I read a bunch of zombie themed novels. Some have lots of zombies, others not so many. Some are real books, some are what I was hoping were the upper echelons of more or less self published work.

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The city is suing Yuengling to collect some tax money.

Changing the name of the tax from Business Privilege Tax (for serious, that was the name) to Business Income and Receipts Tax doesn’t make it any better. I’ve always thought this was a really stupid tax that just pushes every white collar office business out into the suburbs, twenty feet over the city line, but this is absurd. What counts as taxable activity? The city will tell you (or not, apparently) when they send you a bill.

Company responds.

A week late, but it’s a double issue for Dec. 31. Whew!

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The internet story of the now is how Facebook photo ruined Christmas, which reminded me of a time when I thought Facebook had ruined my photos. One day I noticed (actually, more like a gradual realization) that photos on Facebook looked strange. They were blotchy, with messed up colors. I figured that this was an artifact of recompressing uploads, but a rather annoying one, since it turned people into greenish purple skinned aliens. Turns out this had nothing to do with Facebook, but rather with Firefox. I just didn’t realize what was up because most of the photos I look at are on Facebook and pictures elsewhere didn’t seem affected (only partly true; some other sites were pretty bad too, but many were ok), and then when I compared with my phone, I figured maybe they were different sizes and compressed differently. Doesn’t help that with all the Hipstamatic and Instagram crap filtered photos it’s hard to know what colors are supposed to be in the image.

Finally, I decided the problem had to be in Firefox, and a little searching later led me to a blog post explaining how Firefox uses color management. Read it for details. I’m not particularly concerned about accurate colors, just so long as people look like people, so I disabled color management entirely. Now pictures in Firefox have the same slightly blue shifted look they do in all my other programs.

Some random thoughts after reading vfork considered dangerous. First and immediate response, yes, vfork is dangerous.

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It’s a little weird to write a review of an individual issue of a magazine, but it provides a chance to collect my thoughts. Also, I found The Onion’s A.V. Club reviews of individual TV shows kind of interesting. That said, this is less a review, but short summaries of some pieces I thought stood out. I don’t know what I’m paying for The New Yorker these days, but this issue was surely worth it.

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The movie In Time comes from Andrew Niccol, who also wrote and directed Gattaca, one of my favorites. I didn’t know this until I looked it up afterwards, if I had known I probably would have made more of an effort to see it sooner. I like most of his movies. All of them, in fact.

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I was growing tired of my old iPhone games so I bought some new ones. I play only on an iPhone, not an iPad. I was mostly looking for quick fix games, not anything to rival a console game.

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Obviously, I don’t use Ubuntu much, so I’m a little late to the party, but better late than never. Upgrade from 11.10 went smoothly enough. Do you want to download 700000 packages? Sure, why not.

Now, after the upgrade, I’m greeted by the following dialog. “Sorry, Ubuntu 12.04 has experienced an internal error.” I click continue because, hey, why not. “Invalid problem report: Could not determine the package or source package name.” Great. Who’s the fucktard responsible for this I wonder.

Finished reading all ten books of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. Started reading in late 2006 (first two books), read two more in early 2011, then finished the remaining six summer 2012. My thoughts on the series are somewhat scattered, I don’t think I’ll finish a complete review, this is more like a rough draft.

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