Some shots of outside our office building a few days ago. Most of the snow now has since melted away. It’s supposed to be mid to high single digit °C for the next few days, so there might be time to try out the Leaf Hog one more time before spring.

My birthday was last week. I’ve reached the ripe old age of 28. And now I can cherish every moment I have left because the load times on my PS2 can be drastically reduced. One of my gifts was a quaint little piece of software called HDLoader that harnesses the power of the PS2 HDD, by allowing me to store and load my games from the hard drive instead of using the slower optical disc drive. They market it as having 95% compatibility, but you can find a more accurate list elsewhere.

Now I just have to find something that will automatically clean my glasses for me.

Update (26 Oct 2004): It also allows other hard drives than just the Sony one to work in the PS2. But the stuff that is designed to work with the Sony HDD will still only work with the Sony HDD.

Update (1 Nov 2004): I ordered a Maxtor 120GB drive, and installed it this evening with no ill effects, so far. I could probably put close to my entire game collection on there.

Here’s my first attempt at posting with an image using the Exhibit WordPress plugin.

Update: Taken with my new birthday present.

Update: I’m trying to phase out the Exhibit plugin. This was uploaded with the built-in image uploader.

Andrew Krespanis has a very clever tip for creating cross-browser cascading style sheets by removing the different margins and paddings that each browser might apply differently. Then you can style them back to a default layout and be on your merry way. Totally makes sense, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of it.

Update (20 Oct 2004): In related news, Steve Smith has a guide for writing lean CSS code.

I’ve been looking for the perfect RSS news aggregator. One that can sort based on date of entry, uses an embedded browser, and isn’t buggy beta-ware. And I need to find one for both Mac OS X and Windows. I tried FeedDemon and NewsCrawler, but they didn’t do quite what I wanted, and they weren’t free. Being free isn’t a requirement, but if it’s not going to do what I want, I’m certainly not going to pay for it. I tried RSSBandit, and it was working out quite well, but was glitchy at best. Pages would open inconsistently in either a tab or in IE, and seemed to be a resource hog (although I can’t prove it). And it fell in a category of other programs that graft tabs on to the IE engine that cause display problems on my computer (both Crazy Browser and Maxthon cause it as well). I’m sure it’s no bug in the program, but a system level bug in Windows 2000 with dual monitors.

On the Mac OS X side, I only tried NetNewsWire, and was pretty comfortable with it. I was on the verge of purchasing NNW, but thought about usage and subscription maintenance. I do most of my reading on my Windows box, and very little on my Mac. I just couldn’t justify paying for NNW for how little I’d be using it. And maintaining my subscription across programs and platforms seemed to time consuming (even with support for OPML files).

Then I stumbled across Bloglines, and my answers were solved. It sorts the way I want, it uses an embedded browser (the opposite actually, because it’s just a web page), it quite stable, and even better: it’s free and it’s cross-platform. Also, it relieves the extra bandwidth on the servers of the places I visit by half, because it acts as a middle man, by querying the RSS feed once and supplying the results to all the people subscribed to that feed.

Update (26 Oct 2004): Feel free to look at my Bloglines subscriptions.