Benign Thoughts

Hey everyone! Yep, this post’s going to be a fully fledged entry today. It might even be a bit longer. We’ll see :-D. Anyway, I have a good amount of stuff to cover, but first I’d like to congratulate Scott on his new layout in a very long time. Anyway, I’ve found that if I stop blogging and go to do something else, I tend to forget about the entry laying here and never get around to publishing it, so I either publish it the next day, or I delete it. Therefore (big words today!), I’m going to write this entry in one, single, sitting.

Yeah, I’m in a fairly good mood today. And why is that, you ask? Well, you should know by now that I love band. It’s one of my favorite classes because it’s not like a normal class, it’s actually fun. The only other class that can be compared to Band is Gym, which sucks. Yeah, I said it. I hate gym. Anyway, today I had regular band class, a band lesson (which I got to miss gym for), and tonight I have Stage Band practice at 7 (1900). Stage Band is like a club where you come every tuesday at 7pm (1900) up until 9pm (2100) to play jazz music. Every once in a while there’s a concert or something when you get to play for an audience which is rather fun. Next Thursday we have the jazz festival, so things have been rather hectic lately.

Oh, and by the way, I hate Jazz music. I’m more into Ska, Metal, Rock, and Techno. Yeah, that’s a rather odd mixture, isn’t it? Lately I’ve been listening to NovaStream Web Radio, which plays basically everything. The only time I have it turned off is when someone is playing Hip Hop or Rap or something sucky like that. Then I listen to MY music.

What is my music? Wow, this turned into a music post. Strange… Well, believe it or not, I actually bought 2 CDs the other day from Hot Topic (Hate the store, love the music). One was a metal collection, which is alright, but some of it’s censored, and the other one was Rammstein - Reise, Reise. If you don’t know who Rammstein is, google it. They have to be the most amazing band I’ve ever heard. I mean, it would help if I understood German, but it’s alright. I can deal with it. I also like Evanescence, Cradle of Filth, Slipknot, Korn, System of a Down, and all that kind of stuff. I’ve also found that Lacuna Coil’s pretty good too.

So anyway, I’m writing a new short story. If you’re currently reading WCPH, don’t worry, I’m still continuing that one. I’ll post a new section later. The new story I’m writing is for Writing Lab. It’s about a “Mirror World”, and it plays on the fact that we don’t know if this is even the real world. What if there was another world inside the mirror that also thought that they were the “real” world? I can’t tell you anything more than that, but the story will be up here on it’s own page when it’s done.

So anyway, I’m done. Feel free to look around at my older entries or visit the sites on my sidebar if you’re new here. If you don’t feel like it, have a nice day

Alright, I’m sure you noticed the new category. Yes, every once in a while I find a site and think, damn, that really sucks. Well, this is the first post of my “Badly Designed Sites” series. So let’s start!

You remember TooNekked, right? Well, now she’s using her xanga for her ‘layout and skin plugs’, and I admit that she’s an awesome artist. I can’t do vector, so I admire her for that. Anyhow, remember a long time ago when I said that her layout was screwed up in firefox and she jumped all over me? Well, she made a new one a while ago, I guess december or sometime, and it’s still messed up in firefox. Take a look at it yourself. I’m sure it’s beautiful in IE, but in Firefox, frankly, it sucks.

Now, she’s got a rant blog thing. Ahh, that’s much better. See? It’s not that hard to make a layout using real html and css, is it? Now, I’m not posting this to make fun of the layout. I’m posting this to yell at her (and her friends) for picking on people who ’stole’ her images. In my opinion, it’s not a big deal, and she’s overreacting and being way to immature over things. I would have calmly left a comment on the offending blog/xanga/whatever or emailed/IMed the offender and told him or her to remove the images or give me credit. See? Be nice, don’t act like you have an insect up your ass all the time.

And now, another horrible, horrible site. Alright, this one’s called.. uh… does it have a name? I’ll just call it Hellcat. Anyway, just look at it. Need I say more? Well, unless you’re blind and you use a screenreader, you can’t read the damn thing. I mean, you could, but it’s really hard. Who came up with the beautiful idea of tiling a regular picture, no, a painting, not watermarked, and calling it a background. Oh yeah, and the font is gigantic.

Alright, that’s all. Thank you for putting up with me

Alright, I started something big again. You know that dumb Microsoft (yeah, I said it) campaign against linux (Get the facts on Windows and Linux). Well, I’m working on a page for Firefox (Get the facts on Firefox and Internet Explorer). The layout is finished, but I need some figures of authority to tell me your experience with firefox. I’d also like some regular people, so if you’re famous, have something to do with software (Randal L. Schwartz, that includes you), or are just a regular person who likes firefox, feel free to email me at louis@benignthoughts.com (I don’t care about spam, Thunderbird has the best spam filter ever) or IM me on AIM or jabber. My screenname’s U12 and my jabber username is LouisC@jabber.org. I’m going to attempt to get some linux guys (Yes, Linus Torvalds included), and photomatt of course. So anyway, contact me somehow.

If I don’t get at least 10 people, I’m cancelling the project. I’m not starting the feature comparison until I get 10 people.

Mozilla guys: when it’s done, I can tar up the site for you and you can have it. This isn’t some dumb traffic stunt, I simply want to let people know how much better Firefox is, and that it’s a great alternative to IE.