comics pt.1

surprisingly… i’ve started to read comics again. well that’s not surprising but the fact that i’m reading _new_ comics is. i had this feeling that just all new comics would suck. as basically everything newly “creative” nowadays does. i’ve been reading various marvel titles lately and really enjoying them though.

my own personal golden age of comics is 1991-1994ish, for various reasons i began to lose interest in comics around 1994. i owe comic books quite a bit…i’m positive i would’ve never got into reading novels without first enjoying comic books. sure, i had to read novels in elementary school, some of which i liked. but..things are different when you’re somewhat forced to do something. like a chore or something. anyhow, an issue of uncanny x-men from 1991-ish ended up in my hands. i think this was 5th grade. i immediately loved it despite not knowing the characters and the fact that the issue was mid-saga. so then i was hooked and began buying more issues, especially of the x-men. i collected pretty much exclusively marvel comics for quite some time.

according to my memory, marvel comics suddenly got crappy like in 1993-94 or so. all their top artists jumped ship to image comics at the time. i had a lot of the first image comics and continued to collect those..and guess what they got crappy too. i stumbled upon valiant comics at some point and those are by far some of the best comics ever made. valiant art is average, but the stories are amazing.

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@d87studios

seriously..your competition to firefox is seamonkey?!!

the history you noted..here again:

netscape communicator -> mozilla browser -> seamonkey

when communicator came out is when i stopped liking netscape. that’s exactly when i started playing with IE 3.x and finally jumped on IE 4.x completely. computers were extra slow back then (even with the turbo button enabled), mine couldn’t handle that bulky communicator crap. i don’t want a browser suite. i just want a browser.

and evidently a lot of people feel that way thus mozilla begat firefox.

and to correct your research…seamonkey is not a mozilla project it’s developed by outside volunteers. the relationship between the seamonkey people and the mozilla folks i believe is amicable though. and seamonkey exists because the mozilla foundation (or whatever) completely abandoned the browser suite.

and IE8 sucks.

d87studios

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gnome 2.28

2.28 just came out, but that’s not really what i wanted to write about. mostly i just want to say how much i like gnome. in fact i’ve pretty much always liked gnome. newer releases seem so polished and responsive.

gnome has always been a favorite of mine, but i’m not really that biased when it comes to desktop environments. at one point i preferred kde over gnome, that was during kde 3.5.x series, that was a very full featured environment. and i used kde 3.5 for quite some time. around that time i wasn’t incredibly happy with gnome’s direction with the default spatial mode, and seemingly removing lots of useful options. i spend most of my time in gnome nowadays but….

i actually am happy with kde 4.x. i love the new qt. everything is way sleeker than ever before and much quicker to launch. the only thing i do not like is no icons on the desktop by default. now, i haven’t done any research on how to get icons back, but just this moment i found – http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/06/how-to-create-desktop-icons-in-kde4.html

so evidently it is possible to get traditional desktop icons back. i’ll try that sometime. why do i want desktop icons? well my preferred version of a desktop is what i consider to be the “win95” model. program menu lower left, system tray lower right, commonly used files on my desktop, a quicklaunch for commonly used applications (though i think this made its appearance in win98 or win98se?), etc. that’s the desktop i enjoy, nothing fancy. and really so far i am very anti-widgets. get that garish crap outta here.

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site change!

okay, for about 2 years now i’ve been pondering changing the layout of resinblade.net. at one point i was leaning towards drupal, then another time joomla, and then researching more portals, etc. almost all that time i was using wordpress for my blog.

and i’m aware that basically all those solutions have blog functionality, or a blog module, but i’ve come to really like wordpress. and so i’d hate to then begin using an inferior blogging solution (at least in my opinion).

so i’ve decided to just use wordpress as my “site” or whatever these things are called nowadays. i’ll be working on some much needed cleanup for a while…

p.s. i’m posting this entry from the blogging applet that’s packaged with GNOME :O

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troubleshooting linux audio

remember to try this whenever experiencing audio problems in linux:
alsamixer -c 0
alsactl store

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mandriva products

it’s 2009 and mandriva is still my distro of choice.
some products released by mandriva that don’t seem to get a lot of press:

mandriva directory server (ldap) – http://mds.mandriva.org
(redhat released the 389 directory server sometime ago as well)
pulse 2 (system management) – http://pulse2.mandriva.org
(manages windows workstations as well)

i haven’t tried either of these products yet, but may sometime in the future out of curiosity.

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groupwise client removal

CleanIt removal tool by Messaging Architects:
http://www.messagingarchitects.com/products/free-gw-tools/email-essentials/cleanit.html

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RSS feeds for Outlook 2007

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179173.aspx#RSSHomePage

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windows auto-login

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315231

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maple9 network installation

useful links:
http://math.feld.cvut.cz/nemecek/maple/install9.html#Win_Net_Install
http://www.mapleprimes.com/forum/maple-10-no-longer-starts-up

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