Branko’s Weblog

Taken at the Louis Braillelaan in Zoetermeer, the World Trade Center in Amsterdam, and on the Amstelveenseweg in Amsterdam respectively.

Doing science fiction is very like doing farce, in one area only: it’s real people in an unreal situation. [...] If they’re real people, then it works.

- Gareth Thomas

Ah, welcome to the virtual home of a lunatic.

Today there is a common cold on the menu, like yesterday, and similar time-units before. Rather fuzzy in the head, I am.

So now I am condemned to the hell of daytime television.

Have you ever noticed how some interviewees respond to their interviewers as if they are explaining things to literal retards? I always assumed there is just this type of interviewee, you know, who explains anything to anyone this way, slowly, deliberate, and not to afraid to pronounce and then answer every hidden assumption.

But with retards doing the interviews, it is hard to say what is going on these days.

Today I felt a little fitter than yesterday. This renewed vigour, I felt, was proven by the fact that yesterday I preheated the oven, but had forgotten to put the buns in. Whereas today… and then doubt started to creep in. I checked the kitchen. Suffice it to say that unlike yesterday, today I had preheated the oven, taken the buns out of the fridge, and then … I just walked away.

Am I the only one who, when cleaning the kitchen floor, lavishes about four times more attention upon the white tiles than the black?

I am going to try and come up with a couple of achievable, yet challenging New Year’s resolutions. In fact, that will be the first one.

In the meantime I wish you a good 2010.

Lovely little funky Christmas tune by Laura Vane and the Vipertones:

He was a very good bullshitter, by which he meant a very bad one.

They say that where Firefox really shines is its ability to extend its functionality through plug-ins. It is not why I use that web browser the most. Below are the plug-ins I use:

- British English Dictionary, Woordenboek Nederlands. Because if left to my own devices, I would call the first plug-in “Brittish English Dictionary.”

- DownloadHelper. I finally decided I wanted to save a Youtube video to my hard disk, and this plug-in lets you do exactly that. Add an encoder, and you extract the MP3 from a music video. Works with every site that has embedded videos, not just Youtube. Seems to have gotten pretty popular, because now that I know what they are there for I see the familiar coloured balls on many computers I come across.

- Exif Viewer lets you see the data that photo cameras and photographers add to online photos, such as exposure, copyright information, and so on. Handy to find out with which brand camera a picture was taken, or if a journalist lies about when a photo was taken. It is possible for photographers to remove that sort of information, but so far most people seem to leave it in.

- Leet Key decodes (and encodes) text from (and to) ROT13, which is sort of a standard way for posting spoilers. That is to say, if you want to write about a movie, but do not wish to spoil plot details for those who haven’t seen it yet, you can opt to encode the spoiler text with ROT13. This method is very little used on the internet, but does seem to have some kind of following, so this plug-in comes in handy every few months or so.

Leet Key encodes and decodes between many more formats, but even though a format like Base64 is popular, you will hardly ever find it on the World Wide Web. Base64 is what is used by e-mail to transport photos and other files over networks, even though the user typically doesn’t get to see the encoding that is used.

- FEBE is a back-up tool for Firefox. I use it mainly to make sure that a fresh Firefox installation on another computer still has all my bookmarks and plug-ins. It is said to be buggy, but the one time I used it, it caused no problems, so maybe they got the bugs out.

Of the plug-ins (or extensions as the Firefox community calls them) mentioned above, I use the dictionaries almost every day, and the Exif viewer regularly.

I also a bunch of the many Firefox plug-ins for web developers (I work as a freelance web developer). These days I would be slowed down considerably if I had to make my money without them. But I won’t bore you with those—as they are business related—except to quickly mention their names: Web Developer, Firebug, Javascript Debugger, Tamper Data, Dom Inspector.

Are there any must-have plug-ins I missed?

I just downloaded the fourth season of Battlestar Galactica from the internet video recorder, and something I noticed while spot checking the files was that they changed the text overlay of the trailer.

In the previous seasons you would get a quick recap of the back story, A-Team style, so that even if you weren’t a fan of the series you would be up to speed before you even started watching.

The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. [picture of robot firing his gun-hand here] They evolved. [woman coming out of her peptide bath] There are many copies. And they have a plan.

With the fourth season a new introductory text was chosen:

Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in secret. One will be revealed.

That text assumes two things: one, that you already know the back story (not such a strange assumption), and two, that you care about who the Cylon models are. Without having seen a single frame of season four the series is already trying to tell me what it is going to be about. And I do not know if I care.

The producers of the A-Team also changed the intro, in the fifth series, but in that altered trailer they did not change the promise of its makers to the viewers (namely: Shichinin no Samurai set in the US). Battlestar Galactica seems to be saying it has changed into Lost, a series that has so far failed to hold my attention for longer than it takes to press Next on the remote control.

What is more, if BG really is going to cater for its current viewer base (not to mention only that part of the base that is most interested in the mystery behind the Cylons), there is also a hint of lowering standards. After all, why make the effort when you are not trying to woo anyone any more.

I am afraid, I am very afraid.