ask-mark.com

I’m not sure what happened, but some time between last night and tonight, my site went bad. All of a sudden, it didn’t load my page, nor did it give me any errors to clue me in to what was wrong. On my WP admin page, I noticed that there was an error about my Dashboard Options plugin. Upon further investigation, I didn’t find out what was wrong with the plugin, but I did notice that a bunch of my files were set to 644, and the owner was user number 99. I’m not exactly sure what user 99 is, but my guess is that it’s some sort of anonymous user or process that does stuff. The permissions should have been fine, since they now work after putting a fresh installation of 1.5.1.2 on. Yes, I know, I should be upgrading to 1.5.1.3, but I’ll get to that in time. Anyways, just thought I’d share my woes, since something also happened to Grant’s and Al’s blogs the other day, too.

Between his jumping up on Oprah’s couch to his quick engagement to Katie Holmes, I thought Tom Cruise was going nuts. After hearing some of the soundbites of his interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, now I know he’s just crazy (ironically).

I’m not a huge fan of psychiatry, but even I think the field has some merit. Despite the misdiagnosed cases of depression, bipolar disorder, ADD and ADHD, there are probably more cases that have been properly diagnosed. Similarly, for every improperly prescribed drug, there are probably many more prescriptions that actually do help the patient.

To use his press for War of the Worlds to publicly declare psychiatry a "pseudo science" is an abuse of fame. Usually, I feel that celebrities should subscribe to the STFU mantra when it comes to their opinions. I am not saying they should all have their mouths sewn shut, as many have valid points to make, good charities to help and worthy causes to support. What I am saying is that they should sometimes think before they speak. Cruise’s comments demonstrate his lack of knowledge about psychiatry: "You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do." It must be nice to have so much free time to intensely study the history of psychiatry, only to conclude that it’s a crock.

Here is my message to Tom: I liked you better before you got outspoken about topics you barely understand, and I am sure there are many out there who agree with me. Stop your craziness and come back to earth.

I’m sitting in my office after a nice relaxing day, listening to Frank Sinatra singing "The Way You Look Tonight." The sidebar showed me that CNN.com has a post about the American Film Institute’s list of 100 most memorable film quotes to celebrate its centennial (other lists found here).

Clark Gable’s line, "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn," tops the list of most memorable quotes. The quotes were voted on by 1,500 filmmakers, actors, critics and historians. There are obviously some good quotes missing from the list, as well as quotes you may not think belong on the list, and nevermind how drastically different you would have ranked the quotes that do appear on the list. I would agree that the quote from Gone With the Wind should top the list, at least as far as my limited knowledge of films goes. I definitely would have put Judy Garland’s, "Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore," one notch higher, but I’ve never seen On the Waterfront.

I am glad that historians were included in the jury, as many of the films listed in the top 100 were great films because of the period in history when they were released, or the period in history about which they were written. The historical aspect of these films cannot be ignored when considering the value of their famous quotes. These films are not just entertaining motion pictures. They are, in a sense, "historical documents," as the aliens called them in Galaxy Quest. In the end, though, one must come to the realization that the list is probably just as much a commercial for the films and the AFI as it is a fun exercise in ranking an otherwise unimportant set of things.

I just finished the move to POP3-free e-mail, using IMAP instead for my e-mail needs. I’ve been using Outlook to manage my mail and calendar for the past seven years, ever since I figured out what the program did over and above Outlook Express, Eudora and PINE.

Throughout those seven years, I have searched for the perfect e-mail service. To be the perfect e-mail service, it had to let me access my e-mail from everywhere, let me easily send and receive HTML mail, keep track of a tremendous amount of e-mail that I may never file away into folders, and not burden me with stupid ads embedded into the messages I send. Likewise, I looked for the perfect e-mail client, which supports all of the above, as well as being a secure client. Yes, I know that Outlook has never really been the best choice when it came to security, but it does what I need, and I’m not that stupid when it comes to e-mail and opening attachments of unknown origin.

I knew that my IWU e-mail account was only a temporary address, so throughout college I looked for alternative e-mail services. I switched ISPs like underwear (that is to say, about once or twice a year) since leaving the dorms. I had long since ditched Juno, which has only gotten more ridiculous as of late. I could not go to AOL simply because it was AOL, and the same went for MSN. When Microsoft bought Hotmail, I wondered when the end of my free spam box inbox would come, and am surprised that after eight years I’ve still got it. MailandNews.com didn’t work out because it had some spotty service issues about five or six years back. And then I finally bought my own domain and got a web host almost two years ago. I must say, that has probably been the best thing for me in terms of creating my permanent place in (yes, I’m going to say it) cyberspace.

And now, I’ve finally left POP3 behind with my ask-mark.com e-mail accounts and I have moved entirely to IMAP, allowing me to read my unfiled mail from any of a number of clients, including the web. Hopefully this will make my life easier. If not, I can always go back to POP3.

I’ve been disappointed in Yahoo!’s choice in advertising companies as of late. The reason is that I’ve found that the recent changes in the companies that deliver ads on Yahoo! has greatly increased the load times for Yahoo! pages. Some time in the past three weeks the change happened, and then every request I made to Yahoo! was extremely slow to load.

Companies like QuestionMarket, Mediaplex and DoubleClick are slowly eroding the quality of websites that I frequent. It’s a shame that ad revenues are still the primary means of supporting my favorite websitges.

That was the first time I’d run in about three or four weeks. The last time I ran was just before the NT position was posted. After eating not so healthy quite a few times in the past month, I decided that it was time to run again. I just did a little over a mile for a 15 minute run. I know that’s not fast, but I’m sweating like crazy right now. Of course, I must still be in decent shape since I’m not completely out of breath, but my legs are definitely feeling a burn. Anyways, time for a shower and then sleep.

I just crapped my pants. I’m watching the WWDC 2005 keynote (MacNN play by play), and I just saw Jobs say that OS X has been living a double life for the past five years: since its inception, OS X was to be programmed and compiled to run on both PowerPC and Intel platforms!

I’m floored. Jobs announced Xcode 2.1 in his keynote. Xcode 2.1 will allow you to compile a single universal binary that will run on both PowerPC and Intel platforms. Application developers have little to do but make a few tweaks and recompile their software. For example, Wolfram Research’s Mathematica took but two hours to tweak and recompile to get a running universal binary!

As a former die-hard PC user who took every chance I could to slam Apple and their "archaic" operating system, who is now a subscriber to the "best tool for the job" philosophy, I can’t wait until I can load Tiger or Leopard onto my desktop running on an AMD Athlon XP processor. Running Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office 2004 on OS X on an x86 box would be so sweet.

That’s all I’ve got for now, so you’ll have to go to slashdot or Ars to get more of the technical details.