If you haven’t heard it from about 1,000 people already, Microsoft made the Upgrade version of Windows 7 Available for pre-order today at less than half the suggested retail price. It ships October 22, and the pre-order price is available only until July 11, or “while supplies last,” whatever that means.

Order it from amazon now:

Windows 7 Premium Upgrade – $49 (Reg. $119)

Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade – $99 (Reg $219)

What are you waiting for? This will probably run faster than XP if you’re still running it, and certainly faster than Vista. Get it cheap before supplies run out and you’re back in 6 months paying $119/219 for it.

(Well, sort of).

I’ve been coding a new template for a new venture I’ll be embarking on over this summer break, and I wanted it to look all nice with alpha’d png images. IE6 hates those things.

Despite the fact that it probably won’t matter (most of my traffic these days is Firefox, and the direction I’ll be headed is for more tech-savvy and mac users), I hate leaving little things untended.

So…. I looked, and looked, and looked for a script that might work for my pngs in IE6. Supersleight wasn’t flexible enough, (the jQuery plugin would have done the trick, but for it for some reason it did not work at all for me) and so I kept looking…

Some dude made it work. Nicely. Check it out if you’re frustrated with other solutions.

IE6 PNG fix

It claims to work even for repeating backgrounds, but I haven’t tested that. I did verify that it doesn’t work well for backgrounds on tr and td elements.

Enjoy!

Bidding on ebay, and I hate always getting sniped.

Turns out, there’s free ebay sniping tools out there:

eBay Sniper

I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly, but I do feel impelled to make a few comments regarding the following:

They recently reported that UPS will no longer advertise during the Bill O’Reilly show, due possibly to a campaign they’re running trying to get consumers to petition the O’Reilly advertisers to pull their support for said show. Their beef? That O’Reilly harasses people by confronting them.

Now, I’m not a fan of Bill O’Reilly, and certainly this is not meant to defend someone I like or respect, but merely to point out the idiocy of what’s going on here. What’s that? That Think Progress has an agenda (we all do) and they Bill O’Reilly is against their agenda, and so they’re going to villify him as much as possible. Read the comments on their “articles” though, and you find that the people who support this site are the kind that worship every “expose” that Michael Moore does: you know, that king of harassment. The only difference between the two? The ideologies behind each case of harassment.

The focus of the outrage this time? Bill O’Reilly was ranting against drunkenness and the stupid things it makes people do, and remarked that a girl may be partially to blame for being raped (their take). What do we take from this?

1. O’Reilly was a bit insensitive here
2. If you were going to make a list of things that you should not do on say a study abroad trip, that list would go something like this:
   • Don’t dress overly provocatively, it gets the wrong kind of attention
   • Don’t get drunk off your rocker, it makes you less like to recognize danger and increases your chances of doing stupid things
   • Stay out of the wrong parts of town, especially late at night
   • Don’t walk around at night alone as a girl (most “safe” universities regularly harp on this for even their own campuses)
3. The girl in question broke all of these guidelines. Admittedly, the rapist is legally the guilty party, but it is also likely that had the girl done none of these things, this tragedy would not have happened. Not admitting this puts others at risk, because it encourages people to deny their own responsibility to act in an intelligent manner to stay out of danger! Sure, it might make the family feel bad to hear that their victimized daughter probably could have averted the crisis with better judgement, but it also might help prevent others from making the same mistake in the future. Not being made into a victim can be related in some cases (not all) to our own behavior.
4. America is a culture based on people feeling disproportionately proud of themselves if they do something good (or even try to do something good) yet avoiding all sense or even hint of responsibility if something goes wrong. This is seriously messed up.

If “good advice” says not to harass stray dogs and I start baiting a stray dog with and then get bitten, is it my fault or the dog’s? The dog was the one that bit me, right? If good advice says to stay out of dangerous parts of town late at night (or any part of town if you’re alone and relatively defenseless), and that drunkenness impedes physical and decision-making abilities, and that dressing to attract sexual attention will, indeed, attract sexual attention, who should we blame for something like this? Would it have made any difference if this girl’s friend had told her that evening not to do all those things? Shouldn’t she have already known these things? Baiting dangerous animals is dangerous. Baiting violent or dangerous people is dangerous, whether explicitly intended or not.

America, wake up and start taking responsibility for your own actions, rather than always looking for someone else to blame.

I hear that you’re having some troubles with your finances, and I just wanted to help you out a bit with some advice. Don’t worry, it’s free advice!

1. You can’t spend more money than you make. Really, this one’s pretty simple. It’s a matter of debits and credits, which need to be (at the very least) equal. I know that you’re a big fan of bailouts, but there is no one to bail you out. Even Bill Gates can’t swing that kind of cash, so you need to fix your own problems.
2. Giving money to irresponsible people is, well, irresponsible. It seems that banks haven’t figured out that paying millions of dollars a year to CEOs does not guarantee them top-notch quality businessmen. The more you bail them out, the less reason they have to reform. I’d say we start by enacting some laws: if you take our money, nobody in your company makes more than $150k per year. At this rate, they can hire about 20 (or more) smart economics grads straight out of the University for the price of one crusty old CEO, creating extra jobs and virtually guaranteeing that one of those 20 will have some clue how the real world works. (If people “can’t live on that,” move the bank headquarters to rural Indiana, where they will be the richest people around)
3. Start fighting over whose programs don’t get cut. Again, you’re in the red every year. Obama wants to halve the deficit in 4 years? WE’D STILL BE SPENDING WAY MORE THAN WE’RE MAKING!!! Rather than wasting time in congress fighting over who gets to spend more money on new programs, I propose a new perspective.
   1. Divide our deficit by total tax revenue (about 33% in 2008)
   2. Cut every single government program by that percent (33%)
   3. Make congressmen fight for scraps. If you “need” more spending for something, you have to convince everyone else to sacrifice spending on some other program: there’s no more money to spend, just like a real budget.
   4. If tax revenues fall, congress is required to cut spending.
   5. If tax revenues rise, spend the extra money on paying off our ridiculous debt.
4. If all else fails, fire all the politicians in the next 4 years, and replace them with people in this country who have 0 credit card debt, don’t have disproportionally high house and car loans, and make less than $150k per year. Chances are, they’ll be able to take care of things.

It’s not going to be easy, but I know that somewhere in the back of your mind it makes sense that disaster looms if every year we spend more than we make. I know that you can’t honestly believe that the federal government should be bailing out every poor decision (or lazy soul) that ‘requires’ a few bucks. Sometimes, a little pain goes a long ways towards convincing people that those $5,000 shoes are a little overkill, or that $150/month on cable when you’re unemployed is unsustainable.

If you let people bleed a little bit when they do stupid things, they just might learn not to do those stupid things again.

Sincerely,
Andy

If you’re comfortable with trying to use Terminal (or curious to start), you can get your twitter updates via growl on OS X. If you don’t know what growl is, you’re really missing out. Get it here — it updates you unobtrusively with program status messages that might typically show up in a popup box or embedded into a program window, or not at all.

Once you’ve got growl, you’ll need to make sure you have Ruby 1.8.3 or higher.

You’ll also need MacPorts to make this work right: Install MacPorts

• If you have 10.5 Leopard, you’re set
• If you have 10.4 Tiger, you’ll probably need to update:
  1. Open a Terminal window and type in the following command, hitting return at the end:
     sudo port install ruby

Now, we’ll install some stuff that we need for our script to run. Using terminal, enter these commands (Hit return after each one)

sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem install xml-simple
sudo gem install ruby-growl


(If the “gem” commands don’t work, you may need to restart terminal before running them)

Provided this all went well, you should be ready to install the script. Download the Squawk Scriptand move it into your home directory (looks like a house in finder if you’re totally lost here). This file is thanks to damien, but I had to make a tweak for it to all work right. You have to edit the file with your login info:

sudo pico ~/squawk.rb

It should be obvious where to put your email address and password.

Finally, run your script!

ruby squawk.rb

If you want to run it in the background on startup, check back later. I’ll be posting on this shortly.