A reliable source has told MacRumors that the new iMacs are coming within a few weeks, with 15′”, 17″ and 19″ screens. I’m not sure I believe the 19″ story, since Apple has no 19″ item in its cinema display line. Also, 17″ is on the large side for the little half-sphere base - 19″ would be too much of a good thing.
I’ve gotten a couple of trackback hits lately and rearranged a few categories, so I should probably say a little something about the blog. I started blogging about science fiction at another location in September of 2001, and about fan fiction on blogspot in October of the same year. In December I moved the blogger page off blogspot, putting it up as my home page here at Jemima’s Trek.
In April of 2002 I installed MovableType here and imported all of my blogger entries. In June I imported the sci-fi entries, leaving me with an all-in-one blog. In October I upgraded to MT version 2.5 and implemented the styleswitcher.
This month I split up the GeekSpeak category into Mac and Web, renamed the Fandom category Meta, and tried to separate Meta (discussion of fandom) more cleanly from Fanfic (discussion of fanfic - the actual blogfic is in Ficlets), though that’s always a tough call to make. It’s not meta until somebody gets annoyed, and obviously that someone isn’t me. So here’s the rundown on all the categories:
Today was nightmare day on the T. The Red Line was running late this morning, and then tonight I was running for the train at an open-air station and it just drove away. It was barely 5 degrees out, with a windchill twenty degrees below that, and the conductor couldn’t wait fifteen seconds for me to reach the door.
So I was faced with the choice of waiting ten minutes for another train, or spending an equal amount of time walking home in the cold. I decided to walk. Fortunately I made it home with all appendages intact, and decided to take a nice warm bath.
It sounded so simple at the time. There was this annoying car alarm going off in the courtyard, but otherwise it was just me and The Hobbit. Then the car alarm went up about a hundred decibels and I realized it wasn’t a car alarm, it was the fire alarm.
So I got out of the tub with my wet hair and put my cold clothes back on and went down to the foyer to shiver with some of the other human residents and a few cats. Word was it was just a burst radiator, so the evacuation was half-hearted at best. Considering the weather, we’d be better off inside a burning building than out in the wind.
So the firemen left without turning off the alarm. They said to call the management company to do it. I went back upstairs and resumed my bath, and eventually the alarm stopped. The heat is even still on, despite the exploding radiator problem. It’s not doing much good against the wind that blows straight through the walls, but you can’t have everything. At least I have my fingers and toes.
Today is my lovely sister Veronica’s nth birthday, and she’s feeling blue. Literally. Here’s her story in her own words:
Last night I started to do my nails; I was shaking the bottle of nail polish
and tapping it against the palm of my hand when the bottle broke.
Did I mention that it was a full bottle, of blue polish, and of the
Jet-Set-Dries-in-1-minute variety?
So blue nail polish flies everywhere, on the couch, on my yummy sushi pajamas and
all over my hands (full bottle remember). So I run to the bathroom and throw
the whole mess in the sink (still blue by the way, can’t wait until the
landlord sees that!) and try and wash the polish off my hands. Some of it
comes off but unfortunately, being Jet-Set polish - it set.
I looked like I killed a Smurf.
It took me almost 2 hours, a full bottle of nail polish remover and most of
Joannie’s cottonballs to get it off my hands. And I missed a few spots - so
today, I have blue freckles.
Hope your night was better than mine!
Strangely enough, when I put Veronica’s name into the Smurf Name Generator, it returned “Killdozer Smurf.” How did they know? For even more smurfy fun, Smurf the Web!
I thought I’d spend the holiday writing, but instead I made my own color picker. It’s a table of all 4096 web-smart colors, but don’t go there. The page is half a megabyte, so it’s a bit of a slow download and will also run up my bandwidth quota. I’ve already hit 20MB today just testing it. The page looks like this:
The arrangement leaves much to be desired, but a better one will have to wait for another holiday weekend. When you click on one of the colors, you get a popup in that color, with the hex color value in black and white text. The cell size can be adjusted from 8 to 16 pixels.
To see what it’s like without a long download, try the little version (popup or full page), which gives those 27 colors out of the 4096 total which are closest to the web-safe color #6699cc.
If you like it, you can download the whole thing, unzip it and open it locally in a browser: color.tar.gz (32kb). The main page is the one with 4096 in the title. If you’re sneaky enough, you can even find the real page on-site and play with it at freeshell’s expense.
I should mention that none of the color pages have been tested on IE, only Mozilla and Chimera. Click at your own risk.
Here’s Jintian’s 40 fannish facts meme, by way of Lori, Seema and Sara. I was too lazy to do it myself, so they helped. My corrections are in brackets.
I couldn’t find an easy way to add palettes to the Mac OS X color picker, so I looked for on-line color pickers to help me design a seventh stylesheet for the blog. Here’s a nice page of on-line color picker reviews from the web-graphics.com color blog. I also took a look at Google Directory’s list of color pickers.
Here’s a 5-k winning blogger with the world’s simplest on-line color picker. He also has a bookmarklet for identifying the colors used in a website. Rather than steal someone else’s color scheme, you can check out these color scheming links.
A while back, Mac Edition called for more web colors and the web-smart palette was born at more Crayons, which also has a cool color weblog, through which I found a snarky essay on what I’ve always thought of as Eighties colors.
I’ve been looking around for a 2D version of more Crayons’ 3D color cube, similar to the nice color layouts of the 216 web-safe colors at Visibone, but so far, no dice. I haven’t found anything based on the 4096 colors but more Crayons’ own color slider and slices of their color cube. I’d like something I can run off-line, but they have no downloadable utilities and I don’t feel like pagesucking the entire site. So I think I’ll make my own 2D color palette. Later.
I’ve changed the style switching links to gifs, as seen in Talk to Oneself, who replied to my recent ping saying Mozilla had been fixed. Unfortunately, the babelfish translation didn’t throw any further light on the entry. (I shudder to think what babelfish will do to that sentence alone.)
Anyway, try out the images, keeping a couple of things in mind:
The LCARS styles work properly only in Mozilla-based browsers.
The page must be reloaded when switching to or from Technicolor because of the extra javascript.
This weekend is your last chance to sign up for Boskone 40 at the cheap rate. This Boston con runs from February 14-16, 2003, and is the ultimate geeky way to spend Valentine’s day.
The annoying part is how they go on referring to it as a free service. I get a lot of free services, and not a single one of them comes with invoices due. They’ll get $9.95 for what everyone else gives away free when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. This means I’ll go back to using Crosswinds as my mirror, since it’s back up, more or less, and I did finally get all my Voyager fic up there tonight before I heard this bad news.
The email has been resized to fit your screen. Emphasis on free added, though the capitalization is original. If you don’t see it, click “more.”