Miss Jackson's Weblog

I wish somebody, somewhere, could tell Bank Independent of Sheffield, Alabama, that the certificate for the secure portion of their site has expired. There is nothing on the site to indicate who is responsible for it (they're probably in hiding). I have to click past a warning from helpful little Safari every time I want to check my bank balance. Maybe I should change to a bank with a better site and less ugly checks. :-\

The TV version of Airplane! has several scenes that were originally cut from the theatrical version (and are therefore also missing from the home video version), presumably to make up for the loss of such as the "Cocaine Lady" gag [I wonder how many people have watched the movie on TV, sat through the credits, and then wondered "What 'Cocaine Lady'?"]. These include a silly "Hi, Jack!"/hijack gag, extended dialog between the two child passengers, Kramer and McCroskey drinking too much water at a water cooler, and this bit of dialog between Elaine and Ted in the cockpit. -----

One of my all-time favorite movies is the classic parody Airplane!. I was able to buy the DVD recently at Wal-Mart for a whoppinig $8.88 plus tax. I've watched the DVD several times since then (it seems like every time the movie airs on TV, I always tune in late and miss the beginning). I recently spent an entire Sunday recording the DVD as a MPEG (using the USB version of EyeTV) and taking 111 screen captures of a single character. I am appropriately ashamed of this obsession, so I will not be uploading those pics to the World Wide Web. However, I also made some very nice MP3s of four of my favorite quotes from the film. I'm sure you can find these elsewhere, but not perhaps taken directly from the DVD:

• "Surely you can't be serious..."
• "I'm doing everything I can..."
• "It looks like a big Tylenol"
• Kramer's soliloquy at the end

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After a lengthy delay due to my mother's back surgery and three weeks in rehab, the review for "The Mark of Gideon" is finally ready. I'm not sure why I chose this episode as my next to be reviewed, except that I had some good screen captures of the show. The review was typed up using Vim 6.3 and the HTML.vim plugin, and the video captures were organized using one of the most oddly-named programs ever: Photosite Timesaviour. [Every time I watch "Gideon", I keep thinking of the early 1980s song by Utopia, "Bad Little Actress." :-\ ] -----

While looking for some old desktop pictures, I came across these two screen snaps from my Mac OS 9 days. The first is a screen shot of Napster from the "good old days" (ah, remember those?) [By the time an official Napster client was released for the Mac, Napster was on its way out. This is, however, a shot of the official client, although all Napster did was take a 3rd-party client and change the name from Macster to Napster, plus change the interface appearance slightly.] The second is a rare, rare instance of my connecting to the Internet at 52000. The screen shot is from FreePPP (an old dialer for Macs) and the modem was not an Apple Internal--it was a Teleport USB external modem (pity they don't work with OS X). The speedy session didn't last long: my iMac froze up about 15 minutes later and had to be force-restarted via straightened paper clip. :-\ -----

I have six GMail invitations just waiting for a good home; e-mail me at m5comp AT mac DOT com if you'd like one. -----

One of the new features of the latest incarnation of the venerable Netscape web browser is yet another toolbar, called, oddly enough, the Netscape Toolbar. It is actually useful to some extent (easy access to "clear history" button and a number-of-pop-ups-blocked indicator). For some reason, this toolbar is present by default only in the Windows version of Netscape. Mac users can enjoy this latest innovation, too: download these two files (or click these links while running Netscape):

http://ftp24c.newaol.com/pub/netscape7/english/7.2/windows/win32/bfkprv/jslib_current_lite.xpi
http://ftp24c.newaol.com/pub/netscape7/english/7.2/windows/win32/bfkprv/netscapetoolbar_current.xpi

Open these two files from within Netscape, restart the browser, and marvel at your new toolbar. ;-)

(For more toolbar hacks, see http://home.att.net/~cherokee67/ns72TBhack.html.) -----

You'd think that webmasters would realize after a period of time that it is not a good idea to put exclamation points (!) in file names. I don't want to mention the site involved (a fan site for one of my favorite actors), but I would imagine that the webmaster of a site that has been in existence since 1998 would have learned that by now. I thought that putting quotes around the URL would take care of any special characters when I tried to download a video clip from this site using wget in OS X's Terminal application. No dice; it still needed to be escaped with a backslash. Next time I'll be prepared--the URL character encoding for "!" is "%21". -----

OK, here I am, a good little Vim advocate, and, after myriad bad experiences with Pan, what do I end up using for a newsreader? Gnus. Yes, in my desperate attempt to find a stable, free newsreader that works with Giganews, it has come to that. So far, it is working as well as can be expected (it's a miracle that it is working at all), but I don't understand why it takes 5 keystrokes just to mark a group read (shift-m control-c c). :-\

Update: OK, now I realize it just takes 2 keystrokes to mark a group read (shift-c). -----

Well, here it is--my brand new blog, using a new type of blogging software. Hopefully this blog won't get blown to bits by another hard drive catastrophe. -----