I’m off to Paris for 6 days to follow the Magic: the gathering Worlds tournament with some friends.
I’ll be blogging using my DS lite’s Browser, which thankfully works fine with the site’s aged back-end.
The Opera-based Browser renders most sites perfectly, even those with lots of AJAX such as the .Mac Webmail. However it has a ridiculous inability to display ‘large’ images. This basically makes it impossible to load any of my webcomics on the go, apart from Scott Kurtz’s monochrome PvP Online. It’s such a feeble decision on the designer’s part since the browser comes with its own freakin’ extra-memory pack! Is it too hard just to give me a option to load the big images? Or at the very least load them fully if I link right to them?
Graphics heavy sites load fine but anytime a Jpeg or Gif is larger than 300 or so pixels the DS browser will just render them in with some disgusting interlacing.
It also renders dog-slow. Even though you don’t need to use PDA website layouts, you feel like you ought to take advantage of any site with them since it cuts down the load times. This device is running on a wireless broadband network for pete’s sake! It’s an ARM processor in there, ARM processors are not weaklings. Perhaps the device really can’t support a decent paced browser but I’m willing to bet that you can do a lot better than Opera’s effort.
I fully expect the Homebrew Okiwi to outstrip it in a few month’s time.
6 days without Webcomics. (Unless I find a way to automate chopping the images into bitesized chunks and lacing them together using CSS, which will of course load fine since that wouldn’t fall under the entirely arbitrary thresholds imposed on the Browser) What will I do?
Au revoir tout les monde!
John
Recently, we have been informed by Christian groups that wearing a white remembrance poppy is more ‘Christian’ than a red poppy, we’ve been urged to select it.
However, I’m going to be quite frank here. The white poppy is wrong. It has the noble intent of suggesting that no good comes of violence but in doing so, it trivializes the sacrifice of the millions who gave their lives during warfare.
I know that this is precisely the opposite of what the white poppy wearers claim and that they are very wary of any suggestion that they trivialize the deaths of our soldiers. Yet they do.
The white poppy is a recision of the belief that those soldiers died for a purpose. It is a direct attack upon the idea that freedom isn’t free, it stands against the notion that it must be paid for in a blood price. I say if there is one thing we have learned in the decades since the World Wars it is that the price of our freedom is dear and that it can be paid in no other way.
Millions died so that I could write this, Hitler wouldn’t have stopped at Poland, indeed he didn’t. Wearing a white poppy is not the mark of a man who is conscious of the human price of war, it is the symbol of a man who is naive at best and ungrateful at worst. Suggesting that wars fought for our freedom were unnecessary ignores the march of tyranny and oppression that would, if given the opportunity, cover the entire world even today.
They are free to wear their blanch, self-righteous affectation because of the sacrifice of millions. Thankful for nothing, cocooned in a world given to them by a bloodied generation.
I’ll wear my poppy with pride.
Later
John
To employ the phrasing of a gam3r d00d.
This really is pathetic.
EU countries cry and complain over new logo. Arguments break out, rattle thrown from pushchair. More news at 10.
Later
John
I’m quite happy with the results of the US midterms.
1) Lieberman won - Take that Netroots/HyperPartisans! 2) Arnie won - Bipartisan appeal 3) Democratic control of the house
The only downside seems to be Pelosi as house speaker but, whatever, I can live with that. The important thing is that the independents showed their muscle and hyper partisan politics took a beating. Are we looking at retreat from the US’s obligations on the world stage, emphatically no, Pelosi ain’t the president.
What we have to look forward to is a better balanced legislature that keeps the evangelist base in check.
I’m hoping the Democrats will build on this and put forward a candidate in 08 who isn’t a politically incompetent, base-hugging pile of crap. They don’t get to fight against the lowest polling president in 100 years next time around.
Joe had it best:
“I’m Senator Joe Lieberman and I approve of this Election.”
Later
John