resist. unlearn. defy.
Microsoft has announced yet another delay of the much-touted Windows VIsta release, from late 2006, to January 2007. Maybe.
Considering all the wonderful features that have been pared from the promised list, one is beginning to wonder if MS can really deliver.
For the past several years, random stenciled-in and spray-painted grafitti art has been common along sidewalks, brick walls, manholes and any other reasonably spray paintable edifice on public property. It first started out with text-based socio-political-economic messages (“Stop Bush!” or “A Tree Used to Be Here!”), that on the face made some sense, and would presumably make some people stop and think.
But then the messages started to revert to images. And they also began to get pretty random and, well, puzzling. For instance, there’s The Cat, which is among the longest-lasting and most persistent of the messages. There’s also the more recent and random likeness of the late Jerry Orbach. And then there’s The Passion of The Saget:
“The Passion of the Saget”
Part of the Urban Stencil Art Gallery
Yes, you WILL obey!
While it’s no big Earth-shattering development that the Catholic church has been… well, a bit of a laggard in keeping up on that whole science thing. After all, there are still Catholic apologists out there who still insist the Earth is the center of the universe.
So it’s no surprise, the kind of statements the Pope would make when he encounters a gift like an iPod:
Vatican Radio employees bought the Pope his iPod to commemorate his first visit to the station’s headquarters.
“Computer technology is the future,” the Pope is reported to have said when presented with the gift by the head of the station’s technical and computer support department.
Well, one thing’s for certain: Nostradamus he sure is not. Don’t expect him to fortell anything significant anytime soon, considering his proclamations are about, oh, four decades behind schedule.
Before I go into this rant, let me just say that I love the fact that the advent of a wired universe permits people to correct their mistakes so easily. I certainly could not possibly have made it through college (hell, I couldn’t even make it through life) without that little electronic wonder known as the Delete key. There’s no way I could imagine the hardships faced by people writing up papers and presentations in decades prior, where one simple typo or grammatical lapse would require that person to rip up the page and start all over again. To the editor of WISYWIG editing editing: I salute you!
Likewise, the modern technological age has permitted those performing other tasks to similarly clean up their mistakes after the fact. Computer software on the fritz? Download a patch, and it’ll be taken care of. Cell phone hanging up on calls for no reason? Hook a cable to your cellphone, and reflash its firmware… problem solved. Car’s blowing up for no apparent reason? Get the word out about a recall. Problem solved… kinda.
While online updates are useful, and even serve to improve upon some already-great products with functionailty that may not have been available at product launch, the phenomenon has unfortunately also engendered a bit of lazyness. Now, getting something right the first time is no longer a necessity. Pre-launch product testing no longer appears to be as thorough as it used to be; if there’s a problem and it can be fixed by software, many times a manufacturer will just push an update whenever it gets around to fixing the problem, and hope everyone downloads it.
I suppose I can put up with that. But when the bugs start creeping into basic tangible objects, like, oh, a user’s manual, then that’s how we know a company’s given up.
Take for instance, a page out of a garmin GPS Receiver manual that I recently stumbled across:
Wow, so that feature does “xx” huh? ANd I can turn to page “xx” and find out more? Gee, thanks Garmin.
Of course, you could argue that I could just download the updated PDF of the manual, but alas it too has the same errors.
As you’ve probably noticed, updates have been a bit lacking as of late. That’s because lately I’ve been working more on tinkering the infrastructure and seeing what can be done to integrate a gallery solution to the already-existing blog based foundation I have here. The idea is to allow a series of photographs or artwork to be displayed in an organized and automatic fashion, rather than use a kludged-together solution of just linking to files manually within a post.
So far, the solutions haven’t been easy ones. A number of plug-ins are advertised for WordPress that claim to allow gallery integration. Most of them haven’t reached “version 1.0” stage, and with good reason: they just aren’t ready for prime time. Attempts to integrate each led me to dead ends, either because of poor documentation, serious bugs, or a combination of both.
Ultimately, I’ve given up on a fully-integrated solution for now. Instead, I’ll have to resort to running a separate phpWebgallery module, and then linking to the galleries as they are created. phpWebgallery seems to be pretty thorough, however, I’m not 100% familiar with it yet. So, some bugs still need to be worked out.
In the meantime, I do have a test gallery ready to go, and the subject is scaredpoet.com’s perennial mascot, Loki. Have a look!
Gallery: Loki the Cat
Upload Date: March 13, 2006