So my sister has requested I write something other than technical blogs from time to time. This becomes a bit of a problem when I live, breathe, and eat code. It turns out if I buy the right kind of cereal, I can get some decent pseudocode going in the morning. Though, I will say it is difficult to find cereal with semi-colons and curly braces. For those wondering what I have been up to this summer, I currently have four websites on the table with negotiations still wrapping up for one of them. That does not count any of my personal projects such as this one. To make matters worse, I have come across the blogs of Jeremiah Grossman and RSnake, two elite web security specialists. The results of this has been me spending a portion of my time tonight reading some web security talks online as well as tinkering with Fierce and Nessus. Remember how I started this post by talking about how my sister wants me to talk a little less about geeky stuff? That does not mean I remembered it while writing this. Actually, I just meant this to be an update on what I have been up to lately and a lot of it is technology oriented. Call me a geek if you must.
What else have I done? A week ago I participated in my first United States Tennis Association tournament. I walked into the whole thing very tentatively. I have not played competitively since high school four years ago unless you count the poorly organized intramurals at college. I started to play semi-regularly last fall along with playing some this spring. However, I had not hit in a solid two months when I decided to register for the tournament. As a result, I chose the easiest skill level since I was not sure what I would be getting myself into, and I figured winning easily would be more fun than getting crushed. It turned out only one other person registered for my division and it was quite easy. I had gotten in a couple hours of hitting with an old friend on Wednesday. Still, I was hitting even better come the time of the tournament on Saturday. I managed to get a cool t-shirt, a nice plaque, and an instructor’s phone number to call about hitting sometime. All said, the tournament was pretty fun, and I am looking to go to another in Cedar Rapids this weekend. I will make sure to step up a skill level this time around.
This past weekend was a lot of fun. I drove up to Cedar Falls to spend some time with my girlfriend along with attend a wedding of a previous roommate further on down the road. Taking time to relax and watch movies with Jess was great and the wedding was a blast. We also got to watch some of The Open, Tour de France, and PBR on tv on Sunday. For those who dont know, The Open is the equivalent of the golf US Open but in Britain, Tour de France is bicycling, and PBR is Professional Bull Riding. To top the weekend off, we went out golfing on an amazing day. Needless to say, the weekend was over in no time, and I was back dabbling with computers in my apartment.
Tonight has been another moment of relaxation. I started with taking care of some apartment errands early on. Then I proceeded to dabbling in web security reading and tinkering. That was followed up with watching the Chicago Cubs look terrible again along with some light web development. In case you have not noticed, I have implemented a couple new themes and a theme changer to account for different reader preferences. Hopefully, I will continue to improve on this feature over time. I was able to catch up to July on Wallingford’s blog as well. Now I am finishing off the night with a little Sportscent on ESPN and writing this. With that said, good night!
I think almost every guy has dated at least one girl obsessed with remembering every possible anniversary someone might care about. These can include everything from first met, first date, first kiss, first ice cream, first fight, first first, first et cetera. To all those girls out there, guys tend to feel there are more important things to remember such as how to park a car. These are just relationship differences people for which people need to learn to adjust. One solution is to have the guy park the car while the girl gets all excited about their anniversary for the first car accident. The nice part about this one is the girl can also rave about their anniversary for the first time the guy let the girl drive.
However, one of my more preferred solutions is to get all depressed when the girl forgets the exponential month anniversary. In case a reader is wondering what that anniversary is, the formula is as follows:
<start_date> + 2^(<NPEMA>) * 1 month
In this formula, <start_date> is when you started dating and <NPEMA> stands for number of previous exponential month aniversaries. So anniversaries would take place 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, 8 months, 1 year 4 months, 2 years 8 months, … into the relationship. This has two benefits. Most women who try to remember every anniversary will fail to calculate the next one, and the anniversary occurs less frequently over the years so it is less of a hassle for the guy.
Be forewarned, this can backfire. The girl may just care about anniversaries enough to ask you to calculate when the next one is so she does not miss it. The girl may know how to calculate it herself which means you are really in trouble. She may also be exceptionally clever and respond with “I was just waiting to see if you would remember it!” This last one is very bad news because it means she most likely already has contingency plans for almost every trick up your sleeve. In other words, GET OUT NOW!
Many of you have likely seen my “Why IE Sucks” page which I advertise to all my visitors using an Internet Explorer browser. I got a comment in response to it asking what I thought about IE8. I was going to reply directly to the comment, but then what I had to say turned out to be much longer than I thought it would be. Thus, I decided to create a new post for everyone to read. Here it is.
I admit I have been really behind in my IE8 experiences. In some ways I am happy because this proves just how distant from Microsoft I am truly becoming. In other ways, it is kind of disappointing because it is hard to make a quality bash on a product unless I am at least somewhat familiar with it. I think I just updated to IE8 on a Windows XP VM last night. I have not used it yet, however. Though from the brief dabbling from Net Renderer I have done, IE8 is not too bad. From what I have seen, it even renders this site correctly which is more than any previous version of IE can say. I do find it funny there is a compatibility mode to try to prevent the “catastrophe” that was the upgrade from IE6 to IE7. It will not be overly useful going forward, but it helps manage the first year or so while developers make the transition to a standards-oriented version. Overall, it seems to hold its own with Firefox 3.0, but still is slightly behind Firefox 3.5 which just released a couple of weeks ago.
From what I have read online, IE8 passes the ACID2 test, but does terrible on the ACID3 test. As much as this pains me, I have to give Microsoft props for making the effort to fall in line with some of the most popular standards. I would not say they have the best browser out there, but they did considerably narrow the gap as far as web standards are concerned. I cannot speak on the usability, but at least IE7 made huge gains there too with things like tabbed-browsing. If they keep following this path, I will have a hard time continuing to laugh at Internet Explorer. Do not expect this to make me a Microsoft fanboy or even start using their products anytime soon, but maybe I will hate them just a little less. There will be more to come on Microsoft and its plans for the future in the near future.
P.S. Yes, that is right. I did just use future twice in the same sentence!