This is painfully necessary for anyone like me who is perpetually installing higher-level software suites and virtual development environments that leave various detritus behind when “uninstalled”. I love reformatting my hard drive… it’s like a chemical bath of sorts — a digital enema for desktop workhorse.

BUT, the restoration to normal operation has been rocky and is as yet incomplete. I may need to low-level format my hard drive, which is the Jolt Cola of the hard drive formatting world.

We’ll see…

This clip is of a Microsoft technical support specialist leaving a message for a customer. Be sure to pay attention to the animated translations.

For more fun with the English language check out Engrish.com.

The ever-vigilant web stylist, Ms. Gepner, sent me a screenshot of the bad news that I knew was coming but was living in denial of. Yes, the newly released beta versions of Microsoft’s sucky browser did indeed break my website.

The upcoming style problems with Internet Explorer 7 (the latest aberration in standards compliant web browsing) have been foretold by design gurus for months. The development community has been lamenting the fact that Micro$oft saw fit to only fix a puny smattering of IE6′s bugs (of which there are MANY)… yet at the same time they removed a small “hack”, better known as the Holly Hack, which will now hearby eliminate the primary trick that web designers have been using to work around all of the IE bugs that have plagued it for as long as anyone can remember.

Now web designers have a terrible situation. All their Holly Hacks they’ve been using to beat IE versions 6 and below into submission are now gone… thank you Bill “Enemy At The” Gates. Yet, most of the bugs that we were using those hacks to fix are STILL IN THE BROWSER! You can’t make this stuff up. So now we have to use conditional logic in our webpages to load multiple CSS files… a primary CSS file and then an additional one to handle IE6 and below… and probably a third one to handle IE7. Fortunately, I was able to handle IE7 with one extra line of style so I wrote it in without another CSS file.

Here’s what the circus that was my compliant code looks like now:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css.ie6" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
<style>
#subcontent {float: right; position:absolute; margin-left: -175px; width:175px;}
</style>
<![endif]-->


Ugly. Very ugly. I hate Internet Explorer. For the love all that is decent and pure and right in this world… please, download and use a compliant web browser.

I can remember when one of the earlier versions of Microsoft Office came out, and it included a new font entitled Wingdings… there was much attention given to the fact that the letters NYC, when converted to the font Wingdings, appeared as a skull & crossbones (symbol for death), a Star of David (symbol for Jews), and a thumbs up (symbol for approval). Thus, Microsoft approves of the killing of Jews, at least according to some with too much time on their hands.

Of course hits was coincidental, but it didn’t stop the theorists. Although Microsoft did do quite a bit to squelch the rumors that this message was put in there intentionally, they definitely didn’t try and defuse the wild imaginations of the conspiracy theorists when they issued their Webdings font with the letters NYC appearing as an eye, a heart, and a city skyline…. I love NY.

Now just recently I got an email from a good Iranian chap who had a blog with the letters Q33NY spelled out in Wingdings, and apparently this depicts a plane flying into tower-imaginable objects with the symbols for killing Jews next to them. Oh yes, this fed MUCH fervor about the Wingdings font prophesying the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. There were all sorts of theories that Q33 was the designator of one of the planes that struck the towers… or that Q33 was the air bus route… or that Q33NY was the model of the planes that hit. None of these are true.

Anyways, I had never seen this before (incredibly enough) so I had asked this fine Iranian fellow what it meant… and he, in his weak English, said that if I changed Q33NY to Wingdings it would “show me something nice”. *ahem* Needless to say it took a couple more emails for me to learn that he didn’t mean nice in the same way we would think, and that he indeed was sad about the whole event. And as an aside, he also said that the Iranian government totally doesn’t speak for the people… and that the people can’t stand their government and are waiting for it to fall so they can have freedom. Hmm…

Here is the Snopes article on the Wingdings stories.

Here is a website that you can use to test your own name, city, initials, or anything else in Wingdings to see if there’s another conspiracy brewing.

All information is here: www.microsoftnysettlement.com.

If you’re not from New York, better fortune elsewhere. I’m no fan of Spitzer (our Attorney General) but this is the second check he scored me… the first was against the RIAA which, despite the meager $20, was a sweet smelling rose of a little dagger thrust into the belly of an evil organization of greed and artistic destruction. May the Lord deal with the RIAA be it ever so severely! More on that.

Google is giving $5 to some little girl suffering from cancer for every time you forward this email to 10 unwilling participants. Applebee’s is giving a $25 gift card to anyone who sends this to 20 soon-to-be-former friends. Microsoft is tracking this email (how, I have no idea) and will sacrifice a virgin every time you don’t send this to all of your address book. Ack!

When in doubt, please do the following:

• Copy a distinct line of the email (usually containing a name or a place)
• Paste the line into a good search engine and search on it
• If you get a bunch of hits from hoax websites, copy them into a Reply All email back to the sender and all their recipients… to prevent any of them from forwarding this on (this step will cause necessary shame to the careless sender… this is a good thing)
• If you didn’t get a bunch of hits then you may have a legitimate email

One of the earliest and most well-known email hoaxes was the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe Hoax. One side benefit to this otherwise-abomination was the quick world-wide-web dissemination of these small tasty confections. I made them once, and if I remember they were great!

Here’s a link to the official recipe lovingly provided by Neiman Marcus themselves. And it is also lovingly quoted below, directly from their website, by yours truly.

An urban myth is a modern folk tale, its origins unknown, its believability enhanced simply by the frequency with which it is repeated. Our signature chocolate chip cookie is the subject of one such myth. If you haven’t heard the story, we won’t perpetuate it here. If you have, the recipe below should serve to refute it. Copy it, print it out, pass it along to friends and family. It’s a terrific recipe. And it’s absolutely free.

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup light brown sugar
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1-3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoons instant espresso coffee powder
1-1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream the butter with the sugars using an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy (approximately 30 seconds)
2. Beat in the egg and the vanilla extract for another 30 seconds.
3. In a mixing bowl, sift together the dry ingredients and beat into the butter mixture at low speed for about 15 seconds. Stir in the espresso coffee powder and chocolate chips.
4. Using a 1 ounce scoop or a 2 tablespoon measure, drop cookie dough onto a greased cookie sheet about 3 inches apart. Gently press down on the dough with the back of a spoon to spread out into a 2 inch circle. Bake for about 20 minutes or until nicely browned around the edges. Bake a little longer for a crispier cookie.

Yield: 2 dozen cookies

If you make 2 dozen of these cookies in the next week your true love will email you. If you send this recipe to 30 people within two hours of reading it you will get a $500 gift certificate from Neiman Marcus (using Microsoft email tracking technology). If you send at least one dozen of these cookies to the Negative99 webmaster your computer will double in speed and you’ll look more youthful. If you ignore this recipe your entire family will have nightmares for a year. After that year… if you still haven’t made me cookies your hard drive will crash, any plane you get on to travel will crash, all tour buses in your nearest city will crash, and you’ll never sleep ever again. Try this, it really works… I was skeptical at first but now I really can’t get any sleep.

As I was saying, my new 250 GB backup storage device is being used to house my games. I finally got around to installing and playing Call of Duty 2, an FPS set in WW2. The graphics are incredible! My system isn’t top-of-the-line for gaming machines sold today (I have an AMD64 2.8 GHz – 1 GB RAM – Radeon 9600 Pro), but this game’s graphics are fluid as gasoline. I’ll throw on here some of my own screenshots when I get into some fun areas. I just started and I’m a Russian soldier defending Moscow from the oncoming German assault. This has some special meaning for me as I was in Moscow about a year and a half ago and got to see the WW2 monument they have their marking the high-water mark of the German advance. This picture on the left is the best one I could find of it. The article I grabbed this pic from had the following excerpt:

Anti-tank Hedgehogs :: a memorial to Moscow defenders. Erected in 1966 on the 23rd km down the Leningrad highway. The authors are architects A. Mikhe, A. Agafonov, I. Yermishin, and engineer K. Mikhailov.

The hedgehog is what they called these caltrop-like devices you see three of. They were designed to slow advancing tracked vehicles (and they worked pretty well). Way cool stuff!