The Army has created a new brigade, known as the Stryker Brigade. The soldiers in it received special, extraordinary training for this new brigade, which will adopt new tactics, and inevitably new technology and hardware. ABCNews has more coverage on this interesting new development.

“So the soldiers of the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, now known as the Stryker Brigade, have adopted a new method of reacting to attacks: They rush toward the source. Depending on how many vehicles are on patrol, upward of 30 highly trained trained infantrymen may stream out to chase down the insurgents.”

“Meanwhile, other Strykers stay on the periphery, scanning the fields or buildings with their thermal cameras and covering the troops with a .50 caliber machine gun or Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher.”

It’s just in time for a new type of war we’re faced in the world, one that President Bush clearly outlined. This war adopts tactic that was popular during the Civil War, when the Rebels would shoot at soldiers from forests and other places where pursuit was difficult, and finding the enemy even more so. Terrorists don’t fight conventionally. They’re invisible most of the time, and they could be the guy right next to you at the bus stop with a homemade molotov cocktail in his pockets. This new brigade adopts tactic specially designed to hunt down terrorists and put them out of commission. Here’s hoping it proves a successful endeavour. In any case, I like the name — Stryker. It sounds like an Arnold Swarzenneger-type action hero.

It seems every girl I talk to are building up to a divorce, or are in the process of trying to get a divorce. I try to be a good listener, and they complain that the man in their life don’t treat them with respect anymore, don’t love them anymore, or totally disregard them to the point where the marriage part is only being held up by counting on knowing what to expect everyday. Even my own mother isn’t happy, yet she is still living with her husband, even to the point where he threatened to kill her.

Now, me being a guy and all, truly can’t understand this. Anyone that makes me unhappy for an extended period of time, and don’t care about it, or threaten my life, I am out of there. No questions asked, no looking back, sayonara, adios, ciao, hasta la vista, etc. I know it’s easier for a guy to do it, but why do women make it more difficult? Then there’s the fact that I’m nearing 25 years, I’m a nice guy, and ironies of all ironies, I’m still single. I’ve had opportunities to run off, get married, and so on, but deep down I just knew it wouldn’t last. Maybe it’s fear on my part, but I strongly believe that we should trust our instincts, and I live by my instincts. So far it hasn’t hurt me.

So when a woman asks me where all the nice men are at, my only reply is, they’re playing video games still in their mid-20’s, enjoy cooking gourmet meals, and you won’t find them in bars. Fat lot of good giving away that secret does. Maybe I should get out more.

I’ve took it upon myself to redesign a website last night, and it only took me 3 hours to do the whole thing. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, and uses CSS, of course. The old site was using very old code, and it was a pure mess, not to mention redudant and taking up precious bandwidth.

The total size of the old site was 80KB, which takes approximately 20 seconds for those people on dialup. The ideal time limit for a page to load up for dialup is within 8 seconds. Most people do not like waiting for more than 10 seconds, and the quicker it loads, the better the impressions are of that site. The new site, has a total size of 39KB, half of the old site. That is approximately 8.5 seconds on dialup, and I haven’t truly optimized the site yet. The majority of that size comes from the header graphic, which is 33KB itself. Once compressed, I can cut the size down to about 20KB, perhaps. Needless to say, the new site loads quicker, looks better, and supports the latest standards. It works on every browser except Opera 7 and those that don’t support CSS. I’m looking to see if it’s a bug that’s causing Opera to have a fit.

Here’s the before and after redesign: Before Redesign | After Redesign

I’ve made a few design changes the past few days, as you may be able to tell. First off, the new background for the header of the site, sporting a jet from the flight simulator game I’ve been playing lately; Lock On: Modern Air Combat. I was really reluctant to add graphics to the site, as I like a fast loading site, but no matter what I did, the site felt bland, so a nice graphic can do wonders to that. I’ve compressed it as much as I could without losing too much quality, and the graphic is nearly 1600 pixels wide, and weigh about 22KB. Hopefully the site still loads quick enough for those of you on dialup.

I’ve also got a few other changes, mostly of the pseudo-hover, which can only be viewed by Gecko-based browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, etc.) and Safari. Internet Explorer/AOL won’t be able to view these changes, since they don’t support the latest technology and are about a year or so behind. Another little change I did was remove cruft from archive URLs, so they should be easier to understand, and Google will like them. For example, the previous post has the URL: http://www.goodblimey.com/archives/2003/12/09/apple instead of http://www.goodblimey.com/archives/00000063.php. There’s a few other things I want to change, so keep an eye out for those as well.

Rolling Stones Online has posted an interview with Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, and they talk about numerous things; digital music, download services, the iPod, recording companies, and the future of Apple. It’s really interesting, and Mr. Jobs does provide an interesting insight as to why most artists are dissatisfied with their recording companies.

After talking to a lot of people, this is my conclusion: A young artist gets signed, and he or she gets a big advance — a million dollars, or more. And the theory is that the record company will earn back that advance when the artist is successful.

Except that even though they’re really good at picking, only one or two out of the ten that they pick is successful. And so most of the artists never earn back that advance — so the record companies are out that money. Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?

The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success. And they get upset. So what’s the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, “We’ll give you twenty cents on every dollar we get, but we’re not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We’re gonna pay you not on profits — we’re gonna pay you off revenues. It’s very simple: The more successful you are, the more you’ll earn. But if you’re not successful, you will not earn a dime. We’ll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you’re not successful, you’ll make no money. If you are, you’ll make a lot more money.” That’s the way out. That’s the way the rest of the world works.

I’ve updated the Photos section with brand spankin’ new pictures. All in all, 66 pictures, around 41MB were uploaded tonight. There are now a combined total of 270 pictures in the photo gallery, ranging from pictures of my pet, the area around Interlachen, Florida (where I live), from fauna to flora and the sky, and family.

Have I ever mentioned how much I really love my digital camera, a Canon S400?

A topic I’ve been delving into lately is writing efficient CSS. Using shorthands, inheritances, and so on, I was able to streamline my CSS file from 7.8KB to 7KB. That’s a shaving of 800bytes, and while it won’t be noticable, it’ll certainly help. With sites that are getting larger and larger, this kind of knowledge can really help save bandwidth in the long run. CommunityMX has an article on how to write efficient CSS, and I’m intend to learn some things I probably didn’t know before.

One of the touted benefits of CSS is that it reduces total page weight, and thus download time, both at first page load, and even more on subsequent loads due to style sheet caching. This is true, but often a sizable fraction of the first load savings is lost because of highly redundant CSS code.

Well that’s all over. Now you will learn some “secrets” of efficient CSS coding, enabling you to pare that style sheet right down to the bare bones. To be sure, you won’t achieve huge savings doing this, but for some highly competitive sites every little bit counts.