I’ve been feeling extremely worn out as of late, which is probably symptomatic of my not doing anything at all. FWIW my little shaman is coming along nicely, if a bit slower than expected; I’m trying to appreciate the artwork and storytelling and flametongue crits in my SCT. My estranged progeny seems to be doing well, too, but I’ve no idea who or what powers he serves now. Such are the consequences of giving your WoW account away to play only the best MUD ever.
Its a tough decision: keep a now-obscure culture alive, or pay for a videogame that chicks dig.
I just had the chance to tinker with Logic Pro and Mainstage — and wow. I know I keep saying this but maybe now I can go buy a MIDI keyboard and finally get my act together. GarageBand suddenly feels like those little plastic rainbow-coloured xylophones you had when you were 4, which is to say it’s totally awesome but so not a Korg.
Last Thursday I watched more TV than I have in the past two years or so put together, although it technically wasn’t TV but almost the entire first season of How I Met Your Mother. That and at least half a dozen whole movies and a few more we couldn’t endure to the end. Mind you much television is prosaic at best, vapid filler between the occasionally engaging ad, but I guess I can see where the rest of the world is coming from if I squint really hard and there’s great company. Is it elitist to think TV sucks? I need only direct you to tonight’s rerun of Living with Lydia, where the cast was doing the chicken dance in chicken suits at the wedding of an unremarkable secretary type and the king of a fictional nation that intentionally sounds like murtabak. With all due respect to the late comediene, the show is complete nonsense, and I don’t mean in a Super Mega kind of way. I can’t believe I wrote all that to namedrop Johnny Smash.
So I’m at the King Albert Park McDonald’s, and what pisses me off today is not the schoolkids making noise and pretending to study here, but the ad that QMax is injecting into all my pages. An ad for the Creative Zen, too.
But anyway what’s happening is they’re putting a CSS <link> and some Javascript right after a given page’s <head>:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://node02.ssg.qmax.com.sg/walledgarden/inject/float.css" type="text/css">
<script src="http://node02.ssg.qmax.com.sg/walledgarden/inject/inject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
and this other stuff right before the </body>:
<!-- BEGIN QMAX INJECTION -->
<div id="qmaxfooter">
<!-- the footer would go here -->
<iframe width="100%" height="30" frameborder="0" framespacing="0" scrolling="no" src="http://portal.ssg.qmax.com.sg/banner/footer.php"></iframe>
</div>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">CheckVisible();</script>
<!-- END QMAX INJECTION -->
inject.js, which contains the CheckVisible() function, looks like this:
function CheckVisible() {
var xScroll, yScroll;
if (window.innerHeight && window.scrollMaxY) {
xScroll = document.body.scrollWidth;
yScroll = window.innerHeight + window.scrollMaxY;
} else if (document.body.scrollHeight > document.body.offsetHeight){
// all but Explorer Mac
xScroll = document.body.scrollWidth;
yScroll = document.body.scrollHeight;
} else {
// Explorer Mac... also works in Explorer 6 Strict, Mozilla and Safari
xScroll = document.body.offsetWidth;
yScroll = document.body.offsetHeight;
}
if (xScroll >= 400 && yScroll >= 300) {
if(document.all) {
document.all.qmaxfooter.style.visibility = 'visible';
} else if(document.layers) {
document.qmaxfooter.visibility = 'show';
} else if(document.getElementById) {
document.getElementById('qmaxfooter').style.visibility = 'visible';
}
}
}
It’s trivial to hide the ad, of course, by adding div#qmaxfooter {display:none;} to your own CSS, but what I’d like to do really is remove the injected crap altogether.
Right, so I bought it, and it hasn’t changed my life. It is very nice to look at. But what’s funny is all the labels for type books at Borders read “Topography”, and I couldn’t guess if they were tired of hearing about it or nobody had ever noticed.
I chanced upon a curious chord progression two or three Sundays ago and have been trying to form something coherent around it. The first time I played that Cm that lead into the A♭7 on a synth organ I was just trying to emulate various spooky organ themes. Then I hit the Cm to F and I could only think of one thing and it was Batman. I decided to try a more delicate synth and added a second progression (E♭ F Gsus4 G) and well here it is. With a generic entrance by the drum and bass tacked on the end. I need to take all these bits and pieces and loops and phrases and put them together one day, but GarageBand really isn’t designed for multiple time signatures.
On Saturday we finally got around to celebrating me and C’s birthdays and the Earl Grey ice cream at Canele is delicious and I don’t even like Earl Grey much.
Hi my name is Justin.
School started (again) today. It was good but I had to get up at five-thirty so that’s like a B minus, tops. How do you like that, school?
What to say, what
I am now twenty years and eight days old, assuming I was born before six in the evening. Not much has changed since the big two-oh. I bought four gigs of RAM with some ang pao money and my early-model MacBook has a limit of two. Way to go, Justin. I could have bought Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. The The Elements of Typographic Style. Instead I have to settle, in the meantime, for this excellent guide to the application of the Style to the web.
Over a very short four Sundays (or was it three, or five) I’ve taught a small class everything I think I know about music theory under the guise of “guitar lessons”. Which was depressingly little when I put it down on paper. There were so many things I couldn’t explain and I can only hope they discover everything themselves and internalise them and then go out and kick ass, because so many people don’t. People who are awarded eighth grade by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Freakin’ Music and couldn’t tell you which accidentals go in the key of A♭ while tapping their right knee with their left pinky. CAN YOU??
But anyway if there’s one thing I’ve enjoyed teaching in my life it’s theory, because math + music = good times. This is something T-Rex might say, in the event that he hasn’t said it yet.
This is an apple I found in the gents at block 56 in school today. I mean it was just sitting there expectantly, as if someone might’ve temporarily forgotten it and would come back for it later, so that it could fulfil its lifelong ambition of being eaten.