From the "I thought he was dead by now" department:

I just read a really motivating interview with Johnny Rotten. If you don't know who that is, don't bother clicking the link.

Wow, now I'm linking to YouTube

But you have to admit that's cool.

Safari on Windows again

So, I find that I keep using it, even though it crashes periodically and leaks memory faster than anything I've ever seen. (Well, maybe anything that wasn't designed expressly to test memory leaking.) The fonts just look so very much better, that I keep gravitating right back to it.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

But then, I used to use Opera, where I could easily crank up the size of stuff until the fonts were not rendering with only one-pixel-thick lines. 150% usually does it. Hm. I think the real punch line here is that websites all seem to make the font too small. Does anyone out there know why they do this?

Posting links to images is just so much less typing.

Yep, I'm lazy that way.

I think I'll wait for the iPhone Shuffle

The thing I dislike most about Safari on Windows

...is that it looks so much like Safari on OS X that when I go to minimize it, my mouse automatically heads over to the top left corner. A regular windows app puts a little menu on the useless icon that is parked at the top left corner, but since this is all smooth and shiny, there is nothing there. I guess I could back up a bit and click on the 'Window' menu, to get a minimize action, but somehow I always take the time to go all the way over to the '_' button in the top right corner.

So frustrating this is!

Browser features that I want #1: Bookmarks that work like bookmarks.

A while ago I switched to del.icio.us for keeping references to web pages that I might want to visit again. This works fine for remembering a reference to something. I the non-internet world, which some of us remember, this is not what is stored with a bookmark. Generally this kind of information would be recorded in a notebook, or perhaps on some 3x5" index cards, held together with the rubber band off of a Sunday Times from a year or two ago.

I realize every so often (and then promptly forget again) that there is just about no good reason to keep this kind of bookmark around. Google does a perfectly fine job of remembering all the web pages, why should I go to any effort to duplicate what they do anyhow? Just dumb, if you ask me.

No, bookmarks serve an entirely different function. They are for reading things that are more than one page long. Generally people have a few of them that last for a longish while. I generally maintain two or three of them, and they last from one to three weeks. Mine are also typically constructed from the receipt that I get at the library when I check out the books.

Admittedly, sometimes people will maintain a much larger number of bookmarks at one time. I myself have never done this, but I have seen books that were actively being used for, say, the writing of a research paper which looked to have ten or fifteen bookmarks in them. One thing I can say for sure about that situation--it was not meant to last. Those bookmarks were gone a week later. And if they weren't, the owner of them surely had no idea what they meant.

Hm, I feel as though I have slipped off my point. Someone yell at me if I do that again, will you?

So how do I think bookmarks should work? Well, something like keeping a window open but minimized in Opera, if you have ever used that browser. But maybe without the memory overhead. Yeah, I know. A lot of you have never used Opera. Well, you should. It's hella better than Firefox. I am pretty sure that it is where Firefox cribbed most of their user interface "innovation" from. Oh, and for the other 90% of you, Firefox is the browser where Microsoft (they don't rate a hyperlink) cribbed most of their user interface "innovation" from.

That point of mine must be really slippery.

So what is my point? I want bookmarks that work like a bookmark. I can "go to" a bookmark and read for a while, changing to the next page in a sequence, or just jumping anywhere I want, and when I close the page, that same bookmark remembers my new place, waiting for me to go back there.

Since this is a new, electronic bookmark (maybe I should call it a iBookmark or something) it seems to me that it could even do a little extra for me. Like remember all of the historic pages that I visited with it. If I make a bookmark for my car shopping, it could keep a list of all the pages that I visited based on that bookmark.

That would actually be kind of handy.

A nod to the real geeks out there:

My results:
I am Apocalypse

Apocalypse 80% Magneto 79% Dr. Doom 69% Lex Luthor 67% The Joker 65% Dark Phoenix 61% Riddler 58% Poison Ivy 58% Juggernaut 58% Kingpin 52% Green Goblin 50% Mr. Freeze 46% Catwoman 42% Mystique 38% Venom 35% Two-Face 30%

I believe in survival of the fittest and I believe that I am the fittest.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

Oh, the irony!

I actually bothered to read the (currently) top posting on Linux Lore, and it is advertising a utility for converting LiveJournal postings to Blogger ones. Eh, whatever. Not like I need that. Being a Linux bigot enthusiast, I figured he would be distributing a Python script, or something equally unusable.

No, it's better than that.

Wait for it...

It's a Windows executable. With an installer and everything!

Oh, yeah baby. He's a Linux guy! Right up to the very edge of the point where he (or someone he loves) needs to get some work done.

Heh.

Heh.

Heh.

Linux, what?

So, the thread starts with me listening to a podcast called "The Gadgettes", and they mention Ubuntu Linux. Something about the "explosive growth" of it or so. I've been using Linux on and off since late 1992, so it would be natural for you to expect that I would be an advocate of it.

You'd be wrong.

My current opinion is that thousands of highly motivated, yet unpaid volunteers have managed to implement a big, slow, buggy operating system that does a pretty good fraction of what the operating system built thousands of higly motivated, highly paid employees of Microsoft. Part of the problem is that I've been using Ubuntu on my Linux computer at work for about the last three years. Boy, do I wish I had all that frustration back.

Anyhow, while setting up to write an update, I found a page that called "Blogs of Note," and it mentioned a site called "Linux Lore." I only thought it worth mentioning because he lists his location as "Kenmore, WA", which is where I am currently residing. That may not seem so special, but Kenmore is truly a worthless piece of townshipness. It really should just be part of a real town, but someone wanted to be mayor but lacked the self-esteem to try running against anyone else, and so now there is a whole city hall (built out of a run-down strip mall) and everything. Yay.

Long time again.

This time it's been such a long time that I had to switch to my google account in order to post. Well, I might not have had to, but the old one was really flakey, so I'm hoping that this new one will be flakey in less annoying ways.

I've seriously lowered my quality expectations, so expect to see lots more posts in the future. Horray.