Terminally Incoherent

I hate when people fuck up the standard layout of their Myspace profiles. That website obviously was not made for customization. If the creators wanted to allow this type of creativity, they would likely built in a customizable template structure similar to the ones behind blogger and livejournal.

When you inject CSS in weird places to reformat the page you are making a mess. If you don’t watch what you are doing, your profile is likely to look like crap in non IE browsers. But if you redefine a few classes that’s not the end of the world usually.

But I have to ask - why does everyone with a customized profile opts for ass-ugly dark background image, with bright, fluorescent text? Why does everyone remove the borders that nicely divide page sections into readable chunks? When you remove all the spatial formating and delineation you remove the visual clues that are supposed to help the reader focus on the content. Without those borders, everything seems to clump together into an unreadable mess.

When you put a dark, or vividly colored image in the background you once again shift the focus from text onto the background. As a rule, light background + dark text is easier to read than dark background + light text. It’s just easier on the eyes.

Mousover effects are only effective when they are subtle. Font and size changes are horribly annoying as they tend to shift things over and change the layout each time you move the pointer.

And why, for all that is holly in this world, do you people put music or videos on your profile? Do you think I’m entertained by it? No! I hate these things. They slow my browser, they take forever to load and if I have more than 1 profile open at the same time I am treated to instant a cacophony of sound. Background music was a stupid idea in the 90’s and it is still a stupid idea now - regardless of the technology used to play it.

If you really must have some moving shit in there put a Youtube or Google based vid - one that needs to be clicked in order to start playing. Anything that starts automatically is annoying waste of bandwidth. I’m sure your favorite song is really awesome, but why do I need to listen to it every single time I want to leave you a comment or send you a message?

Sigh… I swear that these myspace customization attempts are the modern equivalent of the blink tag, running dog gif image, frames and annoying midi tune playing in the background.

This is officially the best poster ever. Zewrestler said that this is a rare un-edited picture of president Cole. Usually they photoshop out the horns and the goatee Somehow this one must have leaked out without editing.

I heard all kinds of wild rumors about the horns and etc., but I never really believed in them… Untill now…

Note, this poster is hanging in one of MSU offices. Bonus points if you can tell me which office it is. Zewrestler is not eligible for bonus points because he found it

Hehe… I don’t know why but I find this amusing:

Samelessly stolen from ldopa.net.

The csam server has been down since yesterday. It appears that MSU had yet another power outage. This is why my picture on the sidebar is not showing up. It is served up by csam.montclair.edu which apparently went down.

I can still ssh to pegasus, which tells me that the coverage in RI is spotty. Either way, my pic will probably be gone till Monday, unless I move it over to another server and update the html here.

What is worse however is the fact that the outage took down my sourcejammer server. So much for working from home tomorrow. It seems that I will need to visit the Imaging Lab tomorrow and boot that damn thing up again. Remind me to put that machine on a UPS one day. Sigh…

Oh well… I hope nothing got fried by the power spike…

Update Sat, February 18 2006, 11:46 PM

The csam server came back up. My sourcejammer box is still dead naturally. So I’m still taking a trip to school tomorrow. Maybe this is a good thing. I might get more work done in the office than here at home - less distractions and all

How interesting. Roslin is forced to compromise her stance on abortion in order to secure support of the religious Gemini voters. This gives Baltar a chance to play the abortion card to his advantage and look like the good guy.

Does he have a chance in the election? Good question. If he plays his cards well he might have a shot. But he is barely coherent on his good days, and he tends to talk to his invisible Cylon friend in public. People notice that…

What happened to that whole “finding Earth” thing anyway? Not so long ago half of the fleet was willing to put their lives on the line and follow Roslin as their prophet. Now they are making a big fuss over abortion issue? Geez… You never know where you stand with the religious fanatics.

I wonder what will happen when they find out that her cancer was mysteriously cured using the blood of a hybrid fetus. I think there would be one hell of a shitstorm over this. Besides, if she is not dying, she can’t be the prophet eh?

Of course Baltar also has skeletons in his closet. Eventually someone may remember that he was given a nuke for experimental purposes, and will want to check on it. Loosing a nuke can’t be good for ones political career. And if he runs, he can be sure people will start digging for dirt on him.

Next week they resurrect Sharon. Does that mean that Galactica Sharon dies? What about the hybrid baby? Very intriguing!