piercer of snow

Wilford School of Humanity

watched snowpiercer. has its flaws and yet i found it to be an enjoyable ride. visually stunning with some fascinating story elements, it’s a movie that i’ll be thinking about for awhile. would recommend.

i can’t read czechoslovakian

i’ve been using the internet and posting designs within its ever expanding web for quite some time. palesky.com alone has been around since before the turn of the new millennia (i can’t be sure if it actually launched in ’97 or ’98) so i’ll be the first to admit that i’ve been really lucky when it comes to web thievery. granted, most of my designs on palesky have been really unconventional and probably couldn’t be ripped template style, so over the years all i’ve really had to deal with is a stolen image or two, and during my later years of hebetude i didn’t even really care.

for the past couple of weeks i’ve been motivated more than usual, and some of that motivation spilled its way into the web which produced the latest interface you see here. like anyone, i was proud of what i had created, proudly showing its sleek lines and ideas of randomness, and although it didn’t receive the fanfare or praise of my previous designs (probably because of my inactivity and/or the changing face of web design accessibility) i was and still am proud of it nonetheless.

with pride comes a greater sense of loss.

i was going through my weekly stats when i happened to stumble upon this site. mild shock set through my system. was this for real? after years of escaping the experience of having my IP taken from, had it finally reared its ugly head? my brain immediately zoomed here and there – i thought of how i had only read jeff‘s “ripped” post a couple of days ago and thought of how i was glad i didn’t have to deal with being ripped off like some of the mentioned subjects posted in his entry.

over several days i watched as the code was gutted, its insides forcibly changed to be something different, yet undeniably the same. for awhile some of my banners and random graphics were still within the code but has since disappeared. still, within its code there can still be found major references to my site – hell, even the images are within a “palesky” directory.

my shock switched to flattery, and now to confusion. my friends ask if i’m angry, and to be honest i really am not because i’m hoping i can find a way to take back what is mine – but am unsure as how to proceed. so i’m looking to you, my friends, the design community, the web community, my family – what would you suggest? will a simple email explaining my thoughts to the perps suffice? or will an aggressive calling to arms be the only way to communicate?

fuck – i can’t even read czechoslovakian – for all i know they could be crediting me all over their site.

favicon.ico with macs

i’m going to jump right past the whole pc element involving favicons because there’s more than enough documentation in regards to that. for those of you who don’t know what i’m talking about, i’m referring to those nifty little icons that appear in the address bar of your browser right beside the URL you are currently viewing. that’s a favicon. mine should look like this:

as far as i could tell, this has always been a pain in the ass for mac users to make – i took several minutes looking over each of my current graphic applications and couldn’t find anything that would convert or save anything i made into a *.ico file. after enough looking around i discovered a program that could do it (GraphicConverter), and it only took a few seconds to convert what i had made – a 16 x 16 pixel .bmp file – into a 4-bit (16 colors) windows icon. i uploaded it to my root directory and was good to go. for the most part.

safari, my main browser of choice, would not show my new favicon for the life of me. firefox, internet explorer, camino all had no problems and showed my new bundle of joy without a hitch. it turns out that safari has a little trouble emptying the favicon cache, and simply using the “Empty Cache…” command under the safari menu won’t work. in order to get the new favicon to appear, i had to close safari and then remove the Icon folder which was located at ~/Library/Safari/Icon. you can either move it to the trash, or move it somewhere outside of the Safari directory, which might be good in case something screwy happens, but so far i’ve had no problems.

one other thing web design related: why the fuck did it take me so long to get into CSS? gawd.

latest browser conclusions

in an ongoing battle to keep my web browsing experience as pleasant as possible, i’ve come across several conclusions over the past couple of months:

internet explorer – fucking ditch it. for mac and pc. see what happens when you don’t have any competition?

firefox – without a doubt the best browser running around for the pc. it’s open source nature has made it an emerging player on the field, and it has certainly made quite a few people turn their heads. build with security in mind, it still manages to bring up web sites quickly while removing many of the annoying quicks of the internet that we have all learned to despise. with the endless expandability of extensions and themes it’s looking like firefox has a bright future. the bookmark synchronizer extension alone is worth the price of admission, especially if you use many computers.

safari – still my browser of choice for the mac, although there have many times where i’ve considered moving exclusively to firefox just because of its ability as a “customizable” browser experience. however, one major thing has prevented me from fully turning (of course there are also a few minor quibbles, but they are minor) and that is the most wonderful saft plug-in for safari. a few features off the top of my head: searchable history and bookmarks, url shortcuts, full-screen browsing, and best of all – it automatically saves and restores opened browser windows at quit and start-up, with tabs (god damn, that’s fucking hot)! for safari-heads, a must have!

what a long way we’ve come from the days of netscape navigator, mosiac and lynx.

mary stared

mary stared

mary stared at the mirror, herself staring at herself. she pondered what her future would bring, whether her golden locks would stay this vibrant forever, how far her current path would take her.

she could smell her sister dying in the next room. mary was tired of taking care of her, tired of seeing the pain. rat poison had crossed her mind several times during the past week, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

she could smell her uncle charles smoking his pipe downstairs, probably by the fireplace, staring at the burning wood in an opium induced haze. mary used to like her uncle charlie, used to like him a lot, until that night she clicked into her sisters room and saw charlie doing things that charlie shouldn’t be doing. that’s when her sister decided to stop caring, and when charlie became and charles. oh, uncle charles. rat poison had crossed mary’s mind several times during the past year, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

ten years later, mary’s sister would no longer be dying, and uncle charles no longer existed. at least not to mary, not to poor old mary. rat poison had crossed her mind several times during the past decade, and she finally brought herself to do it.