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I've been listening to KSHE since the day they changed format in 1967. They play some great rock and roll.

They're a hundred miles away; Im in the fringe reception area so I listen online. So a few days ago I'm editing random Scribblings and the music stops. I curse Firefox and Flash and ComCast and pull the browser up to refresh the page that plays the music, and I see "Still listening?"

Well, no, YOU SHUT OFF THE MUSIC! WTF, if I wasn't listening I wouldn't have it running!

I do see why they started that, though: $$$. They have to pay the RIAA and ASCAP fees, which vary according to how many people are listening, and they don't want to pay for someone who isn't.

Still, it's annoyance.

When I was in college, I often took workshops in the summer. Two weeks of eight hour days equaled a normal class for a quarter. It would allow me a couple months vacation.

One was a blacksmithing workshop, where I learned to fashion stuff out of steel, learned a little metallurgy, and learned where a lot of the "old sayings" came from: blacksmithing. One is "too many irons in the fire", which is where this journal's title comes from. I'm working on three books right now.

Mars,Ho! is in its final editing stages, and I hope I'll be able to publish it next week; fingers crossed.

Next up is Random Scribblings, a collection of stuff I've posted on the internet since 1997; what I consider the best of what I can remember and find. It's also in the editing stage, but there's a lot more work to be done. it's huge, well over 100,000 words.

Then there's Mars Bars, a collection of short science fiction stories. It's in the beginning stages, with seven stories written so far and Voyage to Earth about half a novelette, at a little over 3000 words so far. I still don't know how long that story will be, or what other stories I'll come up with when it's written.

I'll probably post Fourteen: The Final Chapter a week from Thursday. I'll have a rant about my favorite radio station tomorrow or Monday.

I plan on trying the suggested browsers, but thought I'd revisit Opera first. It dawned on me that changing browsers is going to be a big PIA, since Firefox holds a bunch of passwords.

It's been at least a decade since I've tried Opera; it was brand new when I last tried it. So I installed the latest one. The result was...

Who designed this gawdoffal mess? Look, folks, I'm all for hiring the handicapped, but you shouldn't have the learning-disabled designing interfaces. Look, folks, it shouldn't take five damned clicks to get to a bookmark. And what idiot had the idea to have each bookmark take up a square inch or two, with stupid illustrations?

I haven't uninstalled it yet, maybe there's a way to make the interface less idiotic (Firefox does), but I'm not hopeful.

Saturday morning I started working and just wasn't in the mood; I needed a weekend off. I probably wrote a paragraph in "Voyage to Earth". So I did a little random googling and ran across the fact that Windows lets you easily catch and save an audio stream, but it's disabled by default.

I'd been using EAC to sample my LPs and tapes for years, but it will only run on the XP tower. Someone clued me to Audacity a few years ago; it's been installed but unused.

I fired it up to see if I could indeed catch streams, and it does indeed.

And unlike EAC or Opera, it has an excellent interface and its manual is actually useful! I love that program! There are a ton of advanced features I'll probably never use, but it's good that they're there.

Sunday night I copped ACDC's new album, a Deep Purple "best of", and the Grateful Dead's "Skullfuck" album from KSHE's "Seventh Day" show. I guess I need some blank CDs for the car...

It is my impression that a significant number of the people who frequent this site use some *NIX operating system, whether it's GNU/Linux/Potternix/LinuxWithoutTheGNUinFront, *BSD, or Apple's Shiny Bastardized BSD (tm). As such, it may seem a bit odd that I, someone who enjoys bashing Windows at every opportunity, would allow it to share my computers with *NIX-based OSes. Like a lot of people in the same situation, I use Windows primarily as a gaming OS/general fallback in case Wine can't emulate it well enough.

To be honest, I don't hate windows. Rather, I think that it's a crusty mess that has gone from being a fairly nice OS to a usability and productivity nightmare. I have listed the Windows versions that I have worked with as well as my thoughts on each.

Windows Pre 3.0: I find that these were interesting environments in and of themselves. While they were clunky and primitive compared to later versions, they provided a means by which people could run multiple DOS programs at the same time (since there was barely any Windows software). Interestingly, Windows 1 and 2.x programs can still run on modern versions of Windows with minimal modifications (http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html).

Windows 3.x: I actually like these versions of Windows! When you run them on stable hardware, they aren't really all that crashy. The instability that you likely experienced in the '90s may have actually been because hardware compatibility was "meh" at best. To me, 3.x actually has a nice GUI, as the button on the top left of each Window acted as a menu for very clearly laid out actions. The only real problems were that it was slow, had an absurd learning curve, and was 16 bit despite being released in an era when the 386 and 486 were really beginning to take over.

Windows 95: For many people this was My First Preemptively Multitasked OS. When you consider the fact that it can run DOS and 32 bit software side by side, '95 was actually pretty impressive. I have heard that there were serious compatibility problems despite this, however '95 is clear to be as being a definite step forward. It marked the introduction of the Explorer graphical shell, Start Menu, Task Bar, and basic window layout that would be a staple of the OS until Microsoft threw it away in 8. Each of these additions were massive leaps forward not only for UI design but also true usability studies. The Start menu provided an intuitive and easy starting point for users unfamiliar with computers at the time. The function over form nature of the OS is also very striking to me, as it lends itself to actually getting things done, which tends to be what computers are supposed to do.

Windows 98: A generally more stable if not heftier version of Windows 95. This was the first OS I ever used (95 was my second). This was also the first version to feature IE as the main desktop UI, which was a major problem at the time but gradually got subdued as the years went on. The fact that people could get mad about integrating software seems peculiar to me now, however at the time users actually exerted control over their systems. Users were in charge, not the OS or the vendor.

Windows 2000: This is by far my favorite Windows OS. It's small, fast, and dead reliable (I have never had a BSOD outside of a driver problem). To me it's a shame that it got eclipsed by XP, as it has a very clean default UI with sensible defaults. This was also the last version of Windows to really respect the user's control over the system.

XP: Where do I begin? I am one of the few people who hate Windows XP with a passion. I think that it has to do first of all because I didn't use it until 2008 when my family got a netbook as a stopgap replacement between a Pentium III running '98, a Core 2 laptop running Vista, and an i7 860 with Windows 7. XP to me was a slow, unreliable OS riddled with usability and design flaws. Compared to the sleek, modern looking Vista, XP seemed like some sort of child's toy. It was also the first version of Windows to have activation. That in and of itself really should've ruined its reputation right there. 2000 has a very similar kernel and feature set, yet it doesn't require you to re-activate and get hassled by Microsoft if you make a hardware change.

Vista: My 2nd favorite Windows. I really don't see where all of the hate for Vista is coming from to be honest. In retrospect, the "Vista Capable" branding campaign was despicable, but that was mostly Intel's fault (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends/) Also, to be honest, as long as it is given a reasonably good computer (not some POS purchased in 2000), Vista runs quite nicely. There's also the matter of Vista's UI. I still find it to be sleek and nice looking. It pulls off the glass aesthetic in a way that Mac OS had had for a while by that point without going completely overboard. I can tell that it was a well designed if not a little rushed OS that was pretty much completely fixed by SP1.

7: A big round meh to 7. I don't see it as the miracle savior to right Vista's wrongs. Instead, it's more of a point update to Vista, fixing its minor problems like IO speed and such while fixing the brand name. I will say that the new taskbar is a horrible design decision. Instead of keeping it as a low-profile (increasingly important as 16:9 displays were adopted) and including text (for quick identification of each program), Microsoft decided to toss its prior UI research to the wind and wing it. It should also be noted that in Vista, when in classic mode the control panel works almost identically to the 95/98/2000/XP one (in that it flipping works!), while in 7 it has become a terrible web-ified mess.

8: Utter crap. There are no words that can better describe the UI mess that is 8. Rather than making a useful, general purpose desktop OS, Microsoft decided to pander to the tablet market in the wake of PC sales finally stabilizing to where they really should be. Here we have a non-discoverable child's toy masquerading as a serious OS. Tacked on are several useless "apps" that merely waste space in addition to a Windows Store so full of useless s*it that it would make a sewage treatment plant overflow. Gone is the useful start menu, instead replaced by the blatantly misnamed "charms" bar and a start screen for those who are too incompetent to read. Rather than continuing in the pleasant Vista/7 aesthetic or allowing users to revert to the tried and true 9x UI, Windows 8 treats its users to vast swaths of pastel colors. It honestly seems to me as if all of the actual artists and UI designers were replaced with a heap of douchebags masquerading as useful human beings. Windows 8 has no artistic value. The entire UI is simply a paintbucket fill mess.

8.1: I don't know how, but Microsoft manged to make 8 even worse! Now it's slightly more difficult not to get sucked into the hole that is having a Microsoft account.

Technical Preview: Imagine Windows 8 with a terrible, slow, buggy start menu that insists on automatically searching for every term with Bing and the Windows Store. Also add useless search and task view icons to the task bar and you have just pictured Windows Technical Preview. Technical Preview really is designed to be a privacy-free OS from the ground up and I sincerely hope that it doesn't replace 7 in adoption numbers. A clear message needs to be sent to Microsoft that users want competent UI design and privacy above all else.

Keep in mind that these were just my extremely opinionated impressions. I'm willing to hear out what you folks have to say!

A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation about smoking with someone and they posited this argument in favor of smoking being illegal near entrances and exits after I'd pointed out that the danger from second-hand smoke in an open-air environment was so minuscule as to not exist: The smell offends me.

That went up one side of me and down the other and today I say to everyone using being offended as an argument for anything what I said to him: I do not care.

No, that is not me being an asshole. That is me refusing to allow you to mold the world to suit you at my expense. You have no natural, societal, legal, or God given right to not be offended in this life. And neither should you.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Those, right there, are your chief three rights. It's quite important to note that you do not have a right to happiness but only to its pursuit. Also, the the end of each is precisely located where you would start infringing on the same for anyone else. Taken together with all the other rights enumerated in the Constitution, there is a further right that is very much implicit but I believe should have been explicit: The right to be an asshole. Beyond Life and Liberty, I would go as far as to say it is our most fundamental right.

You're probably thinking I am an asshole about now. Why would I say something like being an asshole is one of our most fundamental rights? It's simple, really; because anyone at any time can call anyone else an asshole for any old arbitrary reason. If this has any bearing on the rights of the person being accused of being an asshole, then they do not really have those rights and never did in the first place. All their rights are subject to sanction or removal by cultural fiat. No due process whatsoever. Only if you have the right to offend anyone, at any time, without fear of oppression are any of your other rights secure.

Large portions of our political landscape have always been made up of unscrupulous bastards who incessantly try to convince you that offending someone is bad or wrong. See this for what it is: an attempt to get you to place chains of your own making upon yourself. They know they cannot force you to behave according to their approval or disapproval, so they attempt to shame you into doing so by being offended. There is no difference today between the puritanical right and the Social Justice Warrior on the left in this; the tactic itself is as identical as it is reprehensible.

So, convince me of your position by logical or moral argument all you like. Tell me I should do or think something because it offends you though? You can jam that right up your shitter and blow some fucking bubbles with it, you fascist asshole.

As usual when I boot on Patch Tuesday, I open a bunch of tabs, the notebook slows to a crawl, and this time it was locked up so tight that Windows gave a message saying it couldn't display the message and to use the power button. I had to pull the battery to reboot the damned thing.

So I start Firefox back up and it says it's updating. It finally opens, with an extra tab, one telling me that it changed my default search to Yahoo.

WHAT THE GOD DAMNED HELL, FIREFOX??? This is bullshit! If I wanted that God damned Yahoo, an even worse search engine than Bing, I would have chosen it.

Yahoo, when your product is so shitty you have to trick people into using it... fucking morons!

There used to be a drop down by the search box; it's gone now. I tried tools->options; that's where it is now. Non nerds would give up.

Pissing off your users is NOT the way to get more of them. Anybody have any suggestions for a less annoying browser?

Also, I need to dig out that kubuntu CD and load it on a thumb drive; I'm damned sick and tired of Microsoft's patch Tuesday.

Excuse me while I reboot. Again.

Mod points both here and slashdot at the same time. And here I'm working on three books!

There's Mars, Ho! which I'm hopeful I'll publish soon.

Then there's Random Scribblings, a collection of articles and stuff I've posted on the internet since 1997. Its subtitle will be "junk I've littered the internet with". Even though there's probably less than 10% of what I've written it's huge, well over 100,000 words. It will probably grow a little, because I just found six articles I thought had been lost forever.

This is kind of related; much stuff from my old Quake site is there. Someone once asked if I could re-post the shoutcasts, but there's too much RIAA music in them and they would surely be quickly taken down, so if you want them, email me and I'll send them as attachments.

Finally there's MarsBars, a collection of short science fiction stories. I worked on Voyage to Earth some yesterday. That book is less than 20% done.

I've been working harder than I worked when I still worked. So I'm glad I got all those mod points, I needed a break.

Thanksgiving morning I was ready to pick up my daughter and visit our family a hundred miles south in St. Louis.

My keys weren't in my pocket. An hour later I gave up looking and called all concerned with the sad news; no Thanksgiving for me this year; I was stuck in my house.

I found them Saturday.

I'd ordered a copy of Mars,Ho!, hopefully the final pre-print, on Monday before Thanksgiving. I expected it to ship Saturday, but it still hasn't shipped. So I doubt I'll have it published by Christmas, let alone soon enough for it to be gifts.

Sorry, guys.

They say that Santa's coming,
He comes 'round every year.
He comes he'll meet a shotgun slug
'cause he ain't welcome here.

Five years ago this Christmas
The fatass came around
With jingle bells and ho ho hos
And looking like a clown.

He came in for a landing
As I let out a yawn
My house is pretty little
So he landed on the lawn.

I didn't have the time to yell
As he came through the fog;
He came in fast and and came down hard
And landed on my dog.

He looked around all furtive like
As I reached for my gun,
Then jumped in sleigh, yelled “giddie up”
And took off on the run.

And so, that fatassed bastard
Better stay away from here
'cause ever since he killed my dog
I have no Christmas cheer.

Two more carols, in MP3 format:
I saw Mommie Killing Santa Clause
Rudolph the Four Legged Stroggie

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
In these modern secular days
With a secular tree with secular lights
And a Santa in a secular sleigh

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
With lots of secular snow
With a secular wreath and some secular lights
And some secular mistletoe

No baby in a manger
No wise men at his bed
No thought of Jesus Christ at all
Just get him out of your head

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
With lots of secular snow
With a secular Santa in a secular sleigh
And a secular HO HO HO!

No baby in a manger
No wise men at his bed
No thought of Jesus Christ at all
Just get him out of your head

I'm dreaming of a secular Christmas
Have a Happy Holiday!
Don't forget the secular eggnog
Just forget just whose birthday...

---

The above is of course sarcasm, but I think that ironically, antitheists might embrace it.

I am offended by the Honda commercials, where toys given to adults when they were children as "holiday gifts" are attempting to sell cars.

There are no "holiday gifts". Only Hebrews and Christians; it's Hanukkah gifts and Christmas presents. and only 1.8% of Americans are Jewish. Damned Japanese! Then I had a second thought -- is there a Japanese holiday where gifts are exchanged?

It turns out that there is a Japanese holiday, this year on the last day of Hanukkah. It's the Emperor's birthday, but gifts are not exchanged; the emperor's palace is open to the public on that day.

Honda ad agency people, you are idiots. 1.8% of Americans are Jewish, 77% identify themselves as Christian. Guess what, morons? You just offended half the Christians in the US while trying to not disenfranchise the less than two percent who are Jewish.

If you're trying to use Christians' second most holy day to further your worship of mammon, you better damned well mention Christ, or risk pissing off half the population.