July 31, 2004
This "Random thoughts" page doesn't get many
page views, so I decided to start a real blog at
mredkj.blogspot.com.
It has the option for anyone to respond to my posts,
so I hope to be able to discuss meta information about mredkj.com.
If I start getting spammed, I'll have to limit the blog comments
to only registered users.
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June 27, 2004
All of a sudden I have the desire to get a
Gmail account.
Anybody out there have an invite I can have?
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January 19, 2004
I don't know half of what there is to know about iTunes.
I now realize why Apple didn't include bookmarks.
They have a shopping cart,
which is functionally exactly what I wanted.
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January 18, 2004
I've been buying music from the
iTunes Music Store.
It's great, but could use a bookmark option.
In version 4.2.0.72, I have found no such feature.
I read somewhere else
that you can drag the song preview link to your desktop.
That's good, but wouldn't it be nice to have a list in iTunes
that one could drop a link, then later
use to purchase multiple items at once.
It would be smart for Apple, because even though
they aggregate purchases
for a day to cut down on transaction costs,
it's not cost effective to them if you only buy one song in a day.
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October-15-2003
Pulchritude
is such an ugly word.
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October-13-2003
I got some new toothpaste:
Whitening Expressions Cinnamon Rush.
It's like brushing with
Big Red.
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August-06-2003
I thought I was clever in devising a new amalgam of the words
spam and
IM.
It seems obvious to call it
spim.
Too obvious, because I'm
not the first.
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July-05-2003
arc ump Annie knead stucco muppet sum'ry lake who'll I'd ears
(read it fo net ick uh lee)
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May-12-2003
Work on my JavaScript code? Lazy.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. -Mark Twain
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April-12-2003
Blessed with anger, burdened with pain.
Buried in water, stuck in the rain.
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January-18-2003
The engulfment
of CDNOW by Amazon is one of the most pointless
teamings
ever created.
Essentially, the once great CDNOW has turned into a facade for Amazon.
CDNOW was simple to navigate and search,
and the artist groupings made it easy to find all cds that were available.
There's just something about Amazon's interface that screams chaos.
The album listings for an artist are in a search result format,
which makes finding a cd a chore.
If that wasn't bad enough, Amazon's song samples are limited to RealAudio,
whereas CDNOW used to have a few choices, including MP3s.
I don't even want to get into the reasons I despise RealPlayer,
but the big
online
merchants
have decided to embrace it.
My quest is to find another online music store
that reminds me of the old CDNOW.
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January-04-2003
After redesigning the main page as a site map,
I've realized there's not much here at MREDKJ.
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July-19-2002
In my July-18-2002 random thought, I referred to several companies.
To figure out who owns who, the following list shows related companies
with links to profiles at
Hoovers.com.
For each line, the first company (from left-to-right) is the parent,
and the others are partly- or wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Fox
and
NBC
own subsidiaries and are owned by parent companies
that aren't mentioned in my previous rambling,
so they don't make the list. (Well, MSNBC is partly NBC's, but it's already in the list next to Microsoft,
so good enough.)
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July-18-2002
What's going on with
subdomains
these days?
Case in point,
msn.espn.go.com.
<sarcasm>Are there enough
dots
in there?
ESPN should throw in a few more prefixes.</sarcasm>
And another thing. Microsoft already has
partnered with NBC,
and now the Redmond company is buddies with ABC. That somehow seems like a conflict of interests.
But speaking of
buddies,
looks like rival AOL should play the concatenation game
(and not in its accounting department).
It already
uses content
from SportsLine.com, so why not join the latest craze of adding subdomains?
My suggestion would be aol.sportsline.excite.com. Nah.
An honorable mention goes to Turner Broadcasting's CNN, with the long subdomain
sportsillustrated.cnn.com.
Yet, it's still missing something. Maybe put a tech company in there somewhere, like
sportsillustrated.cnn.excite.com.
Then there's Fox, who doesn't want to be left out, so it has
foxsports.lycos.com.
It needs another ISP in addition to the top level domain from
Terra Lycos.
Hmmm,
Earthlink
are you listening?
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June-13-2002
The Random Thoughts page hits the one year mark.
To celebrate, here's an extra long rambling...
When listening to certain classic rock songs,
I start reminiscing about old SNES games.
That's because it seems the video games borrowed a few notes here and there.
The first suspect is Final Fantasy III (U.S. release).
The rock song is Love Me Two Times by
The Doors,
which in my distant memory has sounded like the harpsichord-like theme song from the town of Zozo.
Upon closer inspection, The Doors' song has some guitar riffs and keyboards that sound vaguely similar,
but overall it's not a match.
The next game is Zelda: A Link to the Past.
The rock song is Deserted Cities of the Heart by
Cream,
which has a symphonic transition at 1:00 and 2:35.
In Zelda, the Dark World main theme has some similarities,
but once again, it is not a match.
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June-11-2002
Putting up a
JavaScript calendar
at MREDKJ seemed like a good idea.
After all, I wrote preliminary version of the script in 2000.
But, little did I know that the Internet was overflowing with
JavaScript calendars.
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June-02-2002
I need to change the batteries once every few months in my
cordless mouse,
but even that is too much.
Are there any cordless mice with a built-in rechargeable battery
that could dock into a power supply when not in use?
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May-09-2002
While waiting around for pages to load, I was reminded of the song
"What Happended To My Radio" by Buck-O-Nine.
My ISP can be considered the D.J.,
and the HTTP request can be the song request.
i've been waiting more than an hour
for the request that i just made
"we'll see what we can do about it"
must mean they're gonna throw it away
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February-22-2002
After watching Fox's
Glutton Bowl,
I thought champion
Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi
looked vaguely familiar. Or at least his eating habits.
There was a peculiar music video a few years ago, in which a man was eating a variety of food,
but the footage was shown backwards. Turns out this video is God Lives Underwater's
From Your Mouth.
And the man featured in the video "regurgitating" his food is former eating champion
Hirofumi Nakajima,
who is known as one of the
world's greatest eaters.
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February-01-2002
Random thoughts are returning to other pages in the form of Quick Thoughts,
which are archived in the right hand column of this page.
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January-10-2002
A double dose of fine art quandaries.
How many versions did Monet paint of
Le Jardin A Giverny?
Is there any significance to the interlude in Beethoven's
Violin Concerto?
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January-09-2002
Periodically, I'll ponder what would happen if MREDKJ got linked from a popular web site
and couldn't handle the traffic.
It's often called the
Slashdot Effect.
Luckily for my web host, MREDKJ doesn't have anything that link-worthy.
Unluckily for me, my web host tends to be stressed from normal traffic.
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January-04-2002
Lately I haven't had time to create or modify JavaScripts, write tutorials, find running links,
or otherwise update my parts of MREDKJ. But I do have time for random thoughts.
There is a commercial for Cartoon Network
that includes several classic cartoons looking for a parking space.
Fred Flintstone is driving his car with Speed Racer in the passenger side.
I am curious who the character in the back seat is.
He makes a comment about Papa Smurf being corrupt with power.
I think it is King Zandor from The Herculoids,
since Cartoon Network sometimes airs that show.
My second choice would be Thundarr the Barbarian.
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January-03-2002
Random Thoughts are resuming, although the other pages'
Random Thoughts section will still include the U.S. Flag image.
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September 11, 2001
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August-29-2001
Ask Jeeves owns Direct Hit search technology.
We know that MREDKJ.com is not an exceedingly popular web site,
but when did a search for mredkj
at Direct Hit start returning another site
before us? Does Ask Jeeves do anything right?
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August-08-2001
Star Wars: Episode II Killer Clones From Outer Space
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July-14-2001
What do you call a question that goes unanswered?
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July-12-2001
Let's say you're driving down the center of a three-lane highway,
and let your mind wander.
If you notice you're going slowly after another driver tries to pass,
now is not the time to get back up to speed.
Let the other person get by.
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30-June-2001
Junkyard Wars
is a better show than
Battlebots.
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28-June-2001
MREDKJ.com receives feedback/e-mail occasionally, usually with a comment, as opposed to a question.
Don't know what the
etiquette
is for webmasters, but we rarely respond to a comment-only message.
So, this installment of random thoughts is a thank you to everyone who has written us.
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24-June-2001
If a web server
indicates a
NullPointerException
has been thrown, it may be the real problem is convoluted.
Don't believe all runtime error messages when the CLASSPATH is involved.
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18-June-2001
In the 1920s,
Zworykin's iconoscope
(early television) was one square inch.
Computer technology today
allows us to stream video in a little, grainy, one frame per second, buffered window.
How far we've come.
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13-June-2001
a new found glory
sounds a lot like
harvey danger
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