All posts by Randy

Y’z Dock

Anyway, one of the neatest things about the new OS X interface is the dock. The dock is Apple’s answer to the omni-present task bar that is sitting on your desktop at the moment; it’s used to show the currently running applications as well as giving you a “Quick Launch” icon bar for launching applications. Like I said, it’s about the same as the Windows’ XP task bar, but with a great deal more flare and style – it’s basically become the new trademark of the Apple desktop. In fact it’s one of the neatest pieces of OS code that I’ve seen in a good long while, probably since the animated and fading menus of Windows 98 – I’m comfortable in saying “one of the neatest” because there’s been a new product released that is equally as cool, but for Windows XP users: Y’z Dock.
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Samsung S105 and T-Mobile USA

If you recall, I’ve been using an Ericsson t68 with coverage from VoiceStream since April. Times have changed. VoiceStream is now T-Mobile USA. Having been bought a number of months ago by Deutsche Telecom, they decided that their USA subsidiary should be named T-Moble, like the rest of their cellular franchises. Mostly just a name change, but I was sorta psyched – I mean given the great phone technology and service that I’ve seen with the international T-Mobiles, I was hopeful that they might bring the International methods with them. I can sum this up relatively simply: Hah!
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World Series Wrap-up (or The Need to Kick in Fox Sports’ Pickles)

I guess you could tip your hats to the Angels. I mean, I won’t be tipping – I’m a Yankees fan and Percival sucks! – but if you’re a fan of the game, it was a neat World Series to watch. First time the Angels have won; they finished 45 games behind the first place Mariner’s last season. Giants made the Angels work for it the whole time; it was their first shot at the title since they moved from Manhattan in the 50’s. Both teams came into the playoffs as the Wild Card team, and they both beat the teams that “shouldn’t have” been beaten. So, in my opinion, they did a hell of a job at their game. Personally, I was hoping that the new random ‘roid testing would have kicked in, disqualifying both teams, and allowing the Yankees to win, by default. Guess it was not to be.
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26 Days ’til Krispy Kreme of Milford

Connecticut has recently taken its first casualty of Krispy Kreme chaos and quite frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it already. Not the hype, per se – we’ve got another 26 days for the Milford store to open – but about the whining about the hype. See, here’s the deal. KK is one of those home-grown, American phenomenon. There’s no other way to describe it. I’ve known about KK for a long while now – at least the five years or more. It helps having friends in the South, where they seem to know the difference between fast, good food and fast food – if not KK as an example, look at Chick-fil-A – great chicken. Hell, they even get some form of service from their fast food employees down there and, more importantly, their customers are serviceable. What do I mean? There’s a few different things in this Rant already so lets take’m, one at a time.
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A Clockwork Orange

“So, what’s it going to be then, eh?” I figure about half of the movies made have a book that the movie is based upon. It’s been said by some, that Hollywood tolerates authors because they are scared to death of a blank sheet of paper – shows you how much faith people have in actors’ abilities – otherwise, they would have been muscled out of the industry years ago. To me, neither a book nor film is usually better than the other – just different. I find that which ever one I find first, I end up liking better; I loved The Firm in book form, and thought the movie ok (what with Maverick as the starring role – bluh) but they two were different things to me with a common title. The other day, I discovered A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, on the list of “banned books” at Barnes and Nobles and no, I’ve yet to see the movie.
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Hope for Retail Service in the Form of a Mermaid

No secret, my dependency on The Bean, but I actually believe that it’s getting worse… much worse over time. How do I figure that? Every morning, on the way to my train station, I stop for coffee. Well, at first, I didn’t even do that. Then I started to go a little out of my way so I could pop into one of the local Dunkin’ Donuts every morning. Now, and for the past five or six months, I’ve been going even more out of my way to pay homage at Starbucks. They keep changing their menu, at least once a quarter, so it’s hard not to stop by often, and the every day thing just sorta happen.
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Back-to-Back Episodes

I was planning on starting my adventure of reading A Clockwork Orange today – thought I’d take a couple days off from Ranting and this book has got some bizarre vocabulary, so it should be fun – and it seems that cannot be the case. You see this morning, I’ve been handed back to back reasons to have an episode and it’s not even 8 AM yet. Never mind the fact that while I was trying to put on a glove, and holding a latte, that I spoodged it all over my leather jacket – oh and yes, gloves; it would seem that 30-degree weather and a soft top, bare-bones Jeep does not easily offer warm hands on its own, so gloves are required in the colder months. And no, the latte was just a side bar of the day and no cause for an episode – it was just a funny glimpse into my starting day.
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Parade? Fuggettaboutit!

Event 1: On a recent episode of the Soprano’s, there was a sub plot that saw the Italian Mafia family getting pissed off that Native Americans were protesting the celebration of Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day, based on the fact that Columbus abused the natives of America during the exploration and settlement of North and South America. Italians typically don’t like it when people screw with Columbus Day. Event 2: New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided to invite two of the stars (Braco and Chianese) from the Soprano’s, to walk in the Columbus Day parade this year. Event 3: Every Italian-American group in the city has got their wooden spoons out for a flogging because they are very, very Anti-Mafia. These three things together have made for a number of news stories in the Tri-State area, and this is what will cause today’s Mocking.
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Permit Me a Moment of Logical Fantasy

Unbridled freedom is something that I believe the human society can never handle. We’re too unstable psychologically and we have the unique knack, more than any of Earth’s other species, of fucking up a wet dream. We’re the only breed of mammals, when faced with a new environment, that will attempt to change the environment instead of adapting to what’s presented. I’m not sure if that makes us resilient or just stupid – regardless of how we look at it, we tend to be better at destroying than creating. And no, this isn’t a plea for Greenpeace or any tree-hugging group… like I said, this is an exercise in logic.
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“No Honky fo’ President – Vote fo’ Me!”

I heard this today on the news and I’m mostly hoping it was a hyped up “news byte” or a comment taken out of context. I have to say that I wish I could have hung around to see it for sure, but I had to leave the room, so I missed the rest of the broadcast… according to the lead-in this morning, Al Sharpton wants to be our next President. This is something I can neither believe nor stomach. The man has got to be the most visible and obnoxious racist I know of. Yes, I said the word: racist, because he is one. I’ve never seen a public figure take more scandalous situations under his own wing, solely to exploit them for press exposure and somehow use race to blow it totally out of proportion.
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Shadow Puppets, by Y’z

It’s on the extremely rare occasion to find an application that live up to my expectations with a great piece of coding, but it’s happened just last week: Y’z Shadow is a small application that sits in the SysTray (next to the clock) and has only a couple of “tasks.” One is to draw user-configurable drop shadows, under both active and inactive windows. Don’t worry: there’s options for the size and opacity of the shadows and it really looks good when it’s running. Y’z will effect any open menu by turning it semi-transparent, which is a neater effect than you would think.
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Rant: Stolen!

I keep a running list of “Rant” ideas. Right now it’s about half filled with GeekStuff ideas, if only because I haven’t the time to write all the much these days… I find that if I don’t have anything acting like a stone in my shoe on the mornings that I do get a chance to type up some stuff, I just go to the list and that usually gets me going on a topic for a while. Well, last night, one of my Rantings made prime-time HBO, before I had a change to publish it! See, about two weeks ago, I was walking into a local Shop Rite and something poked my brain that got me started thinking about the Slave Trade Retribution thing… and I had a pseudo-epiphany. And then I forgot it! My ChiChi can tell ya that much – she’s often a sounding board for Rant ideas – but what I never told her that a few days later I remembered what it was, and I flung it into the To Do list. Suffice to say that my tirade on non-engineers making software took precedence, and now my idea has been out’d. Tony Soprano did it.
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Professional Therapy, in Progress

Therapy. I think that’s the best part of this web site for me – it provides me a way to get out my personal Rants and pass on Geeky knowledge; in some cases, I even get to declare certain outrageous experiences to the world. Regardless, when I started this whole thing up, I purposely planned never to attack personal Issues (person, place, or thing) too directly, because it can be problematic. In some cases, it’s about biting the hand that feeds you and in other cases, it’s so particular to my own life that no one would care anyway… in this instance, I have a very pointed Issue, but I doubted anyone would be interested. Then I realized that what has happening to me lately, might be happening to other people; this is how Dilbert got started, actually. People began to realize that the madness of the Cubicle Farm was spreading, and viola!, Dilbert was born. Having said the above, I have two Rants of a GeekStuffs nature. I feel I need to share some professional (or lack there of) experiences with my fellow Code Warriors.
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Step Away from the Cart!

I’ve always said a clich becomes a clich for a reason. It’s not that there’s a single, solitary group of people that are constantly churning out biased statements or witty sound bites to piss people off. There’s no Clich Board that decided these things. People can formulate their own clichs and the general public seems to be able to strengthen, prove, and endorse them all on their own. If you’ve been reading this site from the beginning, you’ve heard this before, and I’m certain to say it many times over before this site ever dies. Need an example? Cart Jacking.
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