This morning, I sent a hoax email to a mailing list I frequent, giving bogus instructions on how to defeat the copy-protection on the new version of the software which is discussed upon the list. I've only received a handful of responses so far, but I've created a page about the joke, containing the original message and the responses (names have been deleted). I'll add to the page as new responses come in.

Some people knew what day it was, but others did not.

Last night, I went to the Lightning game with some friends. To my surprise, the Lightning actually won, despite their lack of passing and blocking skills. I've never seen them win before, at least live, so that was a nice surprise.

I'm not a good hockey fan, that's for certain. I don't shout helpful advice to the players ("Stay with the puck!" "Shoot it!" "Hit him with your stick!" "You suck!"). I don't show up already smelling of beer. I don't repeatedly throw my arm over the seat back next to me, thus constantly whacking the knee of the person who sits behind that chair. I don't discuss my high school days at the top of my lungs with the person next to me. I don't get up every five minutes for beer or bathroom break (or both), thus making everyone in the row have to stand up as I make my way to the aisle, and again when I return. I don't start hooting and hollering over the last line of the National Anthem. Oh, and I don't twirl a washcloth (printed with my team's logo) over my head, obstructing the view of the person behind me.

But as bad as American hockey fans are, at least they're better than English football hooligans.

One of the problems I have, when writing Web pages, is the problem of cross-browser compatibility. I've moved recently to using a lot of CSS in my pages, as they give more standardized results — but unfortunately, some older browsers (such as Netscape 4) can't handle the complete CSS1 specification, let alone the newer CSS2.

It would be much easier for Web designers if (a) all browsers adhered to the standards, and (b) people kept reasonably current with their Web browsers. Of course, neither will happen.

But today, as I was browsing my referrer logs, I saw that somebody had visited running an ancient version of Internet Explorer under Windows 3.1.

Now that's just ridiculous.

I'm not great at math, but the webtoys on this page are certainly cool.

My first computer. Back when 48K was a phenomenal amount of memory, and hard drives were unheard of. I spent hours glued to my Apple ][, teaching myself how to program, learning what the limitations were and trying to push past them. (Some things never change, I guess.)

Still, I love the look of the Apple 1. Looks like something out of a steampunk novel, or possibly "Brazil".

While I enjoyed the fact that Chris Carter was able to give a resolution to the Lone Gunmen series in an episode of The X-Files, it certainly wasn't the end I wanted to see. I liked those guys.

What bugged me the most was the way they met their doom. A hotel wherein a fire alarm sends down steel bulkheads to seal off only the section within a few feet of where the alarm was pulled? And in which the alarm bell only seems to ring in the sealed-off section? I can't believe that's up to the fire code. And it's a good thing those bulkheads were completely airtight, too -- obviously it was an airborne virus, if the Lone Gunmen could be infected without having touched the bioluminescently oozing dead guy.

And on another topic, Charisma Carpenter definitely looks better as a brunette. Didn't like the short blonde hair at all. What is it with the WB and unflattering hairstyles on actresses?

For years, I've been using Passport Rhapsody to do music composition and arranging. At the time I bought it, it was reasonably inexpensive, it did what I needed, and (most importantly) it ran under OS/2 Warp. When I finally dropped OS/2 and moved to (ugh) Windows, Rhapsody came along, and worked pretty well.

Until I upgraded to a new motherboard. My old video card wouldn't fit in the new motherboard, so I had to buy a new one. And a couple of programs (GIMP and Rhapsody) started crashing regularly when I tried certain operations. One such operation, in Rhapsody, was adding text — an operation I performed fairly frequently.

So, for that reason among others, I bought a new video card. And the problems persisted. Given that Rhapsody was originally a Windows 3.1 program, I figured it was probably time to upgrade. So I went to buy Rhapsody's bigger (and more modern) brother, Encore, which was now owned by G-VOX.

The only problem was, G-VOX didn't respond to emails, and they didn't answer their phone. A search through Google and Google Groups revealed that they had been incommunicado for several months now; they wouldn't even respond to people who wanted to buy their products. Not a good sign.

I went looking for alternatives. The big name in music notation software, of course, is Finale, by Coda Music Technologies. Along with the big name comes a hefty price tag — $600 is the usual cost for Finale. Checking their site, I discovered that they had some less-expensive products (such as Allegro, for $200). But looking at the complete feature comparison, I saw that Finale had many features which I need, features which were lacking in the others.

Eventually, I stumbled across a link on their site which led to a "competitive trade-in offer" — turn in the master disk from certain other notation programs, and get Finale for $199. To my delight, Rhapsody was one of the eligible programs, so last night, I downloaded the Finale demo and played around with it. The interface is less intuitive than Rhapsody's, but it's better than the first (Macintosh-only) version of Finale, which I'd encountered back in college many years ago. And it could import Rhapsody files, which will save me a lot of work if I need to re-arrange something (though the importer is less than perfect).

So, since I do need a notation program that won't crash on me, I mailed off the Rhapsody CD this morning. Out of curiosity, I emailed Coda tech support and asked if it was possible to create lute tablature with Finale (as it does have guitar tablature support). I just received a reply telling me to wait a couple of months before buying Finale, as the next version should do everything I want and more. D'oh.