m supposed to be doing water changes (half an hour ago!)

Cool! You can take that little scrollbar off the iconbox (hides when not needed), and make the background transparent, and also choose the order in which it chooses the type of icon (snapshot/application icon/Enlightenment icon, in whichever order–I like the little snapshots ’cause they’re cute).

I love this show! I couldn’t pick a favourite episode if I tried, but this one struck me extra funny because it made me remember swish. Swish is, by technical definition, an alcoholic beverage, but not of the quality you’d find in even the cheap aisle at the NSLC. It’s made by putting water in an empty rum barrel–most authentic if you can steal one rather than buy one–and letting the alcohol leach out into the water for a while (turn the barrel each day–giving it a “swish”, hence the name), and although swish will get you good and drunk, it tastes so fucking bad that you have to hold your breath and turn off your taste buds to even get it down. Once it’s down, all you can do is cross your fingers that it’ll stay down. Except for doing it on a dare, you probably won’t find anyone drinking swish unless he’s an alcoholic, some old Indian on a reservation (okay, same thing…hehe), or a broke teenager too young to drink legally. I have tasted it myself (at the reservation, as a matter of fact) and that was enough for me–that shit would make the Mad Dog seem like a fiiiiiine wine.

Julian’s just returned from jail (forget why he was in this time), as have Mr. Lahey and Randy (now jobless and prostituting himself for cheeseburgers as “Smokey”), and in Julian’s absence, Ricky takes over Lahey’s position as trailer park superintendent. Ricky also came up with a great idea to make some extra money…by selling everything in Julian’s trailer and turning the trailer itself a dope-growing operation. He’s got the inside entirely covered with aluminium foil and grow lights set up–grow lights running on Julian’s power bill. He’s installed several splitters on Julian’s satellite TV, and has been selling feeds to residents of the park for $10 a month. He’s also taken out several credit cards in Julian’s name, but thinks it’ll be okay because he threw the cards in the lake after he maxed them out, and if the credit card company can’t find the cards, then they don’t have to pay back the money (that’s true, right?) There are also fraudulent EI (Employment Insurance) claims made in various names, Julian’s among them. Ricky meant no harm, really; he’s just better at growing good dope and trying to get rich without working than he is at thinking, and Bubbles couldn’t control him the way Julian can. When Julian returns, on parole and determined to stay out of trouble so he doesn’t go back to jail, he discovers he has a $2200 light bill, thousands of dollars in credit card debt in his name, no furniture in a trailer lined entirely in foil, no car, no rum, and no money. In an effort to make Julian feel better, Ricky gives him the park superintendent’s car (an 80s-vintage New Yorker that has no hood or passenger’s door, after Lahey lopped them off a drunken accident), because to Ricky, a car is a perfectly reasonable place to live, and in the trunk of the car, there’s a barrel of swish. Disgusted, Julian decides to leave and “go work on an oil rig or something”. Bubbles goes to find him, driving his go-cart because he doesn’t own a car (Bubbles lives in a chipboard shed next to Julian’s trailer). It’s hard to pick a best quote, but when Erica is working an undercover prostitution sting and finds Julian, she says, “Drunk, pissing on a dumpster behind King of Donair.” That cracked me up–I don’t like donairs, but I have been to enough King of Donair places (usually with a carful of hungry drunks), and probably even to this one (it’s in Dartmouth), and I’ve seen more than one drunk pissing on a dumpster! 😛

(Cool–it worked! I’m getting the hang of video editing on Linux after all. I ripped the file from DVD with AcidRip, then used Avidemux to take a clip and save it as FLV. Yay me–one step closer to an entirely Windows-free computing experience, no matter what I need to do! Oh, and Mike Smith can’t see anything through those glasses, and his Bubbles voice is nothing like his own.)

“I think it looks pretty good. I used to rock those pants.” –Bubbles, after “sobering” Julian with some real liquor (little airline-sized bottles…hahaha!), bringing him back to the shed and finding him something to wear because Julian’s own clothes smell like dog piss from his time living behind King of Donair.

I “liberated” this from Michael Calderone’s blog; he had a bunch of assorted bullshit spouted by Bill Keller, executive editor of the NYT. Most of it wouldn’t have warranted reading if I wasn’t comfortably ensconced in my Immobile Command Unit (I’m sick and spending as much of the day in bed as possible), but this did catch my eye:

Among Keller’s observations about the “unnerving future” of newspapers:

On the NYT: Keller predicted that the Times will be “left standing after the deluge.” Noting that readers have offered to donate money to keep the Times alive, Keller suggested that GM probably isn’t getting similar offers.

Commenting on the keep-the-Times alive movement, Keller said: “Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”

Oh, come on! One, you’re a douche. Darfur is genocide. The New York fucking Times is a newspaper. Granted, one of the older and perhaps more respected/well known, but Jesus H. Christ. GM has nothing to do with it; they deserve to go down because their business model sucks, not because people don’t need cars anymore. We still need cars, we just need more fuel-efficient cars (and hybrids) and fewer giant SUVs that get approximately thirty-seven feet to the gallon. GM gambled on the old American way, but that’s just not gonna fly anymore.  People do not, however, still need newspapers. Saving the Times is not a high-minded cause; it’s a desperate attempt to hold back change by old people and retards. Who the hell even reads dead-tree news anymore, except for gerries, pretentious asses or some little local rag that doesn’t even have any  online content because no one who works there knows how to use anything but MS Word? Print news a rapidly dying medium, and beyond saving some copies for bored kids on museum field trips a hundred years in the future to see and think, “That’s how they read their news? How primitive!” why bother with it anymore? Buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when cars took over, and the same will happen to newspapers. Save a fucking tree–put the lot of them out of business now and be done with it. Newspaper by its very design is nothing but a waste anyway; it’s meant to be disposable. I guess it can be recycled, but nobody does that here, so even though P. still reads our local paper, and it’s sometimes thinner than the goddamned flyers stuffed inside it, we still end up with a big pile of papers crammed under the kitchen sink. I hate newspapers; they can’t go the way of the buggy whip fast enough to suit me. Sure, dumbasses want to “save the Times” right now, and they’d like to think it’s an actual “cause” (it isn’t), but as gerries die off and the online generation grows up, nobody will even care about it anymore. Can’t happen soon enough for me; I hate even having to touch a newspaper because I don’t like the feel of it and hate getting cheap ink on my hands. Bird owners, puppy trainers and people shipping fragile objects will find something else…just let it go already! God, why do people insist upon holding onto old ways?

The first time I heard The Ark’s The Worrying Kind, I thought first of all that it was cute and catchy as hell, and second, that it sounded like something I’d heard before. I was getting “70s something”, but it just wouldn’t come to me. It drove me crazy for a couple of days, and after a while, I kind of forgot all about it. After getting RixFM on my phone yesterday, and hearing that song, it started to bug me again, but this time, I think I know what it is. Well, “it” actually isn’t an “it”, it’s two different songs, and that’s probably why I had such a hard time of it.

Can’t embed the video because whatever entity uploaded it disallowed embedding, but “The Worrying Kind” is here.

If you take a big dose of the beat and backing vocals from Shaun Cassidy’s version of Da Doo Ron Ron, and sing it with a little up-tempo Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes thrown in, you’ll pretty much get…The Worrying Kind!

Does it matter? Nope. Do I feel better now? Yep. Well, aside from the cold, but I suppose I’ll have to just suffer through that because I married a walking germ transport unit. Now all I need to get is one more “What does it sound like? It’s driving me crazy!” song, and I’ll be happy. 🙂

It’s water change day once again, I have a shit-ton of work and zero desire to do it, but music helps because I don’t notice the work so much. I wasn’t in the mood for either of (miscellaneous stuff on my iPod) or Pandora. I had Radio Viva on computer for a while this morning, but changed it to RixFM because that woman with the god-awful honking voice was on Viva (I don’t have to understand her to find the sound of  “nasal Slovak” seriously unpleasant). I was midway through listening to Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” on RIX, grinning to myself at the thought of those Ukranian dudes, then I wondered whether I could listen to it on my phone. I hate the Flash web player, so I use VLC on my computer for it, but the phone can’t do most Flash anyway, so I quickly Googled the answer and found a blog post with instructions for a free app called Fstream, and even the necessary URL (though I guess it’d probably be the same one I had to dig out to get it to work in VLC? Hm…no, same URL, but VLC needs “mmsh”, not just “mms”). Anyway, it works, I have unlimited data, so I can use either wifi or the cell network, and since the guy’s also got a post for Shoutcast streams, I should be able to set up Radio Viva. Dunno about K-Rock; it’s fucking Flash and I don’t think I was ever able to hunt down the actual stream URL for that, so I ended up using Prism. Doesn’t matter for now, though, because I can do what I wanted to do today, and I have no more time to mess around. When I can’t find it again, the blog post is here, and if it “disappears” as things on the Internet sometimes do, the instructions are…

1. Ladda ner och installera Fstream från App store. Starta Fstream.
2. GÃ¥ till Favorites.
3. Klicka på Edit.
4. Scrolla ner och klicka på Add new webradio.
5. Name: Ange ett valfritt kanalnamn, t.ex. P3
6. URL: Ange adress till strömmen, t.ex. mms://wm-live.sr.se/SR-P3-High
7. Fälten Format och Bitrate kan du lämna tomma.
8. Klicka på Save. Klicka på Done.
9. Gå till Play. Scrolla ner till kanalen du lade till och klicka på den.
10. Lyssna på webbradio!

The URL I used was mms://mtg-wms.bahnhof.net/rixfm/?MSWMExt=.asf which is the same as the one I have in VLC except for VLC uses mmsh instead of just mms. I have no idea why; they both appear to work just fine.

Also, yay me for reading through the whole thing, not only the instructions, and understanding whilst having to translate just two words. I get a cookie, right? 😀

OMG…thud. (Faints of teh cute.)

No time to mess with it now, but so I don’t forget I wanted to do it in the first place…there’s got to be a way to display the output of NetHogs in Conky. I can’t just chuck it on there because only root can run NetHogs, but Conky runs under my user account. Hmmmm…

FF did an update a couple of days or so after I last ran the browser benchmark test. I didn’t think anything of it because all I ever do when Update Manager presents me with a list of stuff it wants to update is check to see whether there’s a kernel update involved (that will want a reboot afterwards), or whether it’s updating video drivers (I mentally verify that I remember how to fix X in case Nvidia screws up, though they haven’t for a few years). Otherwise, I type in my password and ignore it until it’s done and I can close the window.

I noticed last night that FF seemed kind of “lazy”. Not incredibly slow, but enough that I checked Conky to see whether it (or something else, like that goddamned scrollkeeper-up I should get around to removing) was munching resources. Nope…no worse than usual. Then, I thought it might be Down Them All (getting S3 of Futurama…heh), so I waited for that to finish. No…still feels slower. Just for the hell of it, this morning, I ran the same benchmark test on 3.08 that I’d run a few days ago on 3.07. This isn’t enough of a difference that I really should be able to tell, but it is definitely slower. Interesting…I thought updates were supposed to be improvements. (Okay, not in this case; it was a security update or something).

3.0.8 in Safe Mode with a score of 298; 3.07 had scored 305.

3.0.8 running normally with all of my extensions, scoring 248. I think the update disabled a couple of themes because they were incompatible, but they weren’t any that I use, and the extensions are all the same. 3.0.7 scored 264.

I can’t decide whether this is so bad that it’s good, or whether it’s just so goddamned funny that it’s good. This is Los Colorados; a Ukranian folk band (with, inexplicably, a Spanish name, and counting in German), doing a cover of Katy Perry’s Hot and Cold. I don’t actively like or dislike the original (it’s okay), but these guys…these guys are just full of win!

I don’t know a word of Ukranian, but at the beginning, he said “Good-something” because I heard “dobre-something”, and I guess that whatever the Ukranian might be for “Thank you,” when it’s written, it sounds the same as Slovak “ÄŽakujem.” I think my Slovak vocabulary amounts to approximately eight very simple words such as, “ano”, “ne”, “prosim”, and my personal favourite, “nerozumiem,” because that means, “I don’t understand.” I also know the semi-contemptuous term that Slovaks use for Americans (forget how to spell it, but I think it’s…Amiči”), and that it’s not something you’d say in polite company; it’s more suitable for pub chat with friends. I’m so…cosmopolitan! 😀

EDIT: Found a bilingual Ukranian, so now I know they’re saying…
“Good evening! Welcomes you Detelkivetsky music group ‘Los Colorados’! We would like to present our and Kateryna Perova’s (Katy Perry’s ) old-new song ‘You are hot and cold’ “.
Yay. That was bothering me.