Finally got the new Internet connection all hooked up. Definitely a lot nicer than the old satellite connection, but I’m kind of iffy about having Comcast as an ISP. Their strange stances on things like peer-to-peer and net neutrality make me worry. They may say on their website that they don’t throttle BitTorrent traffic (there are legitimate uses for it, you know), but I don’t really trust them.
Anyways, everything is going swimmingly with that, so I’m happy for now. So happy that I can’t get properly incensed about the topic I was planning to rant about, which makes this a bit of a useless post. Ah well.
Unlike Bagel over at RationReality, my blog absence isn’t the result of sickness and depression, but of a rather sinister combination of finals, moving, and lack of an Internet connection. That last bit may cause some people to call me a liar and accuse me of avoiding my blog because I’m in a creative slump and couldn’t come up with a blog post if I was being held hostage in front of a computer and told that for every minute I stalled an innocent kitten would be denied fame on ICHC. Those people are wrong. In reality, I’m leeching wireless off of some poor schlob who couldn’t be bothered to change the default name of their wireless network, much less put a password on it. It’s a poor connection, and I’m busy with packing and moving, so I’m only connecting for long enough to post this and browse through Reddit for some laughs.
I suppose it’d be useful to explain why I don’t have an Internet connection. My family is in the process of moving into a house closer to town (okay, in town). Unfortunately, utilities like television, phone, and Internet service aren’t due to be hooked up until the 20th. Until then, I’ll be spending my time watching Farscape on my laptop and playing Mass Effect. Well, during the time that isn’t spent packing up my entire life and moving it to a smaller house. Fun.
And the month isn’t even half over. In about a week, I’ll be starting my summer job with the county (working for Parks and Rec). Exciting, huh? Yeah, not really. I’m going to be one busy guy, but I’ll be sure to make time for a rant every so often. After all, this isn’t the Mad Silence of a Raving Genius, is it?
This is my life philosophy.
Every year, I tell myself that I’m going to make an awesome April Fools’ version of my blog, and every year I forget about it until the last minute. I remember one year, I was planning on putting sponsors all over my website. That was a long time ago, and in retrospect, it’s a lame idea. A lot of April Fools’ ideas are pretty lame, but I guess it mainly depends on how you view April 1st. For instance, I find it mildly funny that xkcd points you to Questionable Content, while Questionable Content links to Dinosaur Comics, and Dinosaur Comics links back to xkcd. I also find it funny that the Telegraph reported on flying penguins, and Google and Virgin teamed up to establish a colony on Mars (complete with a questionnaire).
Even better is YouTube RickRolling everyone who clicked on a featured video on the front page (on a related note, GameFAQs has a RickRoll poll on the front page), or College Humor getting bought by some MySpace diva. (Unfortunately, they took that down before I was able to get a screenshot and Google’s cached version is just a few hours off.)
As with every April Fools’ Day, there’s going to be funny stuff, not-so-funny stuff, and stuff that’s just weird. And then there’s stuff like Dextre the Magnificent. Actually, that did make me laugh. In a nerdy sort of way. You know, with the snort and requisite pushing up of the glasses.
The Firefox web browser is well-known for its memory leak problems. If you leave it open for a long enough time, it can take up as much as 200 MB of memory, even if you’re not actively using it. As an experiment, I opened up both Firefox and Internet Explorer and looked at the memory consumption of both when they had been open for a very short amount of time. The results are fairly interesting. Firefox was taking up almost five times as much RAM as Internet Explorer. And considering that Firefox was taking up more than 100 MB during my browsing session a short while earlier, it’s not inconceivable that the ratio would have gone up over time. Here’s the screenshot:
Granted, I may have a few extensions enabled on Firefox that IE doesn’t have, but that doesn’t help the memory leak problem. Or the incredibly slow startup time. Get working on this, Mozilla! Or I may be forced to switch to Opera.
