Archive of March 2005
This is and has been
This is and has been the essential fact of my existence, and I have known it for as long as I can remember knowing: that I am alone. That no matter what transcendent or grievous experience I will have, no sorrow, no joy and indeed no failure or success that I will achieve will I ever be able to share with another human being or extend beyond myself. That no matter how cold or long the walk home, when I arrive the bed I sink into will be empty. I know this more deeply than any other truth as all men know this. This is the dark and ineffable core of every nameless black depression that stretches without boundary, and the root also - the Alpha and indeed the Omega - of the search for God.
Ambrosius Amatus Faber, Deus Meminit
Softwares
My previous post about Safari and Firefox
update: I’m back on Firefox. The determining factors ended up being a combination of Adblock and Safari’s general instability. Another advantage to firefox which I had forgotten is the option to force all open-to-new-window links to open to a new tab, instead.
got me thinking about issues of default applications and workflow and such. I realized that I spend an awful lot of time and energy, and duplicate an awful lot of work in switching between and among programs which do the same thing. The issue of going between browsers is just the beginning, but it’s also a good example. Any time I need to or decide to switch from browser to another, I have to update my bookmarks, synchronize my preferences, and start a new history. This a) takes up a lot of time and is no fun, and b) completely cuts off my continuity in terms of trying to find something I had seen or backtrack through my browsing history.
I also found that thinking about and formally laying out what programs I use, for what tasks, helps to alleviate the issue. Read More »
The great dilemma of my life
I am torn; unceasingly I flop back and forth, never settled, and every time I think I’ve arrived at some conclusion I am immediately beset by doubt and second-guessing.
I am a man who cannot settle on a browser.
Let’s look at the pros and cons here:
Safari has webkit, a beautiful html rendering system. It has a native state-of-the-art GUI, with fonts and controls consistent with the rest of the OS. It has PithHelmet, which lets me apply CSS stylesheets to individual pages (eg: John Hicks’ Del.icio.us hack) and kind of does ad-blocking.
Firefox has extensions; namely, Adblock and Foxylicious. Foxylicious, which maintains a semi-live del.icio.us bookmarks folder, I can probably make do without. Adblock, on the other hand, completely blows PithHelmet out of the water; the simple ability to right click on an image and then create a fliter from that image (or object)’s URL is so useful, and so much more powerful than PithHelmet’s “Block images from server” function, - and its method of excising those ads so much more effective than PH’s - that it alone has compelled me to use Firefox as my main browser. That, and ‘/’ for i-search.
But Safari is so pretty. And plays so much nicer with the rest of the damn operating system.
Any thoughts? Safari solutions or PithHelmet functions that I’ve overlooked? Help me achieve peace.
Link
via Dan Dickinson:
Transparent Screens - a photoset on Flickr
This is pretty legit. I can’t quite tell if it would be insanely difficult or trivially easy to replicate.
Note: as soon as I figure out why my del.icio.us plugin isn’t working, and fix it, links will be in the sidebar rather than the main page.
In Praise of Wallpaper
I have big plans; I have a dream. I have a dream, a personal vision, for the world of art, and for my own ascent to dizzying heights of wealth and influence.
I will open an art gallery.
Read More »Album Review: Character by Dark Tranquillity
These are dark days, my friends, my children. Of late I have found myself standing in the shadow of winter, my health dwindling, the massive burden of work getting heavier upon my shoulders, my life itself crashing down around my ears - and to add insult to injury, this Saturday night, while on break (my vacation was fucking lousy. Who has a good vacation these days? Why bother asking?), I found myself watching, of all things, Headbanger’s Ball on MTV2. Read More »
Album Review: Leviathan by Mastodon
You are incredibly lame. It’s a fact of this modern existence; life within the confines of society - nay, liberal arts college - has reduced the criteria for greatness to not showering and being able to murder an amp in front of approximately 35 apathetic teens. Modern man, sadly, does not need to ever submit his soul to the forging fires of Viking raids, hand to hand combat, or, say, the dogged and single-minded pursuit across the entire globe of that greatest and most terrible of creatures, the white whale. Read More »
Concert Review: RJD2 at North Six w/ Rob Sonic and Diplo
So I saw RJD2 at North Six last Saturday. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on hip-hop. Of all the subgenres of popular music to specialize in, I’d wager that I know about as much about hip-hop as most of the kids at Bard; id est, not as much as I think I do. Read More »
