nerd.of.steel

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.”

This site is awesome and I have spent a good many-o-minutes laughing at how insane poor ol’ John Arbuckle appears. After years upon years of unfunny Garfield comics, they finally managed to bring a smile to my face.

If Jim Davis was smart, he would retcon the whole series in this fashion… Now if only they could do this to the Garfield cartoon…

Visit Garfield Minus Garfield

I ran across a rather odd Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 bug that I felt was worth sharing so no one went through the roller coaster ride of angry emotions that troubleshooting ridiculous bugs always seems to cause. So check this out — Dreamweaver CS3 has a really nasty bug that will crash the application if there is a CSS file in your defined site that is exactly 8KB (8.192 Bytes). Took me a few hours to figure it out but after a little digging through the Interweb and confirming it on Adobe’s support line, if you have a file that is exactly 8.192 Bytes or a multiple of that, it will crash the app and you will be doomed to not getting any work done. What would be the workaround you ask? Add some comments to your CSS files if you are coming close the 8KB mark to pad your files.

You know I use to love Dreamweaver for coding XHTML/CSS but lately I haven’t been too impressed with where the product was going since Adobe took the helm. Lately I have been using Aptana Studio and haven’t looked back. Unfortunately I can only use Aptana at home as the marketing agency I work for requires the use of Dreamweaver for all of their web development projects. If you haven’t checked out Aptana Studios, I highly suggest giving it a whirl, you might fall in love with it as I have.

This weekend I went to see “I Am Legend” (which was totally awesome… just nowhere near as good as the book). After the movie was done I decided to take a quick tour around the mall here in downtown Portland (Pioneer Courthouse Square) and ran into an old co-worker or mine named John. Since we were both looking for gifts for our significant others, I suggested we team up and tackle the holiday traffic together as a unit. John still had no idea what to buy his wife and after a little back and fourth, we both decided that his girlfriend would enjoy an Apple iPhone and since John is a huge Apple fan we thought it wouldn’t hurt to pick him up an iPhone either.

While I have been a little hard on the iPhone in the past, deep down inside I am still a cell phone salesman and enjoy helping others find a phone that they will be happy with for the next few years and both John and his girlfriend are hardcore Apple fanboys/girls so it only made sense to talk him into buying not one iPhone, but two!

While we were talking to a sales person at the Apple store, like all salesman, he decided that he would try to get me to purchase one as well. I was more than nice with my refusals to wanting to purchase an iPhone or iPod and told the sales rep, I kid you not, seven times that I was not interested in either device. John and I both saw that the rep was getting visibly upset, as if it was pure blasphemes to not want to own an iPhone. Eventually he asked what type a phone I was using and when I pulled out my Motorola Q9h and I was pretty much verbally spanked for owning anything that would was made by such an evil corporation. What made matters worse was after the rep found out I owned a Microsoft Zune as well. After I showed it to him since he kept trying to engage me in a sale, he flat out told me that I was not welcome in the store and he did not want “my kind” disturbing his customers.

This is the first time in my life that I was thrown out of a store for owning products made by Microsoft! I mean, really?! Is this what the world has come down to when you cannot even help a friend get a Christmas gift because you prefer a different product? Am I going to have to start drinking from a segregated water fountain as well?!

Needless to say, once this was said to me John told the sales rep that he didn’t want to turn into one of “those people” and politely cancelled his order and we left.

I know I can’t really blame Apple for the actions of one employee, but you know what they say, “When in Rome”. This is why I will never recommend another Apple product to anyone I know ever again. Between this and those ridiculous smear campaign commercials, I have no idea why anyone would want to own an Apple product.

“Intel has just announced and released source code for their Open-FCoE project, which creates a transport allowing native Fibre Channel frames to travel over ordinary ethernet cables to any Linux system. This extremely interesting development will mean that data centers can lower costs and maintenance by reducing the amount of Fibre Channel equipment and cabling while still enjoying its benefits and performance. The new standard is backed by Cisco, Sun, IBM, EMC, Emulex, and a variety of others working in the storage field. The timing of this announcement comes as no surprise given the uptake of 10-Gb Ethernet in the data center.”

I totally made this site. Fin.

Source: Slashdot

Thanksgiving has come and gone and in my household there is a small tradition we have to help ease the pain of waiting with baited breath for almost a full month until we get our grubby little hands on our presents. What we like to do is give everyone in our house a small gift, what we like to call our “After Turkey Present”. We usually try to make it something under $30USD and it has to be something that is not only totally awesome, but amusing and fun as well. This year the little lady gave me one of the most awesome presents I have ever received. In fact, it is hands down the coolest thing ever! It is more amazing than the Nintendo Wii or even, shall I dare say, more awesome than Installing Linux on a Dead Badger! I know exactly what you’re thinking, “Rocco, what in the world could be more awesome than VüDü Linux?!“ and guess what, it’s a toaster! This isn’t just any toaster though; it makes eggs for you too!

This kitchen appliance from heaven functions as a toaster, egg cooker, and meat warmer. It makes a breakfast sandwich in 4 minutes and has wide toaster slots that are perfect for bagels. It also has an automatic shut-off switch for individual toasting and poaching functions and runs on pure magic! Well… I just made up the magic part, but this toaster has definitely revolutionized the way I eat breakfast!

So I got bored the other day… really bored. After spending the whole day working on client projects, I felt the need to just relax and have a little fun. A person can only tolerate starting at a computer monitor for so long before they start pulling their hair out. Realizing that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and do anything fun, useless and amusing with CSS lately I decided to crack open the old sketch book and go to town.

The first page I opened to had a little Super Mario Bros. warp pipe doodle on it that I drew one day in a meeting. Seeing as how Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of my all time favorite games, I thought it would be fun to pay tribute to Mario and Nintendo with a series of pixel art like images created using nothing more than XHTML and CSS. Yep, you read that right! Not one image was harmed (or used) in the creation of these pieces!

When I have more time I want to throw together a nice tutorial for others to have fun with this. For those of you that like to dabble on your own, please feel free to take a look at the code. Pretty much all I did was draw an image on a grid and than recreate the grid with a series ofdiv containers. I could have used tables but I felt using the divs would be more fun. So far I have not found any usefulness for this latest project other than making me smile.

For today, I’ll leave you with a Super Mario Bros. (NES) Warp Pipe as well as a Super Mushroom. Be on the lookout for more pieces to be released by weeks end!

VIEW

• Super Mario Bros. (NES) – Warp Pipe


• Super Mario Bros – Super Mushroom

I was incredibly surprised this morning when I checked my Google Analytics account and found an above average spike in traffic for the past couple days. Looking into it a bit more, I found that all the traffic was coming from Smashing Magazine. It appears that my Grid Overlay tutorial was worthy enough to land in their “Best of August 2007“ article.

I have to say, I’m a little speechless. While I have received a fair amount or praise and thanks over the article, to be featured in a “Best of” article along the likes of Veerle Pieters and tools such as Google’s Web Toolkit and Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor (which my article is directly above) is an honor.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who enjoyed the tutorial as well as sites that featured it such as Smashing Magazine and DZone. Also be on the lookout for several other CSS based tutorials as well as a follow-up to the Gird Overlay tutorial.

—Rocco

So check this out, I was right at the last few sentences of my long awaited Zune Review, which was nothing but goodness despite Microsoft’s constant screwups with the device, and the damn thing just flat out dies on me!

Out of nowhere my Zune reboots itself, shows the Zune logo and dies. I figured, “Hey, maybe the battery is dead” and so I then proceed to plug my Zune into my laptop. The Zune appears to start up, the little progress bar on the bottom swiftly moves across the screen and hits 100% and then “click”, my Zune harddrive makes a noise that can only be described as the sound my old Packard Bell 133MHz computer made whenever I tried to do anything with it. My heart stopped and then my Zune reset and I happily sighed, thinking I would be fine.

Unfortunately, I’m not fine, my Zune is stuck in a constant, what I have dubbed, “reboot and click” mode.

After 3 hours of fiddling with the damn thing, I called Zune support. The nice gentleman I talked to told me that no one has ever reported an error such as this to which my good buddy Mike Temporale quickly pointed out it was because I was “one in a million“.

All jokes aside, I’m so upset I could almost buy an iPod… almost.

I just cannot fathom how a device that has worked so perfectly could just crap out for no reason whatsoever. Now I know what some of you are thinking, “Well it’s a Microsoft product, what did you expect?” and you know what, Microsoft products are usually not half bad and their hardware is usually top notch but the Zune, as far as I’m concerned, is a piece of crap. While it is a piece of crap that plays music very very well, it is still a piece of crap nonetheless. I honestly expected so much more from Microsoft than this. Hopefully Zune 2.0 will be better, if not, I have no idea how Microsoft plans on staying in the music game.

I’m so irked I could scream!

Did I also mention that it is going to take Microsoft 3-4 weeks to repair my Zune even though their campus is a stones throw away from me! WTF?! Really… Really?!

EDIT: So my Zune decided to start up this morning like nothing had ever happened, which is great news… minus the fact that it wiped all of my content before doing so. Now only did it wipe all of my content, it made me go through the wiping process five times! My only guess is I have horrible taste in music and my Zune just couldn’t take it anymore :(

I haven't really had time to play with Joost that much. Work has just been hectic and I really haven't had a chance to do anything. When I do use Joost, it is mostly to let my daughter watch some of the animal documentaries.

Tonight I was bored and I decided to site down and enjoy whatever was on the new digital boob tube. I was pleasently surprised to find the WB's canceled would-be hit series Mercy Reef on their Joost Sci-Fi channel (WB's Sci-Fi Fix). The shows name has been changed to Aquaman and I cannot, for the life of me, figured out why the CW passed up this show. For the love of god, Ving Rhames!

Here's hoping they add all of their old shows that have bit the big on to Joost. I wouldn't mind catching up on Birds of Prey. :)

Oh man, the past couple of weeks have been hectic. So hectic in fact, I haven't been able to post anything interesting or fun, minus my triumph in the iPhone search world... which died a few hours later :)

So I was catching up on some of my favorite podcasts today, all of which reside on the TWiT Netcast Network and low and behold, they mentioned me and this blog! The podcast in question was Megan Marrone and Leo Laporte's Jumping Monkeys episode number 5, somewhere around 6:30 into the show.

Sure it was a brief mention about Glubble (Glubble To The Rescue!), but Megan and Leo have been heroes of mine since way back when so I'm sitting her like a school girl who just walked past Leonardo Dicaprio. The whole reason I use to subscribe to Comcast's Digital Cable service was so I could watch them and the rest of the old TechTV crew... then G4 destroyed my hopes and dreams.

All is not lost. I still get a huge dose of Leo every week via the TWiT Netcast Network and now that Leo and Megan are doing a podcast, I'm in digital daddy heaven. If you haven't checked out the podcasts on TWiT, I advise you to go do so. Go!