Afishionados,
My cell phone bill arrived this week and with it, bad news. If bills like this keep piling up, I’m afraid I’ll have no choice but to shut down the Fish. Donations welcome.
Afishionados,
We’ve come so far since the days of Blogger haven’t we? I’ve been hard at work tweaking the Fish these past few days and I think the improvements are pretty good. Here’s a list of what’s new:
1.) Search, Categories, and Menu buttons have been moved beneath the header and should work from any page you visit on O.F.A.L.
2.) New “About Me” section added (still in the processing of being updated. It’s 2 A.M., what do you want from me? Post your questions or suggestions and maybe they’ll make it in the final cut.)
3.) Over 15 new Quotes of Truth and GoodnessTM.
4.) Fixed a bug in the Benevolence 1.0 WordPress theme that made the Fish incompatible with Internet Explorer 7.0 (many thanks to Bean for feedback)
5.) New “Home Badge” button added. Oooooo, shiny!
6.) “Fellow Inmates” and “Other Places” replaced with cooler, cleaner DHTML menus, thus clearing space for future margin goodies!
7.) Smaller header image. Now with 12 less pixels and half the calories!
8.) New and improved Leatherette CreamTM background color because the white was just too damn white.
9.) I went back and fixed a lot of “broken images” for a lot of older posts that we hosted on a server I no longer use. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find all of the original images but I’ll see what I can do about redoing them at a later date.
10.) Attempted to drink Snapple’s diet iced tea with lemon and found it tasted too much like peach cat piss. Avoid it if possible.
Just post your complaints, bug reports, confessions about emailing underage pages, and comments in the…well, comments section.
Long live the Fish 3.0!
Afishionados,
The holiday season is approaching fast and you know what that means! Yes, friends, that’s right! The Christmas shopping season is nigh! Grab yer wallets and get ready for bitchy customers and long checkout lines!
I went shopping today and I already heard Christmas music. Why are stores playing Christmas music in October? What’s wrong with people? Santa should smack them.
Despite hearing the sounds of familiar Christmas tunes, the holiday shopping season has not officially kicked off because I haven’t yet heard the worst, most dreaded Christmas song of all time, which is how I determine the true start of the holiday madness. Until I’ve heard it in public, Christmas does not exist. (Every year I try to escape it but the song still finds me. It hibernates all year long and waits in the darkness, ready to play the moment it smells my blood and senses my fear…)
Despite the fact that it’s October, SEARS is getting a head start on its holiday sales goals, which brings us to the first part of a new OFAL series I like to call: Christmas Gifts You Shouldn’t Buy.
I couldn’t help but notice this ginormous rack of fugly slippers so I had to take a photo (how else do you expect me to start this new feature on the Fish?). While the slippers come in your more traditional colors of pink, lavender, and creamy white, SEARS is also proud to introduce the new and improved 2006 models.
These new models were designed from the ground up and feature three new textures and colors specifically designed for this holiday season. The new varieties are: Golden Retriever, Smurf, and Skunk. All six designs are made from the finest Muppet available today and are guaranteed not to impress anyone you give them to.
Buying these ugly-ass slippers is not only a dumb idea, but you’re putting yourself at risk as well. There always exists the possibility, however unlikely, that someone could re-gift these slippers to you.
If you’re thinking about buying these slippers (or any other stupid gift for that matter), remember the CGYSB motto: “If buying a present is proving too hard, then just substitute with a nice gift card.”
Afishionados,
I’ve done an upgrade to O.F.A.L. tonight. I’ve moved the Search, Categories, and Archives functions to the top of the site, directly beneath the header. I’ve tested all three functions using Internet Explorer and Firefox 1.5 on the PC and with Safari on my Mac. All three of them look and work correctly for me, but if you are having difficulties please email me and send me a screenshot if at all possible. My email address is nucleardisaster at gmail dot com.
I want to clear up the left side of the site for some future ideas. Unfortunately, this also means I’ve lost my “random quotes” feature for the time being. I thought about keeping it but it looks odd beneath all the menus. Suggestions?
I hope the new layout works as well for you as it does for me. Thanks!
UPDATE: I installed Internet Explorer 7.0 due to Bean’s feedback and Old Fish and Lemonade does not appear to be compatible with it. I checked out a few other sites with it and they don’t look correct either. I can only hope this is because IE 7 is still in BETA. If you’re using IE, do yourself a favor and switch to Firefox.
Also, “random quotes” are back due to much protesting from my mother :-).
Afishionados,
A Borders bookstore in my neck of the woods featured a CD that caught my attention this afternoon. The nice thing about Borders is that 1.) It’s never crowded because nobody shops at the mall that it’s in since a newer and larger mall is 10 minutes away and 2.) You can preview tracks of all the the CDs they sell on computer kiosks within the bookstore.
The album was “Twenty-three”1 by Tristan Prettyman and, after listening to a couple songs, I ended up buying it. I imagine the CD was featured because she’s opening for Guster in Seattle tonight. In any event, I like her “folksy acoustic-ness”.
I didn’t pay much attention to the CD case at the store (who does, really?) and just bought it like I’ve done a million times before with a million other CDs.
While I’m the happy owner of an Apple MacBook, I use my iPod with my Windows PC because it has a bigger hard drive, all my songs are already on my PC, and I don’t want to spend the time moving all my music over to my Mac.
Anyhoo, I inserted Tristan’s CD into my PC in hopes of importing it as an AAC file into iTunes. Once the CD drawer closed, I waited. And waited. And waited some more, watching iTunes and looking for the CD icon to appear so I could start the importing process.
The CD never showed up in iTunes. Instead, I was greeted with a warm and fuzzy copyright notice agreement in glorious pop-up flash animation form.
The notice said something like “In order to play this music on your PC, you must agree to the following:
1.) You must give to us, Virgin Records, your first born child on Halloween night at precisely 12:01 A.M.
2.) You must provide two forms of I.D.
3.) You must submit a urine, stool, and semen sample. All at once.
4.) You must disclose the location of Iraq’s WMDs.
“WTF is this?” I thought to myself. “Is this software CD or a music CD? I just want to listen to it in iTunes, dammit!!!”
Of course I had to agree to the licensing agreement, else the CD wouldn’t even show up under “My Computer”. Even after agreeing, the CD would not show up in iTunes. Instead, the album plays in its own Flash-based CD player. Once again, “WTF” ran through my mind.
I tried to manually locate the song files on the CD but Tristan Prettyman is a sneaky little devil, as she hid them from me. Curses!
I had never seen such crazy shit with a music CD before. Upon closer examination of Tristan’s CD case, I saw that it emphasized the fact that the album was, indeed, copyprotected. On the back of the CD, in the finest print perceptable to the human eye, was this:
Tristan must like rules and regulations because her CD case goes on to list even more stipulations: (Ironic, since she’s an independent and emerging artist and I would have figured she’d want people to be able to hear her sing.)
What the hell, Tristan? You’re all but unheard of, yet your CD is harder to get into than the Pentagon. And it’s not even compatible with the iPod! I would expect this sort of thing from Metallica or Rod Stewart, but not you. This really hurts my (one and only) feeling.
Hmmm… According to the graphics of anality, I am permitted to arrow the contents of the disc over to my Mac, so long as I am running Mac OS 8.6 or higher. Seeing as how Mac OS 8.6 came out in 1999, I’m pretty sure I meet and exceed that requirement. For you, Tristan, I’ll give it a whirl.
I slipped the CD into my MacBook and within moments it showed up in iTunes, downloaded the track names, and was imported as AAC. Awesome.
In reality, I imagine Tristan has very little (if anything) to do with the copyright protection that plagues her otherwise good album (she just has assholes for bosses and that’s not necessarily her fault, is it?). For the Windows inclined, Tristan has a forum on her official web site with a link to a thread about circumventing the copyprotection of her own CD using third-party software right on her front page.
Therefore, I hold the greedy corporate suits at Virgin Records responsible for this pointless annoyance. You and the rest of the record industry can suck it. No one is going to buy your music if they can’t even use it easily. Let this be a lesson to you, bitches. Oh, and thank you for being clueless about Macs. Without your ignorance, I might never have been able to listen to the CD that I paid for.
And a special thanks to Tristan Prettyman. I think your stuff is pretty good.
1Sorry, Anaglyph.
Afishionados,
This flyer was posted to a vending machine onboard the Lincoln. Don’t see what’s wrong? Click the photo for the answer. I stand by my theory that NASCAR sucks and is not a sport.
Apologies for the fold lines. No cameras are allowed onboard the ship while in drydock, so I had to put the flyer in my pocket. It’s expired, so I doubt anyone will mind that I “borrowed” it.
