I ended up going with “Jack bag” as a result of my quest for the right bag, which I have been pretty happy with. It has its problems, but it is pretty nice. As I knew, it is not a laptop bag, which means I am always nevous when I carry around my laptop, as it is just a canvas bag. I have been thinking of getting a protective shell, much like most macbook owners have, but I haven’t bothered yet.

After starting season 2 of Dexter (amazing show) though, I am starting to have regrets. He has this really sweet laptop bag, which just looks awesome. All things considered, it isn’t what I was looking for, but it is still tempting. I did some searching, and the bag is the Oakley S.I. Laptop Bag. It is $180, which is absurd in my book for a bag, but it definitely looks strong and incredibly badass.

I enjoyed another lunch today from the Indian restaurant component of a 7-11 close to where I work (IT stuff at a trading firm) at Washington and Wells. I have never seen another 7-11 with its own restaurant before (fast food, maybe, but this place is different), so I was pretty shocked to see it. When I went last time, I asked if there were any others, and she said it was the first one like it (who knows though). It is also an “internet cafe,” which means they have wifi I think, but I haven’t had a reason to stay. They are only open from 11-6, so it is a lunch place. One of the most bizarre sights I have seen in a while.

old signs for what I guess was an internet cafe before. Who knows if they still have that going.

As some of you may have heard or experienced, Netflix is having lots of problems with like every part of their system right now with their shipment system. After I realized the problem and got the message from Netflix apologizing for the problem, I have watched the whole thing for its humor value. I shipped in four movies on Monday, which are normally received on Tuesday (city life is awesome). I normally go through movies at a pretty fast rate (it was a summer goal of mine to watch and ship in movies the next mail day–I feel proud), so I first though it was Netflix fucking around to screw me over. On Wednesday, I got emails for the two of the four, but on my queue, all of the movies appeared to have been received on the website as the status was listed as ’shipping today.’ Normally, that message is only up for an hour or two; all of the movies I was requesting were common enough that there shouldn’t have been a problem with supply, so I realized the problem when status stayed that way that something was up. Imagine my surprise when I got Serpico on Thursday, but none of the others that were slated to come! Supposedly, everything is fixed and the last few were sent on Friday (a call to customer service revealed that there are still some more to be sent today). I got the documentary Fuck today (that was one for headphones in the maclab; the movie uses the word ‘fuck’ more than any other movie by a lot: 834 times in 93 minutes), but I am still missing two. The best part of it all is that the website is just totally and completely borked. Serpico still reads as “shipping Wednesday” along with the other two I still haven’t received, although I did receive an e-mail for Serpico on Friday. Fuck (or ‘F**k’ as netflix calls it) is registered correctly, but it was still in my queue of things yet to be shipped as well, but I deleted it. I also got an e-mail for it after I had already watched it. We will see what Monday brings…. I am supposed to receive a 15% discount for this month, which comes to about $3.50 on a 4 at a time plan, which is really just exact compensation. I average a little over 20 movies a month or more, so that means that I am paying around $1 per movie with my rental. One was delayed a day, which I can’t really complain about, but I was outed a full watch-return cycle, which by that logic is about $3. With the Olympics, there is plenty to watch, but the failure to provide service is a bigger sting. I was pretty close to canceling before they announced the problem, and I don’t really feel like they have done a whole lot to make feel better about them.

The problem is rather curious. Seems like some sort of database problem, especially with the website, but they are still managing to ship, just slowly. If the whole system was down, nothing would be coming out, and if it was some problem updating the site, the shipping would presumably still be working fine. They are somewhere between those two states. I suppose the details of the problem will  meet the news in some form sooner or later, so we will have to find out.

I posted something previously on blocking social ads in facebook with greasemonkey, where I came to the conclusion incorrectly it could not be done with css. I apparently remembered what “! important” did in userContent.css and userChrome.css; I read “! important” as “not important,” but it aparently means the opposite, and overrides any webpages css. I corrected my post on userContent.css and userChrome.css customization as well. Stupid logic. Anyway, if you add the following block into your userContent.css file, you should be able to block most annoying stuff on both the new facebook design and old.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.new.facebook.com/) {
.sponsor, .invitefriends, .findfriends, .gifts_received, .pymk, .social_ad, .adcolumn{
display: none ! important;
}
}

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.facebook.com/) {
.sponsor, .invitefriends, .findfriends, .gifts_received, .pymk, .social_ad, .adcolumn{
display: none ! important;
}
}

There may be a way to combine these two, but I don’t know the more mozilla-internal css well enough to know. If you use facebook, most of these should be clear. I blocked gifts, as I find them annoying, and I am glad to just not be aware of them. I also blocked the person finding features like “people you may know” (’.pmyk’) or the email search things. I also blocked ads of course. Facebook seems to have to idea that everyone will love ads if they are more specifically targeted at you, based on data they have on file. I can’t stop them from doing that (other than by closing and deleting my account), but I shouldn’t have to see ads if I don’t want to IMHO. Also notice that the new facebook design and the old one use the same css classes for everything; the redesign isn’t that extensive apparently.

Last night, the block my apartment is on lost power. It was during a pretty harsh thunderstorm, so I didn’t think much of it until I realized that our power lines are underground. My neighborhood in Oak Ridge has above ground lines with lots of trees, so I am used to the power going out during storms. The storm last night was also one of the harshest I have seen in Chicago; the Ryerson weather station reported a high wind of 56mph around midnight and around 2 inches of rainfall in an hour. Anyway, the power was incredibly screwed up for the rest of the night. We unplugged everything after I saw the TV sort of flicker on (it was off before) when lightening struck really close by. Hopefully are surge protectors didn’t get the full 1.21 gigawatts of power. For a while, we got an extremely low amount of power; enough for some lights to barely glow. It was strange. At some point, a firetruck came by, which one of my roommates and I watched from the porch while clearing the drain, so we could watch a whirlpool form (entertainment options for a bunch of computer geeks is severly limited sometimes without power); A cop watched us and pulled off as soon as we went inside, which was pretty funny. As far as I know, the power is still out; hopefully we will get it back soon. We heard some strange, almost explosion-like sounds throughout the night, so hopefully the damage is not that bad.

The other side of the street wasn’t affected, but all of the streetlights and even the university police boxes were all off and all of the buildings next to ours were off, which made for about the darkest I have ever seen Chicago. I am used to being able to see around, even if all of the lights are off. There is so much background light, that it is easy to forget it is even there. It made for an interesting evening.