September 30, 2006 by ignatiof.

I have been thinking for a while about writing an article on one of my favourite subjects: food. I finally made the decision to do it when I went to a cocktail-tasting event tonight and spent more time eating hors d’oeuvres (e.g. meat on a stick) than drinking.

So what is meat? Some people just count pork, beef and the like. Others will throw chicken into the mix. And another school of thought (the one I fit into) says that anything that was once an animal can be considered meat. (And by the way, if you’re reading any sexual innuendo into this article, it’s purely in your mind, you pathetic dirty-minded loser.)

Let’s classify the different types of eaters shall we?

Herbivore - one who eats nothing but, uhhh… herbs I guess.

Carnivore - one who eats carnie folk

Omnivore - one who eats omniscient people. Didn’t see that one coming did you?

Goat - one who eats plastic and carbon-fibre

So what about someone who eats only animals that eat other animals? You know, like wolves and lions… we need a name for them. They’s a tough bunch. Time to ponder…

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September 27, 2006 by ignatiof.

My buddy: Hey did you hear the Cotton Club burned down?

Me: Really? It must have been because of all those hot girls.

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September 20, 2006 by ignatiof.

So another Talk Like a Pirate day has come and gone, and I’m feeling the post-holiday blues again. But this time the blues started before the holiday even ended! I wasn’t trying to squeeze every minute of pirate-ness out of the day. Around 2pm, I just stopped. I was done.

What could possible incite such apathy, you ask? Well I’d tell you but I just don’t care that much.

Kidding. I’ll tell you. I discovered that TLAP day was mentioned on the local radio station. Clearly anything popular enough to be mentioned by the likes of Deborah Birminghan on OZ-FM has gone far too mainstream, and I can no longer take any pleasure out of it.

So my new schtick is going to be learning Puppish.

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September 4, 2006 by ignatiof.

This is my first post about a new piece of utility software that I’m working on. I’ve tentatively named it PSP Companion, and unlike most of the other PSP software out there for video, images, and music, this one is for managing web articles for offline reading on the portable device.

It’s a Windows-only application, written in C#, which means it uses the .NET framework. You can download that here.

Here’s the link (40kB) to download my application. There’s no installer yet; just the application. It will create a file called ’settings.txt’ in the same folder that it runs from. When you run it you will see a screen split in four pieces. The left half is the hard drive section. The top is the list of web pages on the hard drive folder you are working from. The lower half is a web preview of the page if you have the Preview button turned on. The right side is the PSP section, with the list of files at the top and the web preview at the bottom. You can move files between lists using the Move buttons, and you can Delete with the Delete button. Whenever a file is moved, a new ‘index.html’ is generated on the PSP side which indexes all the articles.

To ues the index articles on the PSP, make a folder under the PSP folder on the memory card for storing articles. In the web browser, set up a favourite to the index page and there you go. Any questions, leave a comment.

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September 3, 2006 by ignatiof.

So here we were playing cards the other night. Crib to start, just the two of us, and how do I start the game? That’s right, by giving up a 24-point kitty, and ending up skunked. Are you surprised? Don’t be.

Next came Speed. Again, I lost, but this time just by a hair. Things are looking up. 0 for 2 though.

Third was Gin Rummy. I lost at this one too, and this time it wasn’t so close. I should have cut my losses and went to watch TV at this point but no…
Fourth, Crazy 8’s. Guess who won? Yes that’s right, my illustrious partner. She must be cheating, but I have yet to figure out how. Must be the larger brain.

So at this point I’m getting pretty dejected. I mean, I’m used to losing, but occasionally I get a win to keep from totally sinking into the hellish abyss of self-loathing.

“OK”, I say. “Cut the deck and let’s see who gets a higher card.” Finally I have a realistic chance at winning something. I pull a 5. She gets something far better, like a Queen.

Ah shag this… time for bed.

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September 1, 2006 by ignatiof.

We’ve all seen our share of computer oddities, most of which are easily remedies with a three-finger salute or a flick of the reset button, or perhaps by posing a question to our favourite local computer nerd. But every once in a while something comes along that makes no sense, stumps the best of us, and just seems to have no logic whatsoever. Here is one such case, something that I can’t imagine how a computer would mess up. It almost had to be something done by a person, but then who would think to do such a bizarre thing.

It’s on my work computer when using Adobe Reader.  In a certain nameless PDF file I sometimes open, upon filling in a form, I discovered that the letter ‘i’ would not type into one of the fields. I could type it in any other field, but not this particular one. So I tried closing and re-opening the form. Same problem. I tried copying and pasting an ‘i’ from another field. Nope. Then I even tried copying a whole sentence from another field with ‘i’’s in it. It pasted up to the first ‘i’ and then stopped.

Now this file is on our network, so it’s no big deal to open it on another computer. And wouldn’t you know it, but I can type ‘i’ into this field in the same file on another computer.

Explain that, Sherlock!

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