Stop it.

Would Microsoft Windows sufferers who are still using Internet Explorer please just stop it? Go download Firefox or Opera or whatever, and start using a real web browser instead. I am tired of spending hours and hours tracking down the crap-load of bugs and quirks unique to Internet Explorer so that web pages display properly. It seems that every time I get to the end of a project, I find stuff that renders beautifully in regular browsers, but end up looking like crap in IE...

It's a real pain in the ass, so if everybody on the internets could just stop using it, that would be great.

Oh, and since the new Windows Vista version of Outlook f#@%s up HTML emails, if you would switch to Thunderbird or some other email client while you're at it, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Your friend,
Dave2

This sucks ass. Blogography has been fragged with a scrolling bug in IE for ages, and I've got no time to fix it because I'm too busy fixing everything else.

Why does Microsoft hate us so much?

Can I just say that Criss Angel kicked total ass in his guest spot on the episode CSI New York from last night? The guy is a decent magician to begin with, but who knew he could act as well? His emotionally disturbed character of Luke Blade was no easy role to play, and he managed it beautifully. Good episode. Perfect casting.

As more and more of our lives ends up on the internet, there's more and more ways to put yourself there. I've always thought that a daily update on my blog is enough, but then a service called "Twitter" comes along that allows you to put continuous updates about your life on the internet all day long. Despite an occasional trip somewhere, most of my life is pretty boring, and would end up looking something like this...

I don't know why anybody would want to read something like that, so my Twitter account goes unused. Since you can update from your mobile phone, I keep thinking that maybe I'll Twitter one of my trips or something. Travel is mostly mundane torture for me, but maybe somebody would find it interesting?

Another internet invention is a service called "Facebook" which is a kind of social-networking site. It started out for college students to maintain contacts and stuff, but eventually opened up to everybody. Once you join up, you can invite others to join and be on your friends list. Karl from Secondhand Tryptophan invited me to be his friend, and now he appears when I login...

Today I logged into Facebook for some reason, and noticed that I'm being asked how I know Karl. I click on him to answer, and a box comes up with a list of options. When I read through the list, I don't see an option for "Blogging Buddies" so I thought I'd select "Through Facebook" instead. After I checked the box, a little menu popped up asking me what kind of Facebook friend Karl was to me...

POKE BUDDIES?!? What the hell kind of stuff is going on at FaceBook? I mean, I like Karl and all... and look forward to meeting him in person and stuff... but this is a bit more intimate of a relationship than I'm ready for. I decided to go for something less dramatic and select "We hooked up" instead, but figured Karl would probably delete me for something like that. Ultimately, I just selected "Met randomly" and was able to hand-type "Blogging Buddies" which is what I was looking for all along...

Interestingly enough, Facebook won't take my word for it that Karl and I are Blogging Buddies. Instead, they are going to ask Karl for confirmation. Am I really so untrusting?

Even more interesting... I now have an option to "Poke Karl!" (with exclamation point!). WTF? I must be missing something here, so I go to the Help Center to try and figure out what all this poking is about. Here is what I found out...

What is a poke?
We have about as much of an idea as you do. We thought it would be fun to make a feature that had no real purpose and to see what happens from there. So mess around with it, because you're not getting an explanation from us.

Holy crap! If the people who created the poking don't know and won't tell... what the heck are Facebook users supposed to think? "Mess around with it?" What if I poke Karl and he explodes? And what the heck is going to happen when somebody pokes ME?!?

If you don't hear anything from me tomorrow, it's probably because Karl poked me and I exploded.