DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Can you buy happiness for $2.55?

That’s my question for the guy behind me in line at the grocery store. It’s 9:00 AM, and he lays a cold bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and a 40-oz High Life on the conveyor. I wanted to ask, is that breakfast and lunch? Dinner and dessert? Or is one of the bottles for a friend?

But then, you have to wonder, which of the two gets the 40? There’s a quality vs. quantity issue here. Would you rather have 12 oz of good beer, or 40 oz of swill? Assume for the moment that having 40 oz of good beer is not an option. Certainly, in the case of MHL, it isn’t.

The scary part of the episode is that the guy was dressed as if he intended to spend the day operating power tools.

I spotted an endangered species over the weekend, at Costco of all places. A guy in line near me stood about 6'5'' tall, 250 lbs easy, dressed in acidwash jeans and a size-60 XXXL hockey jersey — you know the type, designed to fit over enormous shoulder pads and so on. But this guy filled it. He looked like the sort of person who has to go through doors sideways.

And yet wasn’t his size that caught my eye. It was his haircut: short and wavy on top, long and wiry in back, and squared off below the base of his neck. He had a geniune “Kentucky waterfall,” or like my buddy Andrew says, “Business in the front, party in the back.”

Wait, it gets better. His hair color was dark brown, but on both sides of his head, from the shaved-short temple, over the top of the ear, all the way down each side to the bottom of the mane, the hair was peroxide blonde — striped, in stereo!

I searched the classifications at MulletsGalore.com but was unable find such an amazing, awesome example of what I’ve come to call the Skunk Mullet. I just wish I had grabbed one of the digital cameras off the rack. Of course, had this creature seen me photographing his hair, he’d have flattened me. Or posed… ya never know I guess.

In an attempt to find graphic documentation of a fashion that, by all rights, should have died out 15 years ago, I did a Google search for “striped mullet,” but this turned up something else entirely.

Jeff Zeldman takes on everybody’s least favorite domain registrar… check out the screenshot and then read the merciless (but oh-so-deserved) commentary.

Responsible web developers test their systems in all popular web browsers.

I personally don’t bother, because, really, you don’t really expect me to run Windows, do you?

A recent A List Apart article describes using a low-end Mac as a cross-platform web design testing station. The article is insanely detailed, and it inspired me to restore my own ancient cross-platform testbed, which was a copy of VirtualPC 1.0 (dating from about 1997).

Because the ALA article recommended it, and because it is a lot cheaper, I bought a copy of FWB’s RealPC. This was a big mistake. The electronic version is incomplete and broken: the documentation refers to files that are not supplied, for example. So do FWB’s support reps. The site-search at fwb.com points to a CGI that does not exist as of this writing. And when I tried to call FWB, all their phones were misrouted. I returned the software for a refund.

Next I purchased and downloaded VirtualPC from Connectix. So far, I’m impressed; it’s well worth the extra $70. It took an evening to install Win98, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6, but now I’m about 20 seconds away from testing a web page in any of those browsers. Considering that Microsoft makes it impossible (AFAIK) to run multiple versions of IE on one computer (well, within a single installation of Windows), this emulated solution is significantly faster: I can save the state of these virtual machines, with IE already running, so I can jump from the MacOS into already-running IE within Windows, in mere seconds.

To be fair, Windows emulators are also available for Linux and even Windows; this is not strictly a Macintosh solution. The point is that for testing web systems, emulation is absolutely the way to go.

Here’s a handy tip for medical professionals everywhere: if you’re going to be getting in someone’s face later with an otoscope, why not forego the plate of garlic fries at lunchtime?