Live search’s extra spaces (only for Firefox, of course)

Go to http://www.asp.net and do a search to see a nifty AJAXy popup search results box, powered by Live Search and including some advertising (which I deliberately grayed out below). Look closely, and you’ll see the URLs in the search results (circled in red) have spaces where spaces just shouldn’t be. No surprise, this happens Firefox but not in Internet Explorer.

About the only thing missing is a "Best viewed with Internet Explorer" logo, circa 1998. This really inspires me to click the "Get my own Search Box!" for my site — I’d just love this bug to be reflected in my own work, too.

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Miles per gallon – a (humorous) perspective

Guinness draught, a fine malty beverage! Just got this one via e-mail…

A recent study found the average American walks about 900 miles per year.
Another study found Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of beer a year.
That means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon.
Kind of makes you proud to be an American.

Methinks I’ll be having a Guinness tonight. 🙂

Quicken, Windows, and WTF is happening?

I just installed Quicken 2008 for Windows, and ran it for the first time. Being a Quicken user before, when I got to the following dialog box, I clicked the [Next] button.

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It’s been eight minutes since I clicked the Next button, and aside from massive hard drive thrashing, nothing is happening. There are no other applications open on my computer, and virtually no utilization reported in Task Manager.

So, can someone please explain WTF Quicken and/or Windows are doing right now?

Ah, by the time I finished writing this blog post, I finally received the "Open Quicken File" dialog box. Based on the initial folder in the dialog box, Quicken looked through my entire hard drive to find a Quicken file. I know this, because the FolderShare trash folder is selected — hardly the expected default folder for Quicken.

Can someone explain to me what brain surgeon at Quicken decided that a feature such as this — with no progress indicator or cancel button — was a good one?

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, dies at 69

As reported late last night on The Guardian Online, Gary Gygax, co-writer of Dungeons & Dragons, has died.

Say it isn’t so! What a sad day. Gary Gygax has no idea how much he influenced my childhood. I’m proud to say that I still have my original AD&D Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. From time to time, I crack them open, taking myself back nearly 30 years in time.

Those books truly were a work of art (and, you may recall, dungeon mastering is both an art and a science). I can only imagine how different I would be today if I never found them. Without a doubt, Gygax’s skill as a writer advanced my reading skills by leaps and bounds, and the countless hours I spent in the worlds he created enhanced my imagination.

So much of what is in those books is burned into my mind. I can still tell you, with a high degree of accuracy, the experience point requirements for the first few levels of most classes and the THAC0 advancement progression by level and class. I can also picture in my mind some of the many cartoons scattered throughout the books. (There is no honor among thieves, and We pretend we’re students and businessmen in a technological world — or something to that effect — come to mind.)

I have a funny feeling I’ll be browsing through those books tonight, just for old time’s sake. Good night, Mr. Gygax, and thanks for all the memories. My Illusionist’s Phantasmal Killer tips his hat to you.

[P.S. Thanks to Scott Berkum for being the first one to bring this to my attention, via his blog.]