So, if you examined that picture carefully then you will probably be wondering if these are indeed the greatest stories ever told, as well you might…the jury (or juror) is still out, I haven’t finished reading the book.

One of the annoying things about installing Quicktime is that it changes certain file associations of your browser. Not only that, but the way to stop it is not obvious. In a break from writing music reviews and soliloquies about my life (actually, to be honest, I haven’t written much here at all recently and left most of that labor to zach) I thought I’d post a quick tech tip for anybody who is having a similar problem.

Problem: You installed Quicktime. Now whenever you click on a link to an .mp3 in Firefox it opens up the player, which is fine in some circumstances but sometimes you just want the prompt to save the file. I suppose you could right click and save link as but what happens if you’re not following a link or you just don’t want to deal with the crap.

Solution: In firefox open options which is in the Tools menu, click the content tab and you should see something like this.

Hit the manage button and you should get a window called download actions. Find the file formats that you don’t want qt to open and change them to ‘save them on my computer.’ That’s all there is to it. Of course, I’m not a firefox expert, this is just something that happened to work for me, use at your own peril!

nothing much to say, but i did want to show off the new audio plugin and at the same time highlight the valerie collective.

here’s Anoraak’s “Never Ending Romance Disaster.”

[audio:http://www.optics.rochester.edu/users/zsmith/ANORAAK_NERD.mp3]

UPDATE: documentation here.

over the past week or so i’ve slowly been accruing a bunch of pretty good links that i think i’ll share with you in lieu of a more substantive post.

RollTube – firefox extension that you maliciously install on someone else’s computer. Once installed, it replaces every youtube video with the sublime video to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s the endgame application of the internet prank known as a RickRoll.

Kate Beaton’s History Comics: 1, 2, 3 – People write in historical subjects and she does the comic. From what I can tell most of them are from the opening sections of each item’s wikipedia entry. My favorites so far are “The Peach Basket Man is Hard Done By” (plus accompanying video) and the last panel of “The Fate of a Nation” (both in the first link).

Reporter Lessons:

A Narrative in Crisis – this is from a while back, but Penny Arcade on the video game Crysis. They have a pretty uncanny ability to take a game I know nothing about, and, more importantly, don’t really care to know anything about, and still make a funny strip out of it.

Pitchfork defined – From John Campbell at Pictures for Sad Children, I really can’t think of a more clearly stated vision of Pitchfork’s madness.

WE’RE ALL DOOMED – formerly distinguished scientist James Lovelock abandons all hope in favor of a dystopian future where he can feast on the flesh of his fellow man. But my favorite part of the article is the side-bar where they have a picture for a story about UK reality celeb and all-around chav jade goody. mmmm.

and i know this is probably going to bring harsh judgement down upon me for buying into the hype, but i’m actually really into this vampire weekend song “a-punk”:

The weather is growing mild and I’m in the mood for music. Here’s Sebastien Roux’s July Rain:

more below the cut.

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There’s a new hottest man alive in town, recently-voted-off american idol contestant Danny Noriega. Maybe a little bit of a twink, but I definitely wouldn’t kick him out of the sack.

more junk below the cut.

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Check out who shows up around 2:20. Broken Social Scene “Fire Eye’d Boy” video.

People who live in climates where it’s warm year round probably can’t understand at all the exhilaration one feels upon stepping out for the first time in weeks to sunshine and t-shirt weather. Clearly it is a large component of one half of the strange complementariness of the christian calender, and why Easter feels the way it does.

All anybody would want to do on a day like this is to enjoy the sun and the puddles of water and the still icy grass and just sit outside drinking coffee from a neat paper cup and listening to ‘falling inward’ by bitcrush (a band I’m familiar with from one of the now rare instances when wrur still plays decent music). As I was driving up the hill by Colgate Divinity School the water from all the melting snow was tumbling down the road. The mist kicked up by the tires of the car ahead of me caught the light in such a way that it became clouds of rainbow.

Anybody else experiencing the weather today?