Dr. Pepper promised everyone free Dr. Pepper if Guns and Roses released their album, Chinese Democracy, in 2008. G n’ R at long last delivered, but not Dr. Pepper, at least not for me.  I tried foolishly for too long yesterday to get some at http://drpepper.com/freedrpepper .  The offer lasts for 24 hours.  As I write this post, roughly five hours remain.  I’ve tried filling out the form in Firefox, Safari and Opera and it goes to a blank page, so I doubt anything will come of it.

Update: NME is reporting that because the Dr Pepper servers crashed, a G n’ R lawyer is criticising the company for not being prepared for the influx of traffic, calling for more time and full page newspaper ad apologies.

This is bizarre. I’ve been hitting the refresh quite frequently on Google Finance lately and the above screengrab popped up. I can’t get it to go away in Firefox. No issues in Opera or Safari. Guess I’ll have to try clearing my cache.

Chromium

Slashdot has word of Chromium, a port of the Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac from Codeweavers.

I’m using it on my Mac as I type this post.  Chromium let me insert images via the “Add media” feature in WordPress, which is more than what Firefox and Safari let me do the other day (i.e., Firefox and Safari were not allowing the inserting of images.  I had to use the Opera browser for this to work.)

Chromium appears to be using X11 and is not Mac native, yet.  A Q and A from the Codeweavers site:

Q. Are there native Linux and Mac versions of Chromium available?

A. Not yet. Google has announced plans to support native Mac and Linux versions of Chromium, but they have yet to be released. CrossOver Chromium, however, runs the Windows version of Chromium natively on both Mac and Linux.

It doesn’t appear to be rock solid either.  It won’t copy URLs out of the address bar for me; when clicking on the top bar of Chromium from another window, the whole window wants to move instead of just selecting Chromium; and it will crash every time I open a new tab, try clicking in the unusable search box, then try typing and going anywhere in the address bar.  And this all happened when I was in the process of typing this post.  If I may be so brash as to use an Internet cliche: epic fail.

But hey, at least it’s a start, right?

Please click the above screen grab to actually see the red lines.

Google Reader in Internet Explorer jumbles the bottom options and cuts off the time stamp when zooming.

So I’ve been getting these red lines between stories in Google Reader ever since the beta testing of Firefox 3.  And they still appear in the latest updated version of Firefox 3.

It seems to happen only when I increase the zoom level.  Any idea why this happens?

This seems like a Google Reader issue, not a browser one because Google Reader has it’s own issue(s) in Internet Explorer.  When I zoom in, the options on the bottom of each post become jumbled together (as seen above) and the time stamp thing on the right becomes partially cut off.

However, I also tested the zoom level in the Opera browser.  The only thing to possibly complain about is the blocky, slightly distorted text of certain posts that use FeedBurner.  But this is somewhat understandable.