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As I promised on Wednesday, I offer unto thee, loyal and trustworthy Gluemeaties, a fable entitled “Welcome to Paranoland,” a story just creepy enough to make its relevance to being a Halloween special all the more exact. The story is a tale of a man named Victor who moves into a nice country home away from the city, much to the chagrin of the local villagers. I hope you take the time to download and enjoy it.

It’s a short film which I was honoured to collaborate on with an extremely talented collective of people calling themselves Phylactère Cola. The director, a friend of mine, Patrick Boivin, is extremely talented and, in my opinion, destined for great things. He did incredible work on this piece, which mixes live action with animation, in a combination which is sure to please even the most cynical of viewers. Consider this my very special treat from me to you on this Halloween weekend, and many thanks to Patrick for giving me the permission to add this as a permanent fixture to old Gluemeat Dot Com.

I’ll be curious to hear what you all think about it. Comment or drop me a line:

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Fellow Gluemeaties, I apologise if you have been unable to post any comments for the past twelve hours or so. Apparently, there have been server difficulties which prevented access to my all-powerful databases, impairing not only commenting but updating as well. But, the Gluemeat Server Slave Labourers working out of the sweatshop on de la Tourelle street in Quebec toiled all night through sleep depravation and bleeding eyes to get everything operational again. And for that, we must thank them with their monthly sack of rice.

So comment away and enjoy yet another Halloween comic!

Just before I go, I have something extra-special planned for Friday’s update. Hope you all show up!

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Guess what folks? It’s almost November! It’s almost Gluemeat’s anniversary! So you know what that means… A NEW GLUEMEAT WEBSITE RE-DESIGN!!! Will it be as appreciated as the last one was, or will it be as controversial as the Year 2 design? Time will tell… but one thing is for sure, I want it to be busy; give the users access to a lot of features real easily, but busy. Anyhow, you’ll see how it turns out in a couple of weeks. Trust me, I’ve been toiling hard!

It’s important I share with you know that I have taken the solemn decision to no longer design the Gluemeat website in accordance to Internet Explorer and its skewered web standards. It may sound like Im abandoning the bulk of web users and giving them the big heave-ho, which may come off as a completely preposterous attempt of turning me into a self-righteous David against a very large and capable Goliath.

But no. The new Gluemeat web site will look fine in IE. Not perfect, but fine. IE users will still be able to appreciate the site and its content without any hindrances. However, I have very strong ideas about how my internet experience, and I feel to be completely consistent with them I need to apply them to my own site and thus share my philosophy with others who will come here.

The reasons I have decided to drop spending hours debugging my site in Internet Explorer are twofold. Well, threefold, actually, but I’ll spare you the Evils Of Microsoft™ discourse.

There are gaping security holes in IE which make it terribly risky program to use. Even the US Government warns not to use it. I don’t understand why Microsoft releases software like that. VBScipt applications and ActiveX controls are notoriously risky and are only supported by IE. Malware of all types get automatically installed when certain ads are read through IE. Microsoft should just fess up and call it as it is: beta software. Patch after patch after patch is released, to try to get the program to work, but it never seems to be enough. And when you think about it, when you patch up a pair of jeans too much, they shoddy and terrible to wear. I don’t think anyone should be tricked into using an incomplete piece of software. I don’t use it, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

I’ve been using a good deal of CSS for the new site, and I’ve grown to love its simplicity and flexibility. IE is notorious to not be compliant with various web standards, CSS being the major field where it still fails to keep up with. The bugs are numerous, but Microsoft has no intentions of fixing them, probably keeping their new fixes and features for their Longhorn browser-within-a-desktop thing. But then again IE owns the market, so why would they want to change the bugs? If that’s not acting like a monopoly, I don’t know what is. Not to mention that they confirmed that they would stop development on IE for Mac once Apple announced it was going to release Safari. When you combine those aspects, once IE won the browser wars and blew Netscape out of the water as credible competition, Microsoft had little motivation to keep their browser strong and up-to-date.

Anyhow, back to the code: I’ve tried so many things to try and keep it clean in IE, but it’s frustrating when every single other browser I check the Gluemeat site with (Safari, Firefox, Camino and Opera) gives perfect code while little old IE always has to force me to find workarounds, substitutions or compromises. I’ve had it. No more designing for IE. I mean, it’s not that the website looks terrible in IE, it’s just little things that throw the whole thing completely out of sync and make the design look junked. I’m not going to bend over backwards to try and make my site pristine for a go-it-alone, soon-to-be-obsolete piece of software which has never had the users in mind, but rather its goal of imposing its standards on a digital medium still in need of non-proprietary intervention.

I suggest you follow-up all this at the Web Standards Project and its project site, Browse Happy for more. Or why don’t we discuss it:

Have a great weekend everyone!

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It’s nice to know that everyone in the U.S. is really doing their part to avoid another election fiasco like in 2000. No really. I’m sure Floridians are making sure that every effort is spent to get the right man in this time. I mean, it’s not like Jeb Bush would refuse to pull the plug of the flawed felon voter list which prevented about 2500 people from voting in last year’s elections, despite such advisement from state election officials he should… would he?

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And a good Monday to you, fellow Gluemeaties. I hope sincerely that you all enjoyed your weekend a great deal!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, here are the promised pictures of my brand new iMac. Share the joy.

This is a look of Gluemeat Station with the new iMac. This is where the magic happens.

And here’s a look at the computer itself. Note how wide the screen is.

A shot of it from the side. It’s SO not thick.

And here are my two Mac babies: my iBook and my iMac, sharing like the best of friends.

Life can be good sometimes.

And allow me to remind you all that you can get in the know and chat with me whenever you get the hankerin’ for it. Yes, thanks to this marvellous machine, the borders between reader and creator have been elinimated, and we can now share our thoughts on everything from artificial intelligence to rice pudding. So why don’t you add me to your buddy list? Here are the screen names you should look for:

Hope to chat with you all soon! Have a great week everyone!

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Indeed, fellow Gluemeaties, my new computer rocks the local standadised apartment complexes. Or the house. It could rock simply the house, too, but it seems so little in scale as to what it can do it really deserves to rock much more than simply “the house.” Mac OS X kicks le booty, vous savez. I’m so thrilled with my purchase.

Other than gloating like a child, there’s nothing much to add today. I am happy to announce, however, that if you ever do indeed get the insatiable urge to chit-chat with me, I can be reached through AIM/ICQ with the username Hell Eats Cheese. Hope to hear from you soon!

However, to follow-up on a recent comment by fellow Gluemeaty and commentator TN, I was wondering if this is what he was thinking about picturing me in a cornflower blue dress:

It’s not exactly a SUN DRESS, but I figured it could satisfy your fantasies nonetheless.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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Hello all! And happy Thanksgiving to us Canadians!

Indeed, fellow Gluemeaties, this particular Gluemeat comic is a historic one indeed. Yes, for you see, this is the first Gluemeat comic to have ever been done on my BRAND SPANKIN’ NEW IMAC G5, BABY! WHOO YEAH!

In all seriousness, however, I must mention how incredibly smooth the machine is, how top notch its performance is, and how amazingly stable it is. The more I use OS X, the more I wonder why people still settle for buggy OS’es. This machine is a thing of beauty. You hear me? A THING OF BEAUTY. It is so beautiful that I will probably have a few pictures to share with you all during the course of the week. So not only will you get to see my iMac, but you will also get to glimpse into a little piece of Yorkana. Please, everybody, quit quivering in anticipation.

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