Random email: This morning I received a letter from a woman asking about a problem playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein, which she’d bought for her husband. My immediate suspicion was an email address harvesting letter, where anyone who replies confirms a functioning address. However the headers (*@bellsouth.net) seemed real and there are two people listed in Georgia with this name. (Georgia is BellSouth’s most populous area) After a little poking around, I decided to take a chance, be an optimist and reply. Considering that Macworld put my primary email address online this month, it’s not like I’m expecting a spam-free mailbox.

I know next to nothing about troubleshooting PCs and haven’t played RtCW (though I did play Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple ][+ back 1981
). The error message she sent included the line “failed to find an appropriate PIXELFORMAT” which is probably how she found me since I’m the first English result on Google when searching for PIXELFORMAT. Apparently she’s not the only one with the problem. Maybe if Activision’s support pages were easier to find, answers like this would actually help their customers.

Even though I’m still quite a PHP novice, I’m fairly sure having “echo” and “print” statements in functions is a bad idea. A better idea is to use a return variable containing all the text which would be output by the echo/print statements. This allows for much more flexibility in working with the results of the function. Now if only more of the PHP books I bought had mentioned that…

Wow, I just got an email from Dave, he’s in Ulan Bataar, in Mongolia.

Earlier this evening: Cleaning the dishes, I put a pot in the sink and started filling it with hot water. In the meantime I clean the counter with the kitchen sponge. Then I run the sponge under the extremely hot water. The sponge absorbs the water for a second or two, then it hits my hand. “Yeow!” Hand removed from water stream, water turned off. Then, I squeeze the sponge out… “Yeow! $@^%!” The sponge, of course, was full of the extremely hot water. Ok, that was dumb, back to the dishes, the pot specifically which was just filled with excruciatingly hot water. Yep. Three strikes, I’m a moron.

“The pages were very prankish and immature. They were very poorly written, obviously phony news reports,” said USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson.

Sure, criticize their writing. They still made a mockery out of your web site’s security. But then what is he supposed to say?

It shouldn’t be too long before someone posts screenshots.

The Fifty Words of Green Eggs and Ham

Numbers indicate how many times each word appears in the text.

This comes from a posting I originally made to Everything2, two years ago next week.