Bill turned me onto a couple new (to me) blogs by a local guy named Chris Tingom. One is brainfuel.tv, which tends to have a lot of good web design critique and analysis. The other is Arizona Coffee, a topic near and dear to my heart. (I like to spend time around the corner at Stonegrounds, using their free WiFi to work from “home” :-) ).
Recently in Life And How To Live It Category
Camino is a web borwser for the Mac that wraps a native OS X interface around the popular Gecko rendering engine. It’s fast, and renders 99.8% of sites exactly like Firefox. After 1.0 came out, Idecide to try it out as my main web browser.
End result? I liked the interface a lot, but two things brought me back to Firefox:
- Find-As-You-Type (FAYT): I had grown completely dependent on this before moving to Camino as my main browser. Even after a month, I was typing to find stuff. Muscle memory is hard to change.
- Also in the muscle-memory category: Camino does not focus the address-bar when creating new tabs. My shortcut for a new Google search (a surprising percentage of my “new tab” activity) was Cmd-T-tab. I simply could not get my fingers to do Cmd-T-Cmd-Shift-F.
- Visual irritations: In the dock, I could not seem to stop clicking on that bright orange-and-blue globe. The click-area on the Camino icon seems smaller, and the blue icon blends in with about 8 other deep-sky-blue app icons.
I still detest the form elements in the Mozilla strain of Gecko. But apparently my fingers care more than my eyes do in this case.
Looking back at our fresh starts & modest changes:
Throughout this month, a wonderful quote from Walden has been turning over in my head:
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives.
So just as, in this instance, new clothes can be seen as a fancy uniform that won’t produce in its wearer the skills, mind, or experience for their intended vocation, our new year’s resolutions usually leave us feeling like a chump and a failure.
In thinking about my own position in life and work, I actually came to a similar conclusion about myself, before reading this post. But of course, Thoreau says it much better than I could have.
Man, I am SO BEHIND on the blogging thing. Since I last posted we’ve had Christmas, visits from family, a trip to the Christmas fair, and today Adelina started school. Wow.
So, be patient and I’ll get out a series of posts soon catching up. :-)
Creating Passionate Users: Kill the television, keep the shows
Interesting.
After 7-ish years of using the vacuum we got when we got married, Jodi and I finally decided that it just wasn’t cutting it anymore. We’d heard the buzz about the Dyson vacuums, and thought we’d investigate this multi-hundred-dollar marvel.
Well, we talked ourselves into it. We came home from Lowe’s (half a block from our house) with a Dyson DC-14 Low Reach. So… was it worth it?
Heck, YES.
This vaccuum SUCKS. And I mean that in the best possible way. It’s pretty quiet, the thing is engineered to the hilt (execpt for one removable peice that I’m still scratching my head over - “why is that removable?”) and it handled pretty much everything I threw at it, including the two cat-hair covered IKEA Poäng armchairs that Jake and Lucy sleep on all day long.
Before I was done vacuuming the house, I had to empty the bin several times from all the dust, dirt, and cat-hair the Dyson sucked out of my recently-vacuumed carpets. It also does bare floors better than a broom, and (using the included low-reach tool) gets under furniture with a mere 2.5” of clearance.
Yes, I’m hyperventilating over a vacuum cleaner, it’s that good. And heck, it’s a toy that both a geek and a house-wife can love!
Update: |Seth| wondered on IM if I was now a BzzAgent. Um, no. Not my bag. If I’m shrieking about a product here it’s probably that I own it and love it, or just want it really really really badly. ;-)
|Jodi| and I used to live in an old Victorian home in historic Port Norfolk, Va, which we renovated to a large degree. We loved it! Soon after we moved in, my parents moved into a house down the street. (Unfortunately Google’s data for each of those is a few houses off, but you get the idea.)
Well, Dad’s never been able to leave well enough alone (for which I love him dearly) and — being an architect with a penchant for history — he went and started himself a home show to help others learn how to restore and renovate homes in several of Portsmouth’s historic neighborhoods, including Port Norfolk. There’s even an article that appeared on the front page of the local newspaper. (PDF version with picture)
Go Dad!!
Because I’m always trying and failing to get things done, I’m investigating the latest in productivity memes. Gad, I’ll try just about anything if it’ll help.
Update: I just purchased the book from Amazon. For $10, it’s worth buying so I can mark it up, etc as I read. If I end up not pursuing it further, I can pass it on only having spent $10.
This was a project weekend. There were a nummber of projects I’d been slacking on, and finally got to working on Saturday and Sunday.
- L.T.’s dresser, which used to look like this, has been completely stripped and this weeked got both a coat of primer and a coat of white high-gloss.
- The dresser also got a new top, thanks to Lowe’s and a neighbor’s router. Oh, and I managed to slice my finger open on the router bit. A trip to Ugent Care and some Dermabond later, I’m back in business. Ew.
- We recently got a new sectional sofa, and ordered a new bed. The bed came in yesterday, and we picked it up and put it together. This, of course, meant re-arranging the master bedroom and moving pictures around the house.
- I also primed and started painting a set of shelves to go in LT’s room.
- Plastered the hole in the back of LT’s closet where I had to pull wire for the hall lights…
That seems to be it. Long weekend. Ready for the week. :-)
