All fighters made weight for episode 7 of Bellator Fighting Championship’s series taking place Friday, May 15th at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois.

The event will feature the semifinal bouts for the welterweight championship series. Lyman Good (8-0-0) will face off against Jorge “The Naked Man” Ortiz (16-4-0, 1 NC), and Omar De La Cruz (4-1-0) will fight Dave Menne (43-15-2). The winners of these matches will each receive $50,000 and the opportunity to fight for $100,000 and the championship belt at Bellator XII on June 19, 2009.

According to a report by MMAWeekly.com, British television network Bravo will begin airing Britain-based BAMMA (British Association of Mixed Martial Arts) events starting on June 28. The events will consist of a three-part tournament, with the second coming on August 16 and the final bouts taking place on September 26.

Time Warner sucks. We've had Roadrunner for about 2 years and it's complete garbage. I've complained for a long time about it, but now I have evidence. First of all, I did 2 download tests to assess the speed of roadrunner. I downloaded an ISO of the new Ubuntu distribution (9.04) over both Bittorrent and http here at home on my Time Warner Roadrunner Cable and at school over the wifi network. At home, I activated the downloads each night at about 11:30 PM when I went to bed and stopped them at about 7 AM when I left for work the following morning. The night of the torrented download, over the whole night, I'd downloaded 46 Mb of the 700, and the night of the http download I'd downloaded 134 Mb. (BTW, could there be some throttling going on here, which they said they don't do? hmm.) That means over bittorrent I'm getting approx. 1.74k/s over torrent and 5.08k/s over http, which is paltry yet typical. We have trouble chatting while streaming video here. From the exact same source on the same laptop at the UNCG wifi network, I got the WHOLE 700Mb file in 6 minutes 28 seconds over torrent and 11 minutes 14 seconds over http, meaning speeds of 1.85Mb/s for torrent and 1.063Mb/s over http! We've even called a tech out to the house, he hooks up his meter, says "looks fine to me, have you considered paying for Turbo?" and leaves. No I'm not paying for fucking turbo, I should be paying for dial-up since it would be a GODDAMNED IMPROVEMENT.

Speed is not the only egregious offense either. For your consideration, I present the following evidence: (click the images for larger versions)

Exhibit A: Thursday, March 26, approx 7:00 PM, www.woot.com goes down. No woot-off, all other traffic works including shirt.woot.com, but woot is down.


Eshibit B: Sunday, March 29, approx 5:30 PM, my website goes down but other traffic is fine. My domain's server logs show no errors and people I chat with can access my site, only I cannot.


Exhibit C: Sunday, March 29, Approx Midnight, fark.com and some of the sub pages become inaccessible. Sites fark linked to are fine.


Exhibit D: Monday, March 30, Approx 9:30 PM, my site goes down again showing the same symptoms as Exhibit B. The site works, I know it.


Exhibit E: Tuesday, March 31, approx 7:15 PM, a single Megaupload page goes down but others don't.

This had been happening extensively around this time, I only took the care to document it a few times. Now, according to Time Warner, they're just innocent helpers. "Hey, we saw you got an error when trying to access this page, here's some things that might help you out while what you're looking for is inconveniently down." However, there's no errors. After that last intercept, I went into the little "Why am I here?" link on that page, where they have an option to "Disable Roadrunner Suggestions." I of course click that, and suddenly, I get no more intercepts. More importantly, I get NO MORE ERROR PAGES EITHER. it's not like all these sites go down for frequent swatches of time as Time Warner would have you think. What was happening is Time Warner randomly intercepts your traffic and sends you to a page full of sponsored links, collecting advertising revenue, until you opt out. This practice is SUPREMELY illegal and a violation of their end of the TOS (not the suggestions but the intercepting of my traffic, though how do you really prove that), yet for 99 of people they wouldn't think of it, they'd think TW/RR was being helpful.

Couple all of this evidence with the Time Warner tiered internet debacle that was going to be tested right here in the North Carolina Triad, and it's pretty clear you have to be an idiot to go with Time Warner for any of your services. I haven't even gotten into the 2 months we had digital cable SOLELY for the purpose of watching MMA Pay Per Views and the system didn't work from day 1, we'd try to order and they wouldn't have events or they were labeled the wrong channel or wrong time and you'd miss them or couldn't pre-order them.

We'd cancel if we weren't moving in a month or if we had a phone line coming to the house to get DSL, but the least we can do is tell you to NEVER GET TIME WARNER OR ROADRUNNER INTERNET.

Arlen Specter FTW.

I've been super frustrated on a web project I've been on where I've wanted CSS-only (no slow-ass JSON solutions) rounded corners with transparent backgrounds and and drop shadows. I originally tried a 3 image solution with transparent backgrounds, but it didn't work well and the middle image showed up behind the top and bottom images. I tried just making the backgrounds of the png's match the css background, and I discovered the OSX Safari png gamma correction bug. I hate GIF's and JPEG's as much as I can avoid them, so I decided to just rewrite the solution from scratch, which isn't that hard.

The real reason I am writing this is because 90% of the time I want to do something online I just search for code to do something and use the first result as a template. It took me like 30 tries and I still found nothing decent, so I decided to just do it myself from scratch, and maybe someone else can use it.

This is a 9 image solution made in 3 horizontal sections: a header, a center block, and a footer. Yea, it's a ton of nested divs, but it validates, uses no overlap, works on all browsershots I have tested, and can be used with very small pngs. First of all, here's a sample of the result. Here's the images, their titles, and their dimensions, all of which can be modified:

• Top Left Corner, 15px x 15px, tlc.png
• Top Border, 1px x 15px, tb.png
• Top Right Corner, 15px x 15px, trc.png
• Left Border, 15px x 1px, l.png
• Center, 1px x 1px, c.png
• Right Border, 15px x 1px, r.png
• Bottom Left Corner, 15px x 15px, blc.png
• Bottom Border, 1px x 15px, bb.png
• Bottom Right Corner, 15px x 15px, brc.png

The html for this box is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
 <head>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" title="no title" charset="utf-8"/>
 </head>
 <body>
  <div id="box">
   <div id="tlc"><div id="trc"><div id="tb"></div></div></div>
   <div id="lb"><div id="rb"><div id="c">
    <p>Holy Crap, content galore!</p>
   </div></div></div>
   <div id="blc"><div id="brc"><div id="bb"></div></div></div>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

View the CSS for this technique here. Here's how this all breaks down in the box:

Here's the css required to make this happen, using the variables in the above image:

#box {
  text-align: left;
  position: relative;
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 0;
  width: $g;
}
#box #c {
  background: transparent url('c.png') repeat center center;
  margin: 0 $e 0 $f;
}
#box #tlc {
  height: $c;
  background: transparent url('tlc.png') no-repeat top left;
}
#box #trc {
  height: $c;
  background: transparent url('trc.png') no-repeat top right;
}
#box #blc {
  height: $d;
  background: transparent url('blc.png') no-repeat bottom left;
}
#box #brc {
  height: $d;
  background: transparent url('brc.png') no-repeat bottom right;
}
#box #tb {
  height: $c;
  margin: 0 $a 0 $b;
  background: transparent url('tb.png') repeat-x top center;
}
#box #bb {
  height: $d;
  margin: 0 $a 0 $b;
  background: transparent url('bb.png') repeat-x bottom center;
}
#box #rb {
  background: transparent url('r.png') repeat-y center right;
}
#box #lb {
  background: transparent url('l.png') repeat-y center left;
}
p {
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 0;
}

It should be very flexible; if you need to you can make the borders bigger or smaller, you can even use different widths for the bottom corners if you must. I thought about toying with another master-div that was on a higher z-index plane so your content could dip into the header/footer, but I decided against it because I don't have time. I hope this is useful, it shouldn't be so complicated but there were no decent guides online.