Sunday, July 04, 2004
I believe the technical term is gash.
I probably ought to delete yesterday's drivel. But I shan't, working on the premise of publish and be damned. Admittedly I don't think that was originally intended for this context. Basically, I apologise for writing stuff I've already covered, and doing so badly. Remind me for next time: never write whilst under the influence of low blood sugar. Yes, I did forget to eat for a large chunk of yesterday.
I've still got 4 or 5 things to go haven't I? Right, well then, first of all, I've been experimenting with browsers other than MSIE. This is following an edict round here that Internet Explorer use was banned (because of security flaws which even Microsoft class as critical). Ok, so the person who sent out this command was later seen checking their bank account online via IE, because "it's easier, it's in the menu".
Firstly there's Netscape [there's a link the browser download somewhere in there - try bottom of the left sidebar]. Which has gone downhill since I used it last. It seems to be aiming at tricking people away from Outlook Express, and into a morass of AOL themed programmes. Unfortunately I don't use Outlook, and don't really want a single object for all my communication needs. So much of the Netscape suite is useless to me. Which as the thing appears to load it all [even if you've told it not to], every time you open a new window, this gets annoying. Netscape is bloated and slow. The browser itself has a curious lack of features that one takes for granted in IE. It's also got the annoying habit of not displaying the "alt" text on pictures when you leave the mouse over them. According to the help website, it's because using the alt option like this is wrong. Gee thanks for that, now once you've finished correcting me, would you mind telling me how to make the thing work.
So next I tried Mozilla's Firefox [formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix]. Which is apparently a standalone browser from the same stables as Netscape [I'm not sure which stables they are, as there's a whole armada of incestuous companies and products]. Which is much better. It still has problems with graphics based pages. Hotmail in particular spends ages juddering about as the different sections and images load [odd that that an MS brand item works poorly in a non-MS product]. And can anyone tell me how to edit the contents of the Go menu's recently viewed list? It lists the last 10 or so pages that the browser has visited. The website says "in the current session", but they remain there even after a complete shutdown. The only way I've found so far is to use the Tools > Options > Privacy > Clear All button. Individually weeding out from the History the sites that one wishes to hide [e.g. Blogger] doesn't seem to work.
I do like the fact there's a Google search box in the corner [and the fact you can add and use other search engines to the box, should you so choose]. Being able to sort the History in many ways is also quite funky [I know it's in here somewhere. It was after I read that thing in the NYT, but before I started playing with b3ta].
All this can probably be summed up by the fact that gmail gives a warning about the browser being unsupported if one's using Netscape, but not if one's using Firefox. That and the Blogger's Post text box not automatically wrapping the contents for Netscape, but doing so for Firefox [have you tried typing when you can only read the previous five words? Some might suggest I ought to be able to know what precisely I've written, but my mind is never that organised]. Strangely Firefox won't break a word, and so normal text wraps itself, but the moment a long winded URL goes in, it sticks out at the side [so there's a horizontal scroll bar. Despite this the normal text stays the same shape, which is the width of the window frame, and not the width of the widest contents].
So I'm Firefoxing for the time being (until I found a browser that couples the features and functions of both FF and IE, such as allowing Ctrl+N to open the same page in a different window, not the default home page. But at least shift+leftclick works). And apparently FF allows you to install extensions that make it act a bit more like the bits of IE you want. Now all I need to do is figure out how to do that, and which ones I actually want (and the betting I manage to turn it into the nightmarish Netscape...?).
So is that one or two? Well, two products but one review...
One problem though - I didn't export the MSIE bookmarks, so now checking blogs consists of technorating my way around, and discovering just quite how interconnected the people I read are - even if I discovered them individually [how to get from Anna the jingle lady to Signal + Noise or Casino Avenue to Southern Cross? ATJL to GfB to AFOE to CT to CC to S+N [although there are other routes through the great cluster of liberal blogs and media].
Coincidentally City Comforts is bemused by the phrases "to go missing" and "went missing". Does this mean they don't really occur in American English? He [and others] seem to think they're new forms that have only recently occurred. I thought they'd been around since time immemorial (or at least since people started falling off cliffs on dark nights). The prompt for his thoughts came from Arts and Letters Daily, but I can't seem to find the original [ALD features a bewildering amount articles that one probably should read - including, of course, articles debating whether information excess can cause stupefying insularity. Speaking of which, there appears to be a sister site: SciTech Daily].
Drat, once again I start a post with the intention of rational and concise, and then attempt to do the research whilst I'm writing it. This approach does not work, as then whilst I should be writing about Casino Avenue highlighting ship noises on the Waterloo and City line, I'm in fact reading about the WaPo[1] creating poor taste puns on memefirst [Scarily I know what the headline "Bush jumps the shark" means].
[1] When did we get back into this part of the cycle? The 1930's gave us a collection of SoHo's [along with all the Chas and Thos Bros's, and plethora of -co's, such as Tesco]. For a while things revelled in their ungainly names, then came the regeneration of initials and acronyms [LA, KL, NY: I'm picking the ones that for most part weren't chosen to be initials, unlike NATO]. And it's back to collections of syllables, eg. SoCal, TriBeCa, KenChel [maybe I made that one up, but you can bet Foxtons will start to use it soon]. Only know it's switched from being places to things. Hence WaPo for Washington Post [pronouncing URL phonetically seems to give similar results, for example ex.ac.uk or ox.ac.uk, although these don't sound all that nice]. By the way does anyone know the name of this form of contraction? And what else is ripe for such reduction? NeYoTi, SyMoHe. Most of the UK papers are out having cumbersome The's and Daily's. Most modern brands are streamlined already, except the unusual GlaSmiKliBe, which really doesn't lend itself to contraction [think pharmaceuticals].
I'm now trying to think of brands that are two of more words. And they're all mainly initials already - HP, BT, KPMG. And CoCo for Coca Cola is meaningless as it implies either chocolate or Chanel. Actually there are a heck of a lot that this process mangles in rubbish or something quite nasty sounding. BiBe for Big Ben, CanWha for the great glass phallus, BuckHo has already been done [well technically it's BuPa, which is something unrelated, unless the entire place is actually a Bupa care home], HyPa and RePa for the two big parks, ClaCom for Clapham Common sounds too like the Clapham alone, TrafSqa and LecSqa, OxStre...it really just doesn't work, does it?
So what about internet brands? GeFoBe, CasAv, SoCro, WeWa [which sounds vaguely related to that interestingly named ITV reporter, Nina Nana, who was in fact born in an ambulance with the siren going. Except people with names like Florence or Brooklyn were usually conceived there...I'm not even going to think about it. Apparently she's also a German song. I can only find 3 links for her, and none of them exactly official: 1, 2, 3. Oh apparently it's Nannar].
Right, well I'm going back to scavenging bits of CiCo's [now that's an unfortunate one] book.
Anyhoo,
I probably ought to delete yesterday's drivel. But I shan't, working on the premise of publish and be damned. Admittedly I don't think that was originally intended for this context. Basically, I apologise for writing stuff I've already covered, and doing so badly. Remind me for next time: never write whilst under the influence of low blood sugar. Yes, I did forget to eat for a large chunk of yesterday.
I've still got 4 or 5 things to go haven't I? Right, well then, first of all, I've been experimenting with browsers other than MSIE. This is following an edict round here that Internet Explorer use was banned (because of security flaws which even Microsoft class as critical). Ok, so the person who sent out this command was later seen checking their bank account online via IE, because "it's easier, it's in the menu".
Firstly there's Netscape [there's a link the browser download somewhere in there - try bottom of the left sidebar]. Which has gone downhill since I used it last. It seems to be aiming at tricking people away from Outlook Express, and into a morass of AOL themed programmes. Unfortunately I don't use Outlook, and don't really want a single object for all my communication needs. So much of the Netscape suite is useless to me. Which as the thing appears to load it all [even if you've told it not to], every time you open a new window, this gets annoying. Netscape is bloated and slow. The browser itself has a curious lack of features that one takes for granted in IE. It's also got the annoying habit of not displaying the "alt" text on pictures when you leave the mouse over them. According to the help website, it's because using the alt option like this is wrong. Gee thanks for that, now once you've finished correcting me, would you mind telling me how to make the thing work.
So next I tried Mozilla's Firefox [formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix]. Which is apparently a standalone browser from the same stables as Netscape [I'm not sure which stables they are, as there's a whole armada of incestuous companies and products]. Which is much better. It still has problems with graphics based pages. Hotmail in particular spends ages juddering about as the different sections and images load [odd that that an MS brand item works poorly in a non-MS product]. And can anyone tell me how to edit the contents of the Go menu's recently viewed list? It lists the last 10 or so pages that the browser has visited. The website says "in the current session", but they remain there even after a complete shutdown. The only way I've found so far is to use the Tools > Options > Privacy > Clear All button. Individually weeding out from the History the sites that one wishes to hide [e.g. Blogger] doesn't seem to work.
I do like the fact there's a Google search box in the corner [and the fact you can add and use other search engines to the box, should you so choose]. Being able to sort the History in many ways is also quite funky [I know it's in here somewhere. It was after I read that thing in the NYT, but before I started playing with b3ta].
All this can probably be summed up by the fact that gmail gives a warning about the browser being unsupported if one's using Netscape, but not if one's using Firefox. That and the Blogger's Post text box not automatically wrapping the contents for Netscape, but doing so for Firefox [have you tried typing when you can only read the previous five words? Some might suggest I ought to be able to know what precisely I've written, but my mind is never that organised]. Strangely Firefox won't break a word, and so normal text wraps itself, but the moment a long winded URL goes in, it sticks out at the side [so there's a horizontal scroll bar. Despite this the normal text stays the same shape, which is the width of the window frame, and not the width of the widest contents].
So I'm Firefoxing for the time being (until I found a browser that couples the features and functions of both FF and IE, such as allowing Ctrl+N to open the same page in a different window, not the default home page. But at least shift+leftclick works). And apparently FF allows you to install extensions that make it act a bit more like the bits of IE you want. Now all I need to do is figure out how to do that, and which ones I actually want (and the betting I manage to turn it into the nightmarish Netscape...?).
So is that one or two? Well, two products but one review...
One problem though - I didn't export the MSIE bookmarks, so now checking blogs consists of technorating my way around, and discovering just quite how interconnected the people I read are - even if I discovered them individually [how to get from Anna the jingle lady to Signal + Noise or Casino Avenue to Southern Cross? ATJL to GfB to AFOE to CT to CC to S+N [although there are other routes through the great cluster of liberal blogs and media].
Coincidentally City Comforts is bemused by the phrases "to go missing" and "went missing". Does this mean they don't really occur in American English? He [and others] seem to think they're new forms that have only recently occurred. I thought they'd been around since time immemorial (or at least since people started falling off cliffs on dark nights). The prompt for his thoughts came from Arts and Letters Daily, but I can't seem to find the original [ALD features a bewildering amount articles that one probably should read - including, of course, articles debating whether information excess can cause stupefying insularity. Speaking of which, there appears to be a sister site: SciTech Daily].
Drat, once again I start a post with the intention of rational and concise, and then attempt to do the research whilst I'm writing it. This approach does not work, as then whilst I should be writing about Casino Avenue highlighting ship noises on the Waterloo and City line, I'm in fact reading about the WaPo[1] creating poor taste puns on memefirst [Scarily I know what the headline "Bush jumps the shark" means].
[1] When did we get back into this part of the cycle? The 1930's gave us a collection of SoHo's [along with all the Chas and Thos Bros's, and plethora of -co's, such as Tesco]. For a while things revelled in their ungainly names, then came the regeneration of initials and acronyms [LA, KL, NY: I'm picking the ones that for most part weren't chosen to be initials, unlike NATO]. And it's back to collections of syllables, eg. SoCal, TriBeCa, KenChel [maybe I made that one up, but you can bet Foxtons will start to use it soon]. Only know it's switched from being places to things. Hence WaPo for Washington Post [pronouncing URL phonetically seems to give similar results, for example ex.ac.uk or ox.ac.uk, although these don't sound all that nice]. By the way does anyone know the name of this form of contraction? And what else is ripe for such reduction? NeYoTi, SyMoHe. Most of the UK papers are out having cumbersome The's and Daily's. Most modern brands are streamlined already, except the unusual GlaSmiKliBe, which really doesn't lend itself to contraction [think pharmaceuticals].
I'm now trying to think of brands that are two of more words. And they're all mainly initials already - HP, BT, KPMG. And CoCo for Coca Cola is meaningless as it implies either chocolate or Chanel. Actually there are a heck of a lot that this process mangles in rubbish or something quite nasty sounding. BiBe for Big Ben, CanWha for the great glass phallus, BuckHo has already been done [well technically it's BuPa, which is something unrelated, unless the entire place is actually a Bupa care home], HyPa and RePa for the two big parks, ClaCom for Clapham Common sounds too like the Clapham alone, TrafSqa and LecSqa, OxStre...it really just doesn't work, does it?
So what about internet brands? GeFoBe, CasAv, SoCro, WeWa [which sounds vaguely related to that interestingly named ITV reporter, Nina Nana, who was in fact born in an ambulance with the siren going. Except people with names like Florence or Brooklyn were usually conceived there...I'm not even going to think about it. Apparently she's also a German song. I can only find 3 links for her, and none of them exactly official: 1, 2, 3. Oh apparently it's Nannar].
Right, well I'm going back to scavenging bits of CiCo's [now that's an unfortunate one] book.
Anyhoo,
