department zed | ramblings from the great white north

I try pretty hard not to comment publicly about politics, but I was reading this piece today and something at the bottom of the article caught my eye. I quote:
Mr. Coleman’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, attacked Mr. Franken as “unqualified, unfit and unprepared to be a United States senator.” He said the campaign would […]

UPDATE: After more hassles, I finally canceled my account with UplinkEarth. But they handled it gracefully; not only did they refund the remainder of the year payment, they also threw in an extra 2 months because of the issues this week. I’m not sorry to leave UplinkEarth but I will definitely say that […]

I was re-reading an opinion article by Paul Krugman and something struck me.  Here’s the quote:
The parents have a combined income of about $45,000, and don’t receive health insurance from employers. When they looked into buying insurance on their own before the accident, they found that it would cost $1,200 a month — a prohibitive […]

A while ago I’d written a response to Glenn Branca’s the 25 Questions—a blog post asking 25 hypothetical questions about the state of modern music. A new comment prodded my memory (in that I had not finished my responses), so I figured I’d take a few minutes now to respond to the rest of […]

Check this out:
Mashup of Billboard’s 2007 Top 25 songs
Take a listen. Listen well.
It’s a brilliant mashup, and it’s incredibly sad as well. I’m not sure if DJ Earworm did it or it was the original tunes (I’m inclined to think it’s in the original tunes, based on what I’ve been able to stomach […]

Read thisjust a few minutes ago, and I have to say…I’m getting pretty tired of the record industry pulling excuses out of thier ass (yes, I said it) to explain the decline of sales. I’ll give you the real two reasons why people hit file sharing:
1. The record industry, in thier attempts to quantify […]

(A clarification: I normally develop using the uber-MacBook Pro, but I have a personal policy of only doing development using virtual machines; therefore I normally don’t use the OS X side of my laptop for any kind of development, unless what I’m working on can only be developed in OS X. As you’ll see […]

There are a lot of times when I’m talking to others in the software development industry when I realize how lucky and unique I am; those who know me real well know that this software dev thing was not what I was trained to do.  For those of you who don’t know me, I hold […]

A friend of mine pointed out this old chestnut, which I took the time this morning to re-read…as I read it again (I’ve read it several times), this statement jumped out at me:
“It is natural and helpful to develop your own style, but remember that design is an art, not a science. People […]

So, sometimes in my late night, insomniac browsing forays, I’ll decide to go take a look and see how some very former (in terms of the internet, anyways) colleagues are doing. Tonight, it was dhtmlcentral.com.
For those of you who think JavaScript is synonymous with the term “Ajax”, DHTMLCentral was a place, based in Europe, […]

Not like there were many entries, but last night’s new server build unfortunately cost me the old blog entries.  That’s ok, almost all were just rants anyways, and I should probably be a little more constructive sometimes.
Nah, that’s what a blog is for–to blow off some steam, and hope that some of the people who […]

As an experienced Javascript coder–which has always been more of a hobby for me, and (up until the past 2 or so years) not a major source of income–I have had the privilege of being around for both rounds of Javascript/DHTML/Ajax development. I get (and have participated in) quite a few debates regarding what […]

“Who needs a boyfriend when you’ve got a dog who farts?”
God, I love Overheard in New York.  Makes me feel like I’m back in the hometown.

From my buddy Kirk:
“If I could buy him for what he’s worth, and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth, I could retire.”
Sometimes good quotes are a good thing.

Quote of the day, courtesy of Airbag Industries:
“Let me tell you something, I’ve seen it all since before Netscape was even a glint in some venture capitalists eye and If I know anything it’s this, the Internet is not a truck, it’s a freaking freight train packed full of idiots.”
I love it, it’s like wiping […]