this is my new blog

ok, this is my new blog. hooray for my new blog! yes! my blog is no longer mcgrew.blog-city.com. they deleted that account, probably because of the most recent post. my most recent post was a “disclaimer”. writing that post was a big mistake, but in the end i am glad about it. it said that nothing on that blog was true and it was all a parody and that i wasn’t really who i said i was. i was trying to do something commonly referred to as “covering your own ass”, but it kind of backfired. if i wasn’t really the person who posted that stuff, it couldn’t count against me, right? because, i had posted some stuff that i wasn’t sure was accurate, or that made me sound stupid. well... actually a lot of stuff like that. so, i wanted people to think that it wasn’t really my blog, if they randomly came across it, even though it really was my blog. anyway, blog-city.com (and i am sure blogspot.com too) does not allow for one person to fraudulently claim to be someone else and have a blog. as i explained, my disclaimer merely existed to create the false impression that i am not me, so that the stupid things i said wouldn’t count against me, even though i really am me, and that’s why i didn’t like the idea of stupid things i say counting against me. i like the idea of having freedom in a blog to address any topic, and i didn’t really feel like i had that, because i kept overstepping the bounds of good taste, rationality, and “truthiness”. anyway, for the record, i would like to say that i really am rich mcgrew, the same one who owns the domain name richmcgrew.com and that i ran mcgrew.blog-city.com and now i run richmcgrew.blogspot.com and i really am who i say i am and that this can be verified.

but, now i have a new blog and i am a new man, and i will try and keep my blog posts a bit nicer now. a bit more polished. a larger font, too. the font it tries to use first is arial unicode ms, then lucida grande, then microsoft sans serif, then tahoma, then arial, then bitstream vera sans, then helvetica, and lastly generic sans-serif. arial unicode ms is a superior font that comes with microsoft office xp and later versions and includes virtually every character, lucida grande is a nice new sans-serif font in mac os x, microsoft sans serif is in windows xp, tahoma is in everything back to windows 95, arial is found in both the archaic windows 3.x and the archaic mac os 9, bitstream vera sans is a nice-looking free font that comes with linux’s gnome gui system, helvetica is in even older versions of mac os that don’t come with internet explorer as well as in old unix-based operating systems that have neither arial nor the bitstream vera fonts, and the generic sans-serif is necessary to include for completeness’s sake and maximum cross-platform browser compliance. i left out verdana entirely because although i like it better than all those other fonts, it is extremely wide and throws off the layout of most websites if you override them and make them use it. these fonts are all standard-width sans-serif fonts with nothing fancy or weird about them, just the basics. no serifs, no script, no gothic stuff, and they are all quite readable at small sizes even though i use a medium size, which makes it that much more readable. this should make my blog fairly cross-platform and standards-compliant, conforming closely to internationally recognized web usability and accessibility standards. i recommend enabling font smoothing if possible. font smoothing comes with windows 98 and windows nt 4.0 and all later versions, and you can download a free addon to windows 95 from microsoft that will allow you to enable it (this download is only for windows 95, not any other os). if your os is too old to support font smoothing, try the opera web browser, because it does its own font rendering independently from the os. my super-advanced hi-tech inline-style-sheet html coding is fully compliant with the world wide web consortium’s xhtml 1.0 strict document type definition, so it should look maahvelous in any standards-compliant browser such as firefox, opera, or safari (or in internet explorer too, for that matter). here is some unicode text to test out whether this blog supports that stuff: 中国の鳥人 (Chūgoku no chōjin, The Bird People in China). that should look perfect if you have the font arial unicode ms, which you would have if you have microsoft office xp or newer, like i said before. i had to put arial unicode ms first in the list of fonts to enable support for internet explorer, because newer browsers like opera and firefox have a much better css implementation that lets me make another font the default font and use arial unicode ms only for the characters not in the default font... but since internet explorer is so common, out of the goodness of my heart, i made arial unicode ms first in the list, and i also moved bitstream vera sans to near the end of the list, in case a windows user has it installed but not office xp, because bitstream vera sans, while nice-looking, has way too few unicode characters and if i had it earlier in the list this could make things even worse for users of internet explorer, which i would hate to do, since they have so many problems to put up with already.

so i’ve seen that posting here works, and i’ve already edited this post a bit. and i don’t really want my blog-city.com account renewed. i actually prefer for it to stay cancelled, so none of the crap i wrote there gets ressurrected, because it is rather shameful, much of it. and i’m switching to a different service provider because google has, in many ways, earned my respect and admiration, so i sought out their version of blogging. the other two sites i was considering, livejournal.com and xanga.com, are more community-oriented, but limit a lot of features to “premium members” just like blog-city, and i don’t dig that. but i dig google majorly, so i think i will probably dig blogspot.com. and this time, i will definitely allow comments, because then i will get to see who actually reads my blog, and what they think, and it will be more interesting, plus it will keep me honest and keep me from overstepping my bounds as a blogger as i did in the past. i think my old blog would have definitely been a lot less ridiculous if i actually allowed people to comment on all the nonsense i posted there.

so, since it works, i will have everyone who links to my old blog update their links to be to this new one instead. let us put aside the wackiness of my past blog and embrace a new future, a future of writing things that actually make sense! i hope i have the self-control to do it, because sometimes the wackiness in me is just tearing me apart inside and the only way to get rid of it is to express it in the form of a long-winded, nonsensical blog post. and then once i am done posting, i feel relieved of the burden of all of that rubbish bouncing around inside my head, polluting my brain with its absurdity. it is basically a form of mental waste management. and what blog-city.com did when they deleted my account was basically taking out the trash. my only hope is, they do not ressurect it or keep the data around or anything. i hope it has been irreversibly deleted, or will be shortly. because that is the best way to deal with trash, to irreversibly terminate its existence so that it can never rear its ugly head again in the future. i do not really have anything against blog-city.com, after having a blog there for 3 years, except that when a web browser was configured to use a larger font size, the line-height would stay the same, and the lines would be too close together to read. this problem happened in both internet explorer and mozilla firefox, so i knew it was a problem with the site’s coding, and not the browser’s fault. hopefully, with google in charge of the blogger service and blogspot.com, its html coding will be more tautologically enhanced, to ensure maximal browser compliance in accordance with w3c internationally recognized standards of html document conformance. one thing about google that really impressed me is how they have both the co-inventor of the tcp/ip protocol, vinton cerf, who is also the chairman of the board of trustees for the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, working for them, alongside the co-author of the world’s bestselling artificial intelligence textbook, peter norvig. those are very high-caliber employees, which would only work for a very high-caliber organization. of course, it’s not that hard to be a co-author of a bestselling textbook: for example, my dad is the author of the instructor’s manual for the nation’s bestselling college physics textbook, physics for scientists and engineers, as well as a co-author of the student solutions manual and a contributor to the main textbook itself (whose main author is raymond a. serway, my dad’s boss). that’s not to say my dad doesn’t do an excellent job, but all he had to do to get it was to submit errata and corrections to the publisher’s designated contact person enough so that they decided to pay him. i mean, if you are a professor who can find all the errors in a textbook and submit them to the publisher, then just do it and bam, they hire you and you are now in the textbook business and getting royalties from the sales of the book! pretty cool if you ask me. maybe i could use a strategy like that (start out by helping someone out for free) to get a job. of course, most people probably aren’t quite as gifted as my father at finding and correcting all errors logical, mathematical, grammatical, and typographical. then again, i’m not like most people. i’m a chip off the old block, although i am a lot more irresponsible and wacko than my dad. i don't know where exactly my wackiness (zaniness?) comes from, but the wellspring of it is endless. i could be a comedian, if other people found the same things funny as me, but usually my humor is either above their heads or too reprehensible to be discussed in polite society, or any society at all, for that matter. i will try to elevate the discussion with my blog, and not go for the lowest common denominator like i did with my last blog. wish me luck!