ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts

I have terrible road rage.  There's nothing I hate more than being stuck in traffic, but there's something soothing about being behind a gigantic real life Tonka pickup truck from Texas.  This probably didn't come out all that well as he was driving away when I managed to snap off the picture from my camera phone, but it was a cool sight, and something you don't see it Niagara Falls, NY every day.

(click for full view)

Spam?  On my little homemade blog that exists, unlinked, on a subdomain of my band's website?  Since I'd designed this blog mostly from scratch, seeing spam comments on my last post threw me for a loop.  I don't get a lot of comments here as it is, so I didn't want to go the obvious route and implement a captcha image.  You guys probably get enough of those everywhere else.  So that left the lingering question of what to do about the spam that is effective, yet user friendly.  I found a nice little tutorial about how to tell the difference between a spam bot and a human, and followed it carefully.  If you go to add a comment, you won't even notice the change.

Meanwhile, I'm working on improving the site, and will likely change the "PROJECTS" section into a "PORTFOLIO" section.  I'm also considering breaking off ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts from it's thinksobrain.com parent and getting myself a domain name, seeing as I've been calling this my "official website" for quite a while.  If (and when) I do that, I'll likely give the site another visual refresh.  I like the way it looks now, though, and I'll probably be adding more to it very soon (twitter, anybody?).

Sorry for only giving you guys sporadic updates.  I'm without internet (well, my own internet, anyway) at home until Wednesday morning, so hopefully when I'm back up and running on my desktop I'll be able to keep you guys more up to date on the everyday life of yours truly.

Take care, everybody - except the spammers, of course!

So I'm sure I've mentioned here on ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts that I'm a Linux user (at least, I am on my laptop), and a FireFox user (on any computer anywhere), but if I haven't, I'm a Linux user (Xubuntu is my distribution of choice, for what it's worth), and a FireFox user.  I'm also stuck in a deadend job doing something I hate for less money than I'm worth.  I'm looking to get out of here and into something more fun, like, oh, I don't know, maybe a toy store.  So I hit up Toys Я Us's website, then clicked on Careers, hoping to be able to apply online for the nearest location (which, for the record, is a few towns away - my hometown is devoid of toy stores), when I reached this screen (click for full):

Alright, I can understand no Linux support.  I'm used to that by now, but the only Operating Systems it supports are Win98, Win2K, and WinXP?  No love for MacOS?  What about Vista?  The browser support is no better - IE5, IE6, and Netscape 7??  Netscape 7?!?  Netscape 8 was released in November of 2004 - that's four and a half years ago, kids.  Not to mention that IE6 is the bane of my existence and IE7 was released in October of 2006.

Come on, TRU, it's about time to update your website, five years is a little too long.

I intended to come on here and bitch about the new "diggbar" feature that digg.com rolled out earlier this week, how it's overrated and people are giving it too much credit for whatever.  Then when I was writing, I realized it makes no sense for me to complain, because that means that when people grab the BWF Network feeds off of Twitter, once the plugin is updated they'll be able to digg without leaving the site!  Problem, of course, is how will that effect my site's numbers?  Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Dear Internet Explorer 6,

Please just fucking die already.  Nobody likes you.  The people who do can't see things clearly - mostly because you're not rendering them properly.  We've tried telling people that there are plenty of other fish in the sea, but they just can't seem to get over you.  We've tried to introduce them to a real Fox.  We've tried taking them to the Opera.  We tried to take them on Safari.  Hell, we tried distracting them with something shiny.  We've even tried to introduce them to your younger, much better looking cousins.  Yet they still won't let you go.

For the last eight years, experts have tried to make you look pretty.  Some have succeeded at times, while others have failed miserably.  You've become the bane of designers everywhere.  While some still try, others flat out refuse to work with you, while those who are just crazy enough have even tried to kill you.  Personally, I wish you'd just go away so that I wouldn't have to work harder to satisfy you and your flock.

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.  Hopefully we're seeing the end of yours soon.