Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

I got my first chance to play the Battlefield 2 Demo (download) last night after work. I noticed several big changes from Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield, as well as the Desert Combat mod. Graphically they’ve added some bloom to the video to make everything have a slight haze, which adds to the realism of the game by making everything hazy as if you were outside in too much sunlight. Your field of vision is also affected by a concussion effect when you get hit by grenades or tank rounds. I spent about 30 minutes just using the anti-air weapons to kill planes. There is a neat radar lock where if a vehicle approaches you can lock onto its heat signature and launch heat-seeking anti-air missiles at it. The target can throw off some flares to prevent getting hit. It is very cool.

I think I broke something from laughing so hard while reading tBoCL…

1. I want to fight a Vegan: “Condition 2. You must be an all-out-level-three-Vegan (for at least three years). This means no honey in your herbal tea, not even on Spring equinox! No leather shoes, and please, don’t be a sell-out by having a sorry ass job at a conventional Café that serves low fat Tuna Club sandwiches.”
2. Pregnantish? Take my extra Clearblue Easy!
3. Goodnight Austin
4. Nervous Wreck Seeks Domineering Bitch for Rebound Melee – 33: “Please be able to completely annihilate any residual faith in humanity, delusions of happiness, and sense of self worth. Depigmentation of my hair is not fully complete at this stage – and I am looking for you to finalize the process. Bonus points for initiating enough stress to drag me down the path of premature baldness, or inducing permanent stress-related gastrointestinal damage.”
5. I ONLY had to take a leak. You didn’t need to scar me emotionally

Leeroy Jenkins, of World of Warcraft fame, now has his own soundboard.

Found some great stuff while surfing around this weekend.

• Inspirational, courtesy of the wonderfully thematic Growabrain blog. How to Make a Million Dollars by Marshall Brain of HowStuffWorks: “There are two mentalities: Be an employee, or Hire employees” A must read.
• Five Habits of Millionaires by Barbara Reinhold. “Michael LeBoeuf, author of The Millionaire in You, points out that to increase wealth, it’s essential to emulate millionaires who view money as something to save and invest, rather than income to spend. Many wealthy people live quite simply, he points out, choosing less pretentious homes than they could theoretically afford and opting for financial independence over material showmanship.” Warren Buffett still lives in the same small home in Omaha he bought long before he was a multi-billionaire.
• Encrypt your “mailto” links with this handy form. It will prevent most spam spiders from pulling your email addresses from mailto links.
• Godaddy’s Bob Parsons on his 16 rules for life: “1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.”
• RandText. Awesome free Perl script to include random bits in your webpages. I’m using it for the testimonials at my Duet Design page. Refresh to see it in action.

How long will it take this very cool large-scale marionette event in France (via Waxy.org posted this morning) to appear on Boing Boing?

I visit the wonderful One Man Safari blog several times a day because you never know what you’ll find there. Lately, “one man” has been posting images from old issues of National Geographic Magazine.

Signal vs. Noise reports how Google is wreaking havoc on their web application product, Backpack, by deleting user pages:

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway. Disrespect.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.

Users on the SomethingAwful forums posted screenshots of being logged in on other user accounts. Bad. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.

Just installed this Google Web Accelerator from Google. Let see how it works.

1. 1. What is Google Web Accelerator?

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode. If you have any problems using it or have suggestions for how we can improve it, please see the Google Group devoted to it.

Also note that during the first part of our beta testing period, users outside of North America and Europe may not see much improvement in their web page loading speed.

2. How does Google Web Accelerator work?

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.