All posts by snowdeal

two great pieces of writing that are all the more interesting when juxtoposed. first, lance arthur lets loose a piece on being a blogging elitist:

” All his power, which he deigns to share with only those on a level with him, those few, those happy few on the battlements looking down, far far down on the rabble and scum below, circling and illuminating him like the rings of Saturn. ‘ah,’ he thinks to himself, sharing not this consummate clarity of cerebral enlightenment with those too dull or ignorant to understand even a tenth of its vast and inwieldy wisdom, ‘what must it be like to be one of them.”

and then there’s zeldman’s latest installment of his glamourous life:

“For seven nights they’ve stayed on separate coasts. She watches her brother’s baby in a sleepy seaside town. He clicks and curses in New York.
        Every night they phone each other. But tonight was different.
        Tonight they talked.
        They talked for hours. Like they used to talk when they were falling in love.
        Before they lived together.

They’ve decided to buy a string and two cans.

For when she gets back.”

two great examples of using the medium for entirely different – but equally outstanding – purposes.

netscape 6 developer release notes. hmmm. i don’t see big freakin’ memory leak anywhere. just to be clear – i am reasonably happy with mozilla and congratulate all the people who put time and effort into developing it [unlike the complaining masses like myself who did little to nothing, except complain].

that said – this is the public face of mozilla and it sucks. it gives nobody – save raving opensource advocates a reason to switch. and that’s what counts at the end of the day.

i really wanted to like it. i really did. i was willing to forgive an imperfect browser. i was willing to give a little. so, i downloaded it. the short answer – while the out-of-the-box experience is nice, there’s a big freakin’ memory leak in the windoze binary. for christ’s sake, would somebody plug it, because it just about flooded my cube with bits of ram. jeeeeeezzzuuuuuuuusssssssssssssss! i don’t know it i can understand why the leak is so – well – gargantuous!. i’m bummed. it’s like walking around in a pool of cold molasses. and it’s really cold outside so the molasses just keeps getting thicker and thicker.

oh yeah, i can hear the smartass masses jeering – “well, just download the nightlies!”

i did. and while it is better than that piece of junk that was released yesterday, it still leaks and leaks and leaks and crashes. and i can’t post to blogger for god-only-knows-what-reason. jesus.

the only thing keeping me from switching to explorer, when i’m on a windows box, is not even the fact that it’s m$. it’s because i hate the fact that explorer forces me to alphabetize my bookmarks when i import them. i have a lot of bookmarks and it’s complicated. that’s it. that’s all that’s between me and explorer. forced alphabetization.

metafilter is conversing about n6 if i didn’t sway you.

i hope and pray the nightlies get better – faster.

it seems like aeons since groove was released. at least an epoch in press release and promotional years. i downloaded it and it has been sitting on my drive pleading for me to get around to stop ignoring it. and now what does ev go and do? he goes and prejudices me to certain preconceptions:

“Finally got around to downloading Groove this weekend. I don’t know much more about it than I did before. But I didn’t dig into it too thoroughly. My assessment, so far, is pretty much the common one: potentially cool. Potentially being the key word. As much hype as it’s gotten, it has a steep road ahead. It’s rather obviously missing the elusive “killer app” to get enough people to download it for it to be ubiquitous enough to get people to write apps to get people to download it — and, even more importantly, use it.”

Triple Yahtzee Score Card - Copyright © 1982 Milton Bradley Co.

warning: more ballot humour. funny stuff from splorp. i’ll probably regret finding this so funny in the morning, but for now:

At one point or another, all followers of the democratic electoral process have probably stopped, scratched their chins, and speculated that politics is really just a big game of chance. Shall we add a bit of proof to the pudding? Witness the shocking similarities between the infamous Palm Beach County ballot and a standard issue Milton Bradley Triple Yahtzee® score card.

Is this a simple coincidence or a nefarious, anti-establishment plot hatched by the trusted brand name behind some of the world’s most popular family-oriented board games? You be the judge.”

after the hullaballoo surrounding netscape’s bugginess and general lack of standards compliance we get this follow-up from the author of the original piece:

“It appears that some readers have taken my article to mean that Navigator 6.0 will not comply with standards at all, or that Navigator 6.0 will be as noncompliant as Navigator 4.x. That is not the case. Netscape and Mozilla engineers deserve tremendous credit for creating a browser that has very good standards compliance. In fact, according to many who have studied it more throughly than I, Mozilla and Netscape 6 are more standards compliant than the competition. See, for example, Netscape Standards
Challenge. I regret that I did not make this more explicit and give more credit to the Mozilla and Netscape engineers in my original article.”

although maybe the engineers took something to heart since netscape was released and unreleased several days ago.

when i was an anklebiter, i thought johnny cash was bad. i wanted to be cash. either that or gene simmons from kiss, but that’s another story entirely. anyway, it’s strange that i’ll be forking over cake for his new album 23 years after i first started mimicking his style:

“But American III’s high point is its two-song centerpiece. The first is
Will Oldham’s, “I See a Darkness,” on which it becomes clear that,
perhaps because of his neurological disorder, Cash’s voice isn’t as sure
and strong as it once was. When he quavers, with Oldham singing
backup, “Is there hope that somehow you can save me from this
darkness?” the effect is absolutely devastating. You won’t listen to the
song the same after this. The shivers will eventually leave your spine,
but the residue remains.

That song’s transcendent power also stems from its production, which,
although still sparse, is relatively lush. The organ and piano that rise to
match the guitar remain in use for Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat.”
Chronicling the first-person thoughts of a man being executed, this
song, more than any other on the album, was written for Cash. Building
to a rumbling crescendo, he belts out, “And the mercy seat is smokin’/
And I think my head is meltin’.” This would’ve brought even Gary
Gilmore to tears.”

i don’t even like country.