equivocal ramblings

I’ve just watched the second season of Jack Bauer 24, and all I can say is wow.

The man is tortured, beaten to a pulp, tortured, beaten some more, and yet is able to then run around and take down terrorists who are well rested, well armed and waiting for him to show up.

Oh, there’s also the fact that he can get from anywhere in Los Angeles to anywhere else in LA in a matter of minutes, no matter the time of day, except when someone is bleeding and it really matters. Then they have to wait for a chopper, and it doesn’t arrive in time.

Reality Distortion Field generators are definitely installed all over LA…

All in all though, I still wait for the next episode.

Technorati Tags: tv, 24, suspension of disbelief

I’ve decided to listen to every single track in my music collection — about 3000 items right now.

Now, it is as good as written in stone that I am not going to like every song on the album. Would you keep the tracks you’re never going to listen to for the sake of completeness, or not?

Assume you didn’t buy this on the iTMS, but rather ripped them from CDs just in case you’re factoring in money spent.

The INQ Little Difference 2005 awards list has to be one of the most sarcastic things I’ve read in a while. My favourites include:

Best Literary Work — Fiction: Intel for their 2005 roadmaps
Best Literary Work — Non-Fiction: AMD for their 2005 roadmaps
Apple: Lifetime Achievement in Marketing award for making so many people pay so much for worse audio quality than a 1970s cassette

Its amazing how the usage of email has changed. Once upon a time I could expect most, if not all of the email in my inbox to be of some value to me, something someone had taken time to write up (in plain text, no more) and it had purpose. The subject field still carried meaning with most people, and was filled in with an almost religious effort at meaningfulness. Ah, how I long for those days, when men were men and email was more of a communication vector, and not a public forum for the sharing of pretty pictures and smileys and all that crap.

Nowadays, the only serious email I get comes from clients. Friends no longer send email to say “Hi, how are you?” Actually, come to think of it, some of them do, but its more along the lines of, “Hi, hw r u???”

Its almost not worth my time checking my email anymore. The only folders in my inbox I scan with any effort are the mailing lists, and also an ‘approved’ smart folder.

Last night I installed the ICQ instant messenger and was thoroughly disgusted by what appeared to be a monstrosity of a user interface. Remembering that there was interoperability between AIM and ICQ, I decided today to download AIM and give that a shot.

Here is what I saw (Clicky for a larger version):

And I was shocked. The AIM of today is a far cry from the AIM of last year. This new client sports a custom skin; usually this is a bad thing, but I think they may actually have come up with one of the better examples of non-standard interfaces.

What was really shocking was that the client came with something called AIM Explorer — a web browser of all things. The first time I noticed it was when I attempted to recover my password, and I just stopped and stared for a few minutes.

It actually looked pretty okay, but after a few minutes of usage, I realised — this is what the Internet Explorer team is trying to do and failing misreably at. I mean, its subtly animated, got little glow effects, its blueish (duh), its got Firefox style tabs, and interestingly enough, it’s got anti-spyware/adware detectors for common stuff. Oh, and a working feed reader (Clicky for a larger version):

Lets not forget the thumbnails that appear when you move your pointer over a tab… Yes folks you read that right. Thumbnails. That work. That don’t slow you down. That aren’t ridiculously useless. Shocking.

Did I mention it’s based on Internet Explorer? Yeah, that part sort of got me off-guard too. The first browser to come out of AOL/Netscape not to suck, and its IE based, and beats the living daylight out of what the IE Team is pushing.

What iTunes needs is a “Now Playing” playlist. The idea is very well done in Rhythmbox (CVS), and basically its just a list where songs are enqueued when you double-click them in the library.

A very simple, yet effective feature. In iTunes, I currently have to drag and drop it into a playlist, and this just involves so much more effort than a simple double-click.

When in doubt about what music to play, put on Hell Freezes Over by The Eagles. Never fails to satisfy as background music.

Any other suggestions? Leave a comment.

I gave hosted publishing a try over at Wordpress.com, and after checking it out and trying to work with it, I’ve decided it isn’t meant to be. Something about not being able to choose my software, my own design, my own customisation, my own code if I so chose… it just troubles me.

Maybe I’m just spoilt, having good hosts, and free reign of the server.

I’ve always wondered why boot time matters so much in an operating system. Each release of Windows claims to boot faster, each release of <insert OS here> makes the same claim as well… And its not a secondary marketing point either — its put right up there with stability, reliablity, user-friendliness and so forth.

Why this matters so much I don’t know. Personally, I just turn the machine on, go make some coffee and come back to the pretty login screen.

Larger version

After five years of work, I’m glad they’ve improved the Application not responding dialog. Now, if they can just stop Windows Explorer from not responding…