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musings of mark since 2001

Found this post on waterboarding, no wonder the USA has opted out of international crime courts.

Off to the land of Microsoft Vista I go with a new laptop. HP is the best value around these parts, and buying on Boxing Day at Future Shop allowed a step up for the same price as other times. Ended up with specs like 250GB hard drive, 1.5Ghz speed, 2MB ram and as it’s a “media” computer, (DV9000 series) came with headphones, web cam, and even a remote control for watching DVD’s.

Took 3 hours for the operating system to completely install counting the Windows update, 90 minutes waiting (forgot that it was Dangerous Goods Day on the ferry) at the ferry terminal got the basic OS going and a partion with a mirror for recovery means. Making some DVD recovery discs too now today, strange it’s creating files again as I figured the set already made would be the ones burned.

First impressions of Vista this time around: very pretty GUI but have some continuing problems getting file sharing to work across the network. After the recovery DVD’s are made will be installing Debian anyways, never tried that distro and it’s the one that a lot other ones are based on.

Finally got the MG Web Services web site validating for strict xhtml and the CSS flyout menu is working well too. For Internet Exploder only, the menu uses a simple javascript function called getElementById to locate the menu list and then the list items inside it are referenced by another function called getElementsByTagName, which is used for the mouseover/hover effect. It doesn’t really need javascript for IE 7 and up, will change the conditional comment to reflect that someday.

Not quite just another day around here this Christmas morning, the home owner returned the other day a couple weeks earlier than planned and being pretty much a teetotaler myself went to sleep at the normal nine or ten o’clock and left them to their drinking games. A bit of a mess around here this morning as to be expected, my PC is set up on the kitchen table and that itself is clear so good for me and easy enough to make room in the now full sink to get a cup of coffee.

Not wanting to get stuck when buying a new laptop sometime in the next couple weeks with hitting the daily limit of my debit card withdrawals, went to the mainland yesterday and extracted the $1000 have managed to save up. Not nearly as crowded as expected and got lucky with only one person in the bank line before me, when my turn at the teller was up there were a dozen or more then in line behind, always nice when timing works out in your favour.

It’s a day of reading and a little walk later, also going to get the fly-out menu working on the new design for the MG Web Services site going but before that Mathew Good has a nice blog this morning about the Christmas of 1914 when hostilities were halted for a day; and John Anthony McGuckin has penned a reminder in the NYT of how consumerism has changed a story about a kindly Bishop to a red suited magical person.

Best Xmas jingle I’ve seen on youtube so far is a family effort, her other videos over at happyslip.com 2 are getting some traffic too methinks, and with a couple hundred thousand views in just two days maybe there’s a good career move via youtube in her future. Also available from youtube are the 12 Days After Christmas, more versions than I ever thought possible. Funniest group of the day is Pepto Bismol Saved My life.