The Kingdom of Philtopia

I have a Garfield calender on my desk cause I like Garfield however I have an issue with newer Garfield.

It is 90% about Jon not being able to date

What happened? Garfield used to be about hating Monday, Sending Nermal away, Punting Odie, Watching TV, Smoking, Drinking Coffee, Pranks, Lazyness, Eating, Fighting neighborhood dogs, Getting stuck in trees, Ferns, Scratching furniture…

Over 30 years of Garfield maybe that is all they can come up with now. If that is all that is left maybe Garfield should retire.

If you listen to Adobe then half of the internet runs on flash and you are crippled without it,

If you listen to Apple then all the important websites offer a flash alternative

I’m really tired of hearing about it.

Adobe: I have a blackberry which has a pretty shitty browser and I get around just fine without any fancy plugins. Oh..and Youtube works just fine.
Apple: I have a blackberry and not an iPhone and it renders pages rather decently without being in any bandwidth heavy data plans.

My two cents:
Flash is a CPU chewing piece of shit
Apple is a controlling son of a bitch

That is all.

Anyone remember when April fools day used to be about subtly fooling someone and getting a good laugh?

I sure as fuck don’t because I’m being bombarded by an internet full of obvious crap!!

Every web admin on the planet all of a sudden thinks they are hillllarriious (you are not) and replaces their once almost useful knowledge with the most random and unusual junk thinking they are king shit of April (once again you are not)

Now, not everyone out there is a piece of shit, some places are being clever and a few times I have had to look at the date of the article and go “Ah you sneaky little shit, you got me” but that is pretty rare these days and the sea of terrible and obvious is just getting deeper every year.

Is it April 2nd yet so the internet can move on?

Every fast food joint these days has some burger they are calling a steak burger and I must say, that’s bull shit. At the very best they have a higher grade hamburger and not a steak burger as they claim.

Here is what a hamburger is:

• They take the extra parts of a cow and grind it up and put it a package
• Someone else or some machine forms it into patty shape
• Some punk kid cooks it up
• you eat it

Here is what a “Steak” burger is:

• They take a specific part of a cow, but probably a shitty cow that wasn’t good enough for your BBQ and grind that part up and put it in a package
• Someone else or some machine form it into patty shape but a slightly bigger one cause it’s apparently a fuckin steak!
• Some punk kid cooks it up for you and another one charges you $3 extra cause it’s apparently fuckin steak!
• You eat it cause you have to now.

So, one step gets slightly modified but really it is still a hamburger to me just one that costs to damn much!

If I ordered a steak burger I’d expect someone to ask me how I’d like it done and then I would expect a piece of an NY strip between two buns not an over priced hamburger.

Here is what is great about steak:

• They’re huge!
• They’re juicy!
• They can bleed a bit when you eat it and not kill you!
• They usually come with great things like corn or beer!
• The dog can chew on the remains so it is a multi purpose purchase!

Here are the shitty things about a steak burger:

• Eat one that’s pink or slightly bloody, I dare you and then talk to me in a week and let me know how you feel.
• Cooked to health standards they’re shit and dry
• Being thicker than regular burgers just magnifies the dryness
• They usually come with “fries” and “Ice water cola”
• They are cooked by some punk kid that hates you
• They cost about half as much as a steak but in reality it would be way more enjoyable to pony up the extra 5 bucks and eat a real steak!

Steak season is upon us people so don’t waste your time on these wannabe steak burgers and fire up the grill.

This has been popping up more often these days in advertising campaigns and I find it irritating because the companies touting this are always shit and their product or service is shit and they are just trying to bait you.

Why Pay more? Well lets see….

• Better service
• Better product
• Better staff
• Better quality
• Better satisfaction

So take the money your company invested in that poor advertisement and get a clue.

Of Mobile Facebook.

It has now been a week since mobile Facebook broke comments on Notes and there seems to be no fix in sight. I check every day and every day I see December 31st 1969 and blank spaces where comments once were. Today standard Facebook imported my blog post below but I noticed that it did not appear in mobile. I am hoping this is just an overlooked glitch and not a trend towards discontinuing the mobile sites. I have been posting bug reports semi daily to Facebook with no response and today I complained on their blog that was going on about how much their Mobile sites rock.

Why do I care?

A couple reasons, number one is that mobile Facebook gets you all the same info regular Facebook does while the mobile app on my blackberry just gives status updates, comments and messages so when I need something specific like an event location, read note comments or access to groups mobile Facebook is the better choice on the go.

Secondly, I have a plugin Facebook CommentsTNG which takes comments from imported Facebook blog posts and puts them back into their home WordPress blog. Myself and about 1000 other people use this plugin to keep our social worlds connected and since this breakage it does not function.

To conclude, you can see if you have this problem as well (some don’t it seems but most do) by logging into mobile Facebook and clicking notes at the bottom, pick any notes with comments and see if they are blank with the wrong dates. If they are I have provided some links for you to help the cause below.

Helpful links:
File bug report here
Comment on the Mobile Facebook blog here

Together maybe this can be fixed. Thank you.

Think back to 1995 and the birth of one of the greatest real time strategies of all time, Command & Conquer. Back in those days the game was DOS based and the units were larger than life with a dual disc story to tell the tales of both factions. This game along with Command and Conquer Red alert are still my favorite games of the RTS genre to this date but time has not been kind to their multiplayer aspects. When Windows XP came along all of a sudden both games became un runable due to their dependance on kernel level IPX support. This left the game unrunnable until a patch that disables multiplayer was released isolating the game forever except on Westwoods system which was limited to 1v1.

But wait there’s more.

EA since it has announced the new C&C has been slowly releasing all the old classics as freeware. Currently that list includes C&C, C&C red alert and C&C: Tiberian Sun. For me this doesn’t matter because I bought the first decade special edition with C&C 3 two years go but this does mean that any fan patches and bundles made are now legit for distrobution which is the point I am slowly getting to.

Player made Patch 1.06

This patch improves the games resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768 which everything still looks pretty good in but the better part is that the IPX networking has been converted to UDP. That’s right, LAN play is back with a vengeance and with the CnCnet tool you can play up to 6 player matches over the internet. The people responsible for this patch have also been kind enough to provide a 99meg game package with their patch that is fully playable minus videos so join me in reliving a classic.

Related links:
Freeware Command and Conquer site
CnC 1.06 patch and bundles
CnCnet tool for internet play

Good : Team Canada with our humble Sid the Kid

Evil: Ovechkin (I have nothing against the rest of Russia)

Last night was Canada’s Triumph, no, Hockey’s triumph over a cocky bastard of a hockey player and our revenge as a nation for what happened 4 years ago in the same match up. Go Canada!

Enjoy the trip home Ovechkin.

A brief photo summary of my daily adventure.

6:30am Sue drives me to the train station

6:40am GO Bus to Burlington!

8:00am Burlington Go station

8:14 am Route 8, Harvester East

8:45am Work!

5:41 pm Route 8 North Service road

6:00pm Burlington Go station ticket booths

7:45pm Niagara Falls bus terminal

8:15pm Jubilee route leaving Main st

8:20pm: The end.

Right now I am watching a high def stream of the USA China Womens hockey game and I have it streaming onto my 40 inch TV. I could watch it on cable of course but I don’t have an HD cable box yet and that isn’t the point I am getting at. These are the most online integrated Olympics to date, on the CTV site there is a Facebook connect link, I can share this feed to Facebook, twitter, google, etc. It’s quite exciting to be able to follow hockey on the one computer, skating on another and follow another sport on the TV. I feel a back in my day coming on so I’ll wrap up here.

I am pretty certain I am going to blow my Cogeco bandwidth cap this month with all this streaming as it is running at 500 kilobytes a second right now oh well, worth it.