A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

A person visits their doctor:

Help, doctor! Angry green spots have appeared all over my skin! What does this mean!

Meh. Your skin is, what, five percent of your total body mass? One percent? It can't be that much. And the green spots cover up, what, maybe ten percent of that?

Pff, whatever. Nothing to worry about. Go home.

---

It's hard to imagine that I was thinking out loud about enrolling as a Republican, not long ago. This coincided with the time when I last admired McCain. I had some thoughts about working to better the party from within, but declaring allegiance to it now would basically be signing a document that says "I love only myself. The world can burn. Fuck you."

Going slightly crazy. It is in my interest to have deliverables delivered by tomorrow night. It's possible if I work straight through, but it'll be tough, and so much else is weighing on me, mostly move-related. I haven't packed much beyond that first push on Sunday. I don't want to deal with the parking office to get some stupid signs, but I must. Maybe I'll push it to Friday.

Two more apt-lookers today. I couldn't escape the later of them due to the rain, and did a better job grinning and bearing their inevitable interview (while typing obscene invectives about my visitors via IM to classicaljunkie). Every single person, without fail, wants to know to utility costs. I tell them in all honesty that I do not now. I even looked it up in Quicken, and I still can't figure it out, since I paid them in irregular lumps this past winter, and not always in full.

I must have hosted, gosh, twenty-five of these unwanted visits over the J-months. Perhaps more. I feel I deserve commendation for only now starting to wish I could kill them with my mind, as opposed to a month ago.

To help calm down, I ordered a delicious fishy-fish dinner from Redbones, and paid well over $20 (incl tip). It was around five bucks more than the total based on the delivery menu on my fridge, which can't be more than a year or two old. The food, she has gotten expensive.

Drinking cold beer and taking long breaths now.

I don't feel angrier at the moment, but I know that the floor between the PIT OF RAGE and the EVERYTHING IS FINE AIRSPACE has been ticking upwards for the first time since the 2006 election results. I can't even look at the Google News front page any more. Listening to the daily NPR podcast is once again starting to turn me into an unhinged figure, muttering a stream of curses and making rude or threatening gestures at nobody visible, as I practice my own personal Two Minutes Hate session on my way to breakfast.

Mostly I just appreciate that one candidate got into hot water for "misspeaking" some shit they totally just made up (and getting away with it until someone found the relevant YouTube), and then the other one got laid into for "misspeaking" their actually rather defensible perception of the truth.

By "appreciate" I mean "urge to kill rising".

Update: Hey I can start using my Moonbat icon again yay.

Last night's growling due to happy news: my web-client work is more or less integrated into (my test branch of) the volity.net website, and it works on all browsers I can be bothered to care about, including Opera (yes, I have tested it on my Wii) and both MSIEs. I'm going to push to take it live by month's end.

It's technically not slippage, because my original deadline was Sept. 30. Let us ignore all the boasting about earlier releases I did a month ago.

I do all my JavaScript development on Firefox + Firebug, and Safari generally follows suit without any extra work. It took me an hour or two on Saturday to make it Opera-compatible, figuring out that it didn't like how I was handling cookies. Opera seems to insist that you set the cookie header used for subsequent AJAX calls with the DOM's document.cookie property, and no other way will do. Fine, whatever.

It took all day Sunday to get the MSIEs in line. They are turds and I hate them. Their only redeeming feature in this matter is the surprising fact that both 6 and 7 had the same problems, and I got both to work simultaneously.

The IE problems, each of which took far too long to isolate:

• IE silently ignores requests to add <tr>s to <table>s via the DOM appendChild method. You must instead add them to a <tbody> which is itself a child of the table. Seriously, what the fuck; who uses <tbody> normally?


• IE caches the result of each AJAX call, and subsequent calls to that same URL (a very common polling pattern) will result in no request at all being made, but instead a silent return of the old value, so it looks like it made a request. You can get around this by (meaninglessly) adding the current time to the URL's query string, or adding a bogus If-Modified-Since header to the request. (On the plus side, this made me finally add decent logging to my server-side daemon, since I couldn't figure out what was going wrong without it.)


• For the life of me, I couldn't use any Prototype.js methods to refer to elements that had been added to the DOM tree since the document's original rendering. I finally punted, adding such elements to some global arrays upon creation (with apologetic code comments noting how fucking stupid MSIE is) and just accessing those instead later on.

Working with Microsoft software as a developer makes me so angry. It makes me angrier than thinking about the current American government and its foreign policy, because I usually burn through that in a few minutes. But working with Microsoft means wading around waist-deep in a vat of pure shit for hours. It gives me a hate that can last for days afterwards. I really hope I can minimize exposure to it as the web client project moves forward.

If you are not the intended recipient, please do not retain, copy, use, or otherwise disclose the information contained in this message. Instead, please delete it and notify the sender.

Has this ever happened in the history of email?

"When you are finished recording, you may hang up, or press star for more options. (pause) To leave a numeric page, press pound. (pause) *boop*"

Has this ever happened in the history of telephony? As an alternative to leaving a voice message and then hanging up, I mean.

The first one is just insulting legalese that I barely notice, but the second actively wastes my time every time I leave a voice mail for practically anyone. I hate it!

The second people up against the wall will be car-alarm users.

In case it wasn't clear before today, the userbase of Little Green Footballs is nothing but a bunch of racist fuckwads.

(Except you. You're all right.)

Update Reading about LGF on WP, I see that (a) this has been known for some time, and (b) the site used to be about all kinds of things but, like lileks.com, took a sharp right turn and became generally unreadable as a result of 9/11. Interesting and sad.