Jen’s a nurse, now let’s party!

Published by
FFEJWORLD
June 25, 2008 in none. 0 Comments

Jen (don’t call me a cabdriver no more) The Nurse asked me to post this:

EVENT: The “Hellloooo, Nurse!” Party, during which The Artist Formerly Known As Pickles’ Daughter, Jaybird, Jen the Bartender, Jen the Cabbie, Jen the Ex-Cabbie, and Jen the Nursing Student officially changes her nickname to Jen RN.

DATE and TIME: Tuesday, July 1st, from 5:30pm ’til last call

PLACE: Skylark Bar, 2149 S Halsted (Corner of Cermak & Halsted), Chicago.
It’s in the Pilsen neighborhood, straight down Halsted St, about 2 miles south of Greektown, past the old Maxwell St, past 18th and Halsted, before you get to Bridgeport. For those who are driving, you can take either the Kennedy (90/94) or Lake Shore Drive to Roosevelt. Make a right and go west to Halsted and turn left. Go south from Roosevelt to Cermak (1200 south to 2200 south, about 10 blocks). Park on the street. Come inside and enjoy.

(At which I interject, bring enough money to get Jen and yourself happy, and to tip your bartenders and waitstaff well for putting up with your shit. This is a party in a public place, not a private party, OK?)

Andy Ihnatko on Firefox 3.0

Published by
FFEJWORLD
June 25, 2008 in Reviews and Software. 0 Comments

Don’t even bother to read my post on Firefox 3.0, go read Andy’s post from the Chicago Sun-Times. Hell, go bookmark Andy’s column index over there, he’s a better writer then I’ll ever be (and certainly dig out out his blog from teh sidebar on the right). Worth a read if only for the last 3 paragraphs, which sum up much of tech writing and all the hype on Firefox.

Sorry for lack of posts

Published by
FFEJWORLD
June 25, 2008 in Blog. 0 Comments

Been trying to deal with a death in my extended circle, having trouble writing about it. More posts later about time sensitive stuff.

Firefox 3.0 download day poised to set the record on Tuesday

Published by
FFEJWORLD
June 16, 2008 in Software and Update(d). 0 Comments

UPDATED: Mozilla’s sites are being hammered, use this direct link to download. And Furbism has some optimized builds up already! No, I do not and will not provide links to Windows optimized builds (don’t know or care if they exist). Added mini review.

UPDATED: Firefox 3 has surpassed Internet Explorer 3.0’s download record of 1.5 million over 24 hours in august of 1996! 1.9 million already and the day is still young! Follow the numbers here.

UPDATED: Techcrunch reports Firefox 3.0 was downloaded 8.3 million times in it’s first twenty four hours.

According to Mozilla Foundation CEO John Lilly, that gives Firefox 3 a four percent market share of browsers worldwide straight out of the gate. Mozilla’s servers sent out 83 terabytes of data during that time, and at the peak there were 17,000 downloads per second (with an average of 4,000 per second).

Ok, I’ll spare you hype. Suffice it to say that manana, the 17th of June 2008 is the release date of the freeware Open Source webrowser, Firefox 3.0. And the Mozilla foundation, developers of Firefox would like you to help set a world record for software by getting your free copy. If you’re on Linux, Mac OS X, or even Windows you should get it. For Windows users it provides a faster, more secure and more extensible browser, for the other operating systems it gives you the extensibility and choice-you might find you like it better then your default system browser. Get Firefox here.

I realize not everyone is as browser nerdy as me. I usually have 5+ browsers installed: Opera, Safari, Firefox, Camino, Webkit nightly builds and Firefox nightly builds. But you should have one browser set up as default with cookies turned off, and another one with cookies on (no third party) that you only use for your secure browsing (like banking, bloging, or any website with your billing info).

For the nerdly like me who use the links in my sidebar for browsers optimized for specific processors, you might want to wait a few days for the optimizers to recompile. Optimized browsers tend to be faster and less memory intensive, so us laptop lovers can have more tabs open. And yes, this post was written in Firefox 3.0 release candidate 3, PowerPC 7450 optimized which runs best on my loaner laptop.

MINI REVIEW. New look, blends better with whatever OS your running, can now search your bookmarks (and history) through the addressbar, smaller memory footprint, no more memory leaks, new privacy and security features, better and more standards complient rendering, Faster!

RIP Bo Diddley

Published by
FFEJWORLD
June 2, 2008 in Music, Update(d) and obit. 0 Comments

UPDATED: spelling checked, content added.

Ellis Bates, who was Bo Diddley was 79.

Otha McDaniel, who was Bo Diddley was 79.

Mr. Diddley claimed many different names as his real name, all usually being some variant of Ellis, Otha, Bates and McDaniel. He also told many different versions of how he got the nick name Bo Diddley (during telling one version of the story at a show, in which he claimed Bo DIddley was a curse word, someone in the audience yelled out “WHAT DOES IT MEAN?” and he yelled back “it means I fuck up people who interrupt my story”).

It doesn’t really matter, his real name was Bo Diddley. 

There is lot being left out of today’s obits is how he was the Great Black Menace, the Despoiler of White Woman, The Breaker of the Rules. Rock and Roll was dangerous, teh same people who ailed at comic books were out to shut down rock. Bo was dangerous. Bo Diddley was a Gunslinger, Chuck Berry was a hair dresser (no lie, Chuck really was a hair dresser).

Another thing left out of the obits, glossed over or misstated was his guitars and his sound. He was the first rocker to get a major guitar company to custom make him on off guitars (Gretch). He claimed al the Gretch’s had been stolen from him or lost, and kept patronizing the smaller custom makers, like Tom Holmes. I’ve seen him play guitars with LEDs that flashed his name. He made his own effects, famously fashioning a tremolo out of a wind up alarm clock. He experimented in the studio back in the 50s, and kept on doing so his entire career. One time I saw him do a Pat Metheny style solo using Metheny’s signature sound, another time I saw him play around with a harmonizer. His sound was as important as his beat, and hugely influential. We wouldn’t have had Buddy Holly or Marc Bolen with out him…

another test post

Published by
FFEJWORLD
May 27, 2008 in none. 0 Comments

Hi. No body here but me and the search engine spiders.

Oh yeah, some really bad spelling.

Will Elder has died

Published by
FFEJWORLD
May 21, 2008 in Art, Entertainment, Nerd Pride, Pulp, nostalgia and obit. 0 Comments

Will Elder passed away late last week, Born Wolf Eisenberg, he both had a unique personal style and the gift of perfect mimicry of other artists. His mimicry of advertising art was indistinguishable form the real thing, until you found the gotcha. I’ve heard it argued that he actually had multiple personal styles, his painted work considered from his line work. He was the origin of Mad’s gag art in the margin, although in his case it was additional gags he wrote and blended perfectly with the art for the (usually Kurtzman written) piece he was illustrating. This became known as Chicken Fat or Chotchkies. Along with Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood he was the backbone of the original Mad Magazine. For those of you that don’t know, Mad was the only EC comic book to survive the great Comic purge of the early 50’s, in which various clergy and a certain psychologist claimed that comic books were perverting the youth of Amerika. Elder was unique in his mastery of parody and satire, his become famous not for his pioneering work at Mad, but for Little Annie Fanny, and adult strip he and Kurtzman did for Playboy.

I grew up reading the old copies of Mad that littered the barbershop we frequented, and coveted the bound in copies that Mad put in their Specials in the early 70s, I bought all the mad paperbacks to get all the old work. Will Elder was one of the reasons I’ve used some variation of the ords parody and satire as my online nicknames for close to 30 years.

Wikipedia bio, and eulogy frfom his son in law.

Your message here

Published by
FFEJWORLD
May 20, 2008 in none. 0 Comments

This post brought to you by Sugar Frosted Epidermis, the Doctor recommended treat that Plebes love too!

Keith Olbermann ripping Shrub A new one

Published by
FFEJWORLD
May 19, 2008 in none. 0 Comments

If I was articulate, concise, direct, forceful, principled, sincere and had a good voice I’d be Ketih Olbermann tearing Shrubs head off in this chunk of his show. (with thanks to The Reel Jeff for the pointer)

Real live steam train in Chicago

Published by
FFEJWORLD
May 19, 2008 in none. 0 Comments

MIlwaukee Road #261, a huge steam engine is in Chicago for filming. What they’re filming I have no idea, but you can see the engine and some cars in and around the Dearborn yard and Union Station today. It leaves manana to go to Minnesota.

For more info on #261 visit it’s webpage. I beleive it’s a Baldwin, the article identifies it as both an Alcor and and A Baldwin.

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This is FFEJWORLD: An imaginary Place in a Reactionary Time

It's a blog with a bad attitude, poor spelling and worse grammar. Deal with it. Lately it's been infatuated with Nerd Pride, Nostalgia, and History. But it's prone to veer off on tangents, so nothing is certain.

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