I’m sure most people in Greenville will hate me for this (BTW, I just misspelled that town name - in an unusual irony, it came out as “GreenVILE”) but I just saw a great sunset…from the water’s edge at Clearwater Beach on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico. Fine white sand, a nice pleasant breeze, not too salty but definitely more robust than an inland breeze…it’s great. We’re singing at Hillsdale Baptist Church in Tampa Sunday morning and afternoon, but who could miss hitting the beach for the day before singing on Sunday?
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I just wrapped up watching an episode of the BBC drama Spooks (or MI-5 if you prefer the American designation, since apparently the original name of the show is a racial slur in parts of this country). It’s a bit of a cross between 24, your favorite flavor of CSI, and any number of James Bond ideas - a show about Britain’s national intelligence service (as opposed to the international version, MI-6…I think). Anyway, being a wholly British creation, and given Britain’s close ties to their cousins on the other side of the pond, American-based subplots will occasionally enter into the mix. One episode featured a nutcase from Florida - the actress was very likely British trying to affect an American southern accent. Another featured a rogue CIA agent creating havoc in the country - mostly fine except for the time his New York accent gave way to some variety of British vowels here and there. I imagine our overseas friends find Americans putting on British accents as funny as I found British folk putting on various American accents.
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Launching hamsters: meh.
Launching hamsters to Die Valkerie: radness.

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/action/knd/hamsters/ - doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, probably because they used some proprietary IE method of rendering flash objects. I’ll forgive them that fault because this is so stupidly addictive. What kind of combined distance can you get?

Saw this just now on the weather map:

Watch - cute little red blob though it is now, it’ll probably land right over my apartment.

Some Friday afternoons are frantic - trying to get things done before the day ends. Others are…um…not. I’ll leave it as an exercise in imaginative thinking to decide which today fell under, for me at least. It led me back to a stray thought that’s been banging around my head for a while. I shall start my discourse in true mathematician style:
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Word to the wise programmers out there - this will be a rehash of a lesson you undoubtedly learned long ago. Bear with a n00b, though.

Mozilla recently released Firefox 2.0.0.4 (get it here). That meant that one of my priorities as soon as I got to work the next day was to repackage the installer so we could install it on campus with all of our options pre-set. This includes things like proxy server configuration, extensions, and pre-set options. It’s not hard: when you run the installer, you’ll find a new folder in your temp directory (Start | Run… | %temp%) with three subfolders and two files. Simply copy those folders and files out somewhere else and you’ve got the source for the installer. (Huzzahs for open source!) In a slightly related trick, you can package it the same way Mozilla did - use 7-zip and the copy /b command to create a self-extracting executable that runs a program as soon as it unzips. (Instructions available but not posted - comment if you really want to know.) You can tweak a number of preferences files (most ending in .js; some in .rdf) so that options are set the way you want when it installs. You can add or delete files. You can even set up default profiles to be used as templates whenever someone logs in for the first time…all in the installer. I found this out a while ago and have been repackaging the installer so that it transparently installs my options and extensions. Pretty nifty.
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