so, i danced the priceline jig and lo and behold, got an austin roundtrip ticket for this saturday for $150. which means, i’ll be at sxsw. w00t. on my search for tickets though, a friend did point me out to smarter living’s Airfares Bargain Guide which would have been really useful if i actually bothered to get tickets earlier (or waited until wednesday to see what was being offered), but i decided not to temp fate too much.
grr, opening things that attach to the desktop makes my active desktop refresh…
anyway, to start typing again… real sucks ass. i think everybody already knows that. in any case, i’ve started listening to online streams, and it pops up rp8, even when it’s unassociated w/ mp3 playlists/streams. (apparently a lot of people have been having this problem)
why does this happen? turns out that real went about creating their own playlist extension, called .xpl, and then went and changed the MIME types of playlists and mpegurls to their proprietary .xpl format. it also changes the extensions of mpegs, mpgs, and mp3s to “.mpega” (again, associated to rp). pretty bastardly right? if you’ve been wondering how to get rid of it, copy this into a regfile (.reg) and run (double click):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mp3] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mp3] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpeg] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpeg] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpg] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpg] "Extension"=".mp3" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/scpls] "Extension"=".pls" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-scpls] "Extension"=".pls" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/mpegurl] "Extension"=".m3u" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTMIMEDatabaseContent Typeaudio/x-mpegurl] "Extension"=".m3u"
fuck you real networks!
did i mention that folding@home is the best screensaver ever. the only thing that it needs is a settings screen show you can choose display options and maybe a built in screencap utility. it’d also be nice to run the thing as an activedesktop or windowed app. it’s just that darn cool
while i’m talking about computer stuff, i should mention that the new dualhead drivers, while a huge improvement in win2k, disables full screen opengl acceleration. this normally wouldn’t be a problem, but for playing games, it means changing monitor modes and rebooting. that’s retarded.
i seemed to have missed it the first time around, this is the OpenCola.comSoft Drink Formula. a little HOWTO on making your own soda.
a friend just let me that my site is #10 on google for “foo.” heheh, foo foo foo.
while you’re at it, check ok jesse’s bookmarklet page. it’s pretty neat.
a little while back i read a little article about umami, the recently discovered fifth taste. it’s sorta weird, but i believe that umami has had an impact on my everyday life, or rather learning of umami. i was just thinking in east asian religions class as the professor was talking about mengzi (mencius) and how he used taste as a metaphor for how virtue is developed. it occurred to me about how you could pin down 4 hearts/sprouts of virtue (hmm, looking for an online ver of mencius, 2A6, but can’t find it… you’d think there’d be a copy (not in chinese)) when there may be more at work. of course then it occurred to me that those moral theories were just arbitrary and i didn’t worry about it anymore. um, still trying to tast umami though…
anyway, what this whole train of thought did get me thinking about was that how things or people that you’ve never encountered or met can suddenly become really important. (no, umami is not life changing, but it’s a passable segue). it also got me thinking, do old things and people disappear just as quickly as the new can assert itself? yes, not particularly original thoughts, but still… the phenomological flux in our lives makes it hard for me to accept any worldviews that espouse permanence as a central tenet.
/usr/bin/girl has links to earthquake video cam footage (from groovetech and microsoft). technology is amazing. look at the camera shake on the ms one!)
the login dialog is even centered in the right monitor. that’s so beautiful. *sniff* *sniff* (wiping the tears from my eye)
ok, so started using the new matrox drivers a bit. and yes, they are cool and fix some big win2k problems. the 2nd desktop functions now as a primary desktop extension (i think it can also act as a multi-desktop, but i haven’t cared to try that yet). windows maximize properly and the task menu / autohide functions only on the primary display monitor. now the cool things is that you can 2d and 3d across both monitors (vs the old double monitor where the secondary display couldn’t do overlays). the only bad thing i’ve noticed is i can’t drag icq onto the secondary monitor (i’d like it to latch on the far right, but it won’t budge past the end of the first monitor). i guess, i’ll either play around with the multi-desktop (probably not because i think that’ll screw with my active desktop stuff), or just make lotsa floaters for the few people i regularly message.
the edualhead stuff is an interesting curiousity. i don’t think they’ll become real useful until i get some hotkeys bound. actually, it doesn’t really matter much since i’ve been moving over to mozilla anyway. oh well. having properly working full-screen is nice though… why can’t mozilla do full-screen? argh.