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I just finished reading a book of poetry a couple of days ago called After All by the recently deceased William Matthews. I mentioned this to my poetry teacher in class today and he said, “Bill? I knew him. Smartest guy I ever met.”

Which made me feel a whole heck of a lot better about being awed by this guy’s brain. He used words casually that I didn’t even know existed. I suppose that makes him good prep material for the GRE. *g* All joking aside, if you’re into poetry, I’d recommend him. He’s got a knack for capturing the here-and-now in stark clarity, and even manages to be funny at times. :)

My goal for this weekend is to take a full practice test in the GRE, to see what sort of score I get and to figure out how much studying I’ve left to do. The quizes still kick my but pretty consistently, but I’ve only got so much time to prepare. Might as well take the plunge.

I’ve just signed up to take the GRE on Tuesday, November 25. This gives me exactly two weeks to prepare. And that’s on top of working roughly 40 hours a week at my regular job, having two major assignments due in class between now and then, and working on at least one (possibly two) freelance web design projects.

Not that I’m feeling stressed or anything. :)

Wish me luck! I’ve taken a few of the practice tests so far (and plan to take many, many more), but I’ve gotten less-than-encouraging results. What’s a good percentage of questions to get correct on these things? Yes, 100% would be ideal, but methinks it’s probably not feasable. Anyone whose taken the GRE before want to give me some advice?

I found a fun little website via LYD a few days ago called the Church Sign Generator. Check it out. I spent a good hour on the ISU payroll playing around on this thing. :) At first, I just tried to think of interesting church signs. Yano, signs that would make people laugh, and think, all at the same time:

Okay, so that last one probably isn’t the best. I mean, once you start mixing Baptists with Confucius, somebody’s gonna have a problem with it. And that got me thinking. I thought to myself, “Yeah? And?” Which led to other things:

And then I figured, why not?

In case you don’t get that last blaspheme, it comes from a joke my friend Justin likes to tell at parties:

Jesus walks into an Inn, lays three nails down on the counter, and says, “Can you put me up for the night?”

That’s the kinda guy Justin is.
Go have fun. Blasphemy optional. :)

I was pretty hungry when I got to work today, so I grabbed a miniature frozen pizza from the vending machine upstairs, brought it downstairs to our office area, and popped it in the microwave for three minutes. A minute or so later, the office was plunged into darkness. I blew the breaker with my microwave pizza. :) Normally, we only run the microwave for a few seconds at a time, to warm up a lukewarm cup of coffee and so forth. Also, we just added several servers to that breaker. I guess the pizza was just the snack that broke the camel’s back.

So what did I do? The obvious thing: I turned off the air conditioner before I finished microwaving my meal. :) Sure, the servers got a bit warmer for a few minutes, but I got a gooey mess of a pizza.

We gotta have priorties, folks.

Wow. For those of you out there that do any web development work whatsoever, this is big. Someone (specifically, Joe of Insert Title Web Designs) has figured out how to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer simultaneously. Check out the article here.

Why is this big? There are lots of versions of Internet Explorer still running in the world. I use IE6 at home, and IE5.5 at work (not by choice), for instance. Each of them treats websites a little differently. For example, most of my site’s skins look like utter shite when viewed in IE 5.5. I didn’t know this because I couldn’t test under IE5.5. Because whenever you install a new copy of Internet Explorer, it overwrites the old copy.

Until now.

Now, thanks to Joe’s digging (thanks, Joe!), it’s possible to run stand-alone copies of legacy IE installs. You can have IE6 installed, and still test in IE5.5, IE5, and hopefully even IE4 soon. Though, I probably won’t test in IE4. I just don’t care that much. :)

I was in the process of uploading zipped stand-alones to my various webspaces, when I found that Skyzyx.com already has copies (and mirrors of his copies) up and wonderfully arranged. So: if you want IE5.5, I have it here. For anything else (or even for IE5.5, since his servers might be faster), check out Skyzyx.com here.