A few years ago, I wrote the following: In other news, your One and Only Favorite Friendly Neighborhood MonT-SteR™ is, well, fat. Portly. Obese. Rotund. Corpulent. Some of you who actually see me on
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…but HECK no. Witness a frustrating display of unwarranted brag and bounce: The MonT-SteR’s response: State Sen. Lambert, with all due respect, we’ve only had one primary, which was
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Dear Pastor Jones, I can appreciate your concern for the falsity of Islam. As John Piper notes, bad theology dishonors God and hurts people, and I can't think of a theological construct more hurtfu
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I don’t really consider myself an old man, but I do find that God speaks to me through dreams quite a bit. I haven’t written about it here, but my grandfather passed away near the end of M
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I'm sure you all are aware that political discourse in our country has become increasingly acrimonious and vapid. Both sides of the political spectrum hurl invective at one another. Demagoguery abound
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Well, some of you may quibble, but I challenge you to watch this without laughing at least a little bit. For my own part, I laughed so hard I very nearly passed out. My stomach still hurts…
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
P.S. Okay, I admit it. I’m easily entertained. You can stop making fun of me now. There are benefits to getting a good hearty guffaw out of silly little things, you know…
I hooked up my shiny new Samson C03U USB microphone last night to test it out, and my son decided to get in on the act. The result was some considerable cuteness, at least until it went south at the end (it was way past his bedtime).
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
Uh-huh.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought this possible. But lately, I’ve had a sense that the global warming hysteria juggernaut is losing steam. Big time.
Between this year’s record, world-wide low temperatures and snowfall and recent data showing that a year of global cooling has practically eradicated more than a century of warming, it seems that Al Gore and his Chicken Little brigade are having a hard time blaming humanity’s collective carbon footprint for any and every calamitous or anomalous weather phenomenon.
Check out this story in the Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved.
It’s about dadburned time.
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
It’s time for some MonT-SteR Consternation™.
One of the maddening things about building Web pages is cross-browser compatibility. Most modern browsers are standards-based, which means that solid CSS designs will display consistently whether you’re using Firefox, IE7, Safari, Opera, etc.
The fly in the ointment is IE6, which is regularly cursed by beleaguered Web designers the world over by virtue of its plethora of CSS rendering bugs.
“IE6 is old, Rob,” you say. “Just stop supporting it. People need to upgrade.”
Au contraire, mon frère (ou mon soeur, s’il vous plaît). People do need to upgrade, but somewhere around a third of all Internet users continue to use IE6 for a multitude of reasons. I’m sure there are plenty of individual users who don’t upgrade because they don’t know how, or IE6 feels like home, or they heard someone badmouth IE7 because of its updated UI, or they don’t know about Firefox, ad infinitum. But it’s not just home users. There are plenty of corporations with beefy IT departments out there refusing to upgrade as well.
Until usage statistics for IE6 drop to infinitesimal levels, it stubbornly remains a thorn in the flesh. And beleaguered Web designers who use the Mac tend to curse IE6 even more, because Microsoft stopped building IE for the Mac at version 5.2. How do we test our designs?
Enter Browsershots.org and CrossBrowserTesting.com, which provide free (and paid) online browser testing without the hassle of finagling your system to run IE6 alongside other modern browsers. The former will give you a screenshot of your web design displayed in the browser of your choice. Helpful, but slow — even if you pay the $15 for a month of priority testing. On the other hand, CrossBrowserTesting.com provides what amounts to a remote desktop session in your browser window using your requested computer/browser configuration. And it offers more flexibility for paid users with subscription and pay-as-you-go models.
Sounds good, right? Yes, but with one significant caveat (and here’s where the “emptor” comes in).
I was excited about CrossBrowserTesting.com until I noticed that my credits were disappearing way too fast for how much I was using the service. It turns out that partially used credits are not carried over from one remote session to the next. For me, the net result was that I lost almost a third of the 30 credits I purchased. When I discovered this, my slack-jawed disbelief turned to anger. And I vowed to warn others.
Consider yourself warned. If you go with the pay-as-you-go service, you will lose credits unless you use all of them in a single remote session. It doesn’t matter how unused a partial credit is; whether 20% or 99%, that credit goes bye-bye forever when you end your remote session. And so does your money. Granted, credits cost about 20 cents each or less, but it can add up — especially if you go whole hog and opt for 500 credits at $200. Imagine losing a third of that, and you’ll see red as well.
To be fair, CrossBrowserTesting.com does state that partially used credits do not carry over. My surprise at this after the fact was my fault — chalk it up to failing to read the fine print. And there is a monthly subscription option with a flat fee of $29.95 for the first month and $19.95 each month thereafter for unlimited priority testing (FYI: these rates will soon be raised by $10 a month). Obviously, that would solve the disappearing credits issue.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that when I complained bitterly to CrossBrowserTesting.com about losing almost an hour of testing time, they gave me complimentary credits to cover the loss. But they were also unapologetic about their pricing structure, stating that it’s a common practice in the industry.
Funny, but that everybody-else-does-it argument never worked on my mom.
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
Our small group spent two weeks studying the passages in all three of the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus refers to His followers as the “salt of the earth” and “light of the world” (see Matthew 5:1-16, Mark 9:33-50, and Luke 14:25-35).
We found that our working definition of what it is to be salt and light tends to be woefully shallow and one-dimensional.
I attempted to synthesize the issues raised by all three passages into a summary statement. While this is definitely more expansive than the typical definition you’ll get from your average Joe Christian, it isn’t by any means exhaustive.
Give it a read — and let me know what you think:
Before God, we are spiritually impoverished and in desperate need of His cleansing touch. In response, we pursue God and His righteousness by mourning our sins and dealing ruthlessly with our sinful tendencies — for God will not brook split allegiances.
Before one another, we adopt a posture of openheartedness — an eagerness to freely and peaceably receive, serve, and minister to one another in Christ’s name, and a recognition that worldly hierarchicalism in all its forms is a prideful and bitter poison that has no place amongst Jesus’ followers.
Before the world, we walk not in the brash, self-righteous flamboyance of the pointed finger or the upturned nose, but with mercy, with the kind of winsome, gentle, fervent devotion to God that speaks far better than mere words can. And when the world rejects or seeks to hurt us for this, we humbly entrust ourselves to God, being counted among those of whom the world was not worthy.
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
I have so many things I want to talk about, but there’s no time this evening. I’ll have to limit myself to top-level reactions to the VP debate tonight:
Overall, I think the debate was largely a draw, but that plays in Obama/Biden’s favor. The McCain camp has a lot of work to do. Can they pull it out? I have my concerns at this juncture.
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
The lemon, in this case, is my 24″ iMac’s hard drive. I officially pronounced it dead today.
So, the new one is on its way. Once it gets here, a couple of Mac nerds at work are going to help me perform hard-drive transplant surgery on my poor ‘puter. My sister had the unmitigated temerity to suggest that I just bag it and buy a PC. The only problem with that is that I would have to use the PC. What do you think I am, a glutton for punishment?
“But Rob, but Rob,” my handful of readers exclaim, “isn’t your iMac causing you aggravation already? What’s the diff?”
The “diff,” as you so eloquently put it, is that PCs are contemptible gutter trash. How’s that grab ya!
Honestly, though, I’m blogging right now on my Frankenmac, which is a blue and white G3 with all kinds of funky, extraneous upgrades in it. A little slow, yes, but it’s reliable as anything, in spite of the fact that it’s nearly a decade old. I’ve owned a number of Macs over the years, and they’ve generally been durable and dependable. This iMac is one of two exceptions. The other was a venerable Performa 6200 that is still operational to this day. In each case, the hard drive died prematurely — obviously a lemon. In the case of the Performa, the machine was still under warranty when it croaked, so the repair was free. The iMac, unfortunately, is not.
Even more unfortunate is the treatment I’ve received from local repair shops. The Apple store in Norfolk won’t let me buy a hard drive on my own; they will only do the repair if I pay through the nose for Apple parts. Thanks, but no thanks — my money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. There’s another Apple authorized dealer in town called the Mac Specialist that could probably fix it, but the gentleman I spoke with on the phone today was just insufferably rude and condescending. Plus, they wanted to charge me a ridiculous sum for a SCSI cable several years ago. I just can’t bring myself to do business with them.
So, I’ll make lemonade out of this lemon by making the repair myself. In the meantime, here I am, kvetching and rambling to nobody in particular about my iMac while the economy is in turmoil and the world teeters on the brink of mass conflict and upheaval. That’s perspective for ya!
Blessings,
Rob
aka The MonT-SteR
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