Month: May 2012

Today’s funny spam is a credit report:

I mean, here’s this guy just surfing the web or checking email, and his wife (maybe– she’s wearing about six rings) comes up behind him and starts pawing him. She whispers little sweet nothings into his ear: What’s YOUR Score?

This is just begging for someone to caption it.

Apparently the spammer sending me a LinkedIn invitation is in the “jeff” section of his mailing list.

I have mixed feelings about the new office.

Upside: Shower after ultimate.
Downside: The commute to the ultimate field will no longer be 90 seconds.

Of course one of the motivations for moving into our current office is its proximity to the ultimate field. This time around, the new office had a different set of priorities. I guess you can’t win ’em all.

I was working late this evening, as usual, and when I finished up I was poking around the internet a bit. I found a site I’d bookmarked long ago and checked to see if it was still there. Sure enough. It has hundreds of old Apple II games… the games that were on 5.25″ floppy disks. Classics that I played as a kid, like Lode Runner, Taipan, Night Mission Pinball, and of course Thom’s favorite, Black Magic.

I downloaded the disk images and the emulator necessary to run it. Reading some documentation, it seems like the emulator has even been ported to iOS so you can run these classic games on your iPhone or iPad. Since I have neither, I had to figure out how to run it under Linux. There’s a Windows version of the emulator, and of course it’s possible to run (some) Windows programs on a Linux system using Wine.

Off I went. I downloaded the latest source code for Wine and compiled it, then installed it on my desktop. The games sort of worked– Lode Runner came up in all it’s two-color glory, but the keyboard wasn’t working quite right. And yes, I actually still remember the keys to move the guy in Lode Runner!

I wondered if maybe Wine was the problem, so I looked for some old Windows programs to see if I could run them. I chuckled when I found an old copy of Netscape 4.8. I have newer versions, of course, but it seems like testing something from the mid-90’s would be a great idea. I ran the installer and voila! there it was: Netscape 4.8, running beautifully on my KDE Linux desktop.

Just for kicks I went to this blog site. Wow, it works!

The font styling leaves something to be desired (I think this version of Netscape was before CSS really existed) but hey, it’s not too shabby. It probably helps that I wrote the code for this blog a long time ago and it’s not using a lot of the CSS tricks that “modern” sites use.

It’s funny to remember those fond days of using Netscape Mail. Now if I can figure out what’s going on with the Apple II emulator, I can remember the even fonder days of Lode Runner…

I was looking at a web site this evening, and noticed some text on the page was blinking. Strange. No one does that any more… not since about 1994. But out of morbid curiosity I checked the HTML source:

Wow. The fabled blink tag. The one web programmers mock. I didn’t know it was even supported in modern browsers! Amazing.

So I’m looking online for a nice big conference table for the new office. I found something that looked promising but when I clicked the link to see it…

So it’s not available– which is kind of annoying but oh well– and the site’s other recommended items I “may be interested in” include hubcaps and SUV window pillars.

Uhh…

Alex was in the kitchen tonight with Laralee. He mentioned to her that the shampoo bottle in his shower was empty, and there wasn’t any more under the bathroom sink. She shrugged and said he could just use Kyra’s shampoo for a few days.

He was aghast. “But then my hair will smell like gummi bears!“

Well, Zing is certainly evolving.

About a year ago, there were three of us. Now there are seven, and I’m considering an eighth. We’re about to move into a sweet new office. Our client list continues to grow. Somehow we all continue to be busy.

It’s been an interesting ride over the past year. The dynamics of the team have changed quite a bit, for everything from playing foosball to going out to lunch together. Right now we’re all squeezed into an office that’s comfortable for four but most certainly cramped for seven. I think all of us are excited to get a bigger space where almost all of us (except the New Guys) will have private offices. It’ll be fun to see what happens with that, and how much more changes over the course of the year.

Onward and upward!