Yes, this comes from Apple’s marketing department, but the fact that last year more people downloaded QuickTime than RealPlayer is encouraging. QuickTime has always been better quality and RealPlayer is ugly and full of bugs.

Now if everyone would just download Pageot and use the correct QuickTime
<object> and <embed> tags in their code. Me included.

Pageot is an incredibly useful freeware tool for generating proper HTML embedding code for the QuickTime plugin. When this code is used, missing QuickTime components will be downloaded and installed automatically.

28 High school sophomores were caught cheating by their biology teacher and received failing grades. Parents complained and the school board ordered the teacher, Christine Pelton, to give them credit anyway. She resigned in protest. Good for her, except now she’s unemployed and the students learned that cheating is fine if enough of you do it.

AP story found on Metafilter. There’s also this angry but mostly vapid editorial in the Denver Post.

What does it mean when all of your electronics break at the same time?

Late last year my DV camcorder (Sony PD-100) went to Sony for repair. Four times. It’s probably going back again. At $450 flat fee for repairs, they’re damn well gonna get it right.

Two weeks ago, my Digital camera (Powershot G-1) went to Canon for repair. They fixed it for free, even though it was out of warranty by a month. Yet another reason my next camera will probably be a Canon.

Tonight, the VCR on my desk (JVC sVHS) decides to stop ejecting tapes. It seems like the eject motor or the contact which controls the eject motor has burned out. Even though it’s a fairly good VCR (used for analog capture and dubbing) and I’m sure it would cost more to repair than replace. I’ll probably take it apart to see if I can fix it whenever I get a minute. I doubt that will be anytime soon.

Apparently Michael Buffington is being plagued by ALF. I knew Michael lives pretty close to where I grew up and I immediately recognized the background in the photo of the rude ALF-car. He took the photo while driving north on the 5 (Santa Ana) Freeway at Red Hill Avenue in Tustin. I spent most of the first 20 years of my life within 5 miles of that offramp and my parents still live two exits away from there.

Anyway, the last time I saw ALF, I was flipping channels late one night a year or two ago and he was guest DJing on the The Cindy Margolis Show. So I watched, and it took several days for my brain to recover.

Who knew? Deutschland liebt ALF!

Only loosely connected to ALF, but I found this site really funny.

I wrote a few one-click translation bookmarklets, if you want to read these sites in English.

While looking for images for something, I was amused to find this site with possibly the most insane copyright restrictions I’ve seen on a personal site. Should someone point out that viewing their web page is actually a violation of their copyright paragraph?

…Any reproduction of Images, Photographs, Documentation, etc. on this site for personal, public or commercial use is strictly prohibited without prior written permission from Thomas E. and/or Vickie Ives Speir, and © Karma Farms…

The best part is the name, so much for getting what you give.

I can’t decide if I should feel bad for smiling at this joke about the Israeli/Palestinian mess.

I really hope this happens:

Get Oliver Willis A Television Show

Now about that photo… oh and Oliver, please add height/width/alt tags to that code.