sunday

This is one of my favorite Get a Mac commercials (the other one being Self Pity).

And to top it off, here’s today’s CAD comic:

There’s been a lot of criticism how badly IE6 sucked and how great of an improvement IE7 is for Microsoft. Frankly, I still think IE7 sucks. All the “improvements” made were unoriginal except for the tab thumbnail view. Yay. Well, for some odd reason, after trying the whole load-as-many-tabs-as-you-can-in-Friefox demostration, I decided I’d try it in IE to see what happened. Well, nothing exciting. Unlike Firefox, you can’t mouse-scroll between the first and last tabs. And when you use the arrows at the end of the toolbar, it automatically highlights the first tab and takes you there anyways, even though I didn’t want to change tabs.

So there I am, surfing the internet with about 13 tabs open. I only used IE7 for about 30 minutes that night before I shut it down entirely and went back to Firefox. The next day, I run Adaware. I usually try to run Adaware on a daily basis, or at least every time there’s an update to the virus definition. And I normally get only one or zero critical objects that I need to quarantine and delete. Well, after running IE7 for 30 minutes, the next day I had 13 critical objects. So which browser is still more secure?

I’m confused why IT professionals are loving IE7 so much and hating on how Firefox 2.0 is not that big of an improvement. Well, when you’ve reached rock bottom, there’s only one way to go: up. Firefox 2.0 didn’t have a lot of improvements because they didn’t have a lot of room to improve. Duh.

And the only reason Firefox hasn’t overtaken the internet world is because of all the average users who are too lazy to download Firefox. I’m sure if every PC came preloaded with IE and Firefox, people would be more inclined to use Firefox. You know how the saying goes, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. The problem is when you don’t realize it’s broke.

I know this relatively old news, but I stumbled upon it in a Wired post. About 18 months ago, Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams lost his voice to a rare condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia. While doctor’s have told him that no one has ever fully recovered from the condition, Adams manages to “remap his brain” and speak again.

As the Wired post says, “This is a very affecting personal story, written with soul and no self-pity. The comments are worth a read too.”

Ditto.

In case you missed it, here’s Part I of Wired’s columnist Lore Sjöberg.

His second week, called “MySpace, Now With Random Crap”, entails adding some flair to his page. (Now Lore, why would you call colorful backgrounds and blaring music “crap”?) My favorite on his take of MySpace: “It is the 21st century, and we are all each other’s Hummel figurines. I think MySpace should take a hint from collectible figure games like HeroClix, and find a way to let you make your friends fight.” I would definitely join MySpace just for that.

The new Dead or Alive Extreme 2, brought to you by GameTrailers.com in HD.

Also see Duck and cover! Duck and cover!.

Are ads really that annoying? I find pop-ups fucking annoying, but that’s because they’re impeding with what I’m trying to do at the moment on the internet. But if riding the metro or walking from on station to the next, I wouldn’t mind a couple of visual enhancements like these in Japan. Who wouldn’t want a free mysterious goody bag?

I’ve seen an example of $10 on Washington’s very own Metro. I think somewhere along the red line (from Dupont to Friendship Heights) they had an ad that was seen much like a flipbook as you passed by. I wish they had more of those.

Women whose biological clocks are rapidly ticking have resorted to conning their boyfriends into parenthood by either saying they’re on the Pill or they’re protected when they’re really not. According to these women, they want to have children but they’re significant others are not ready. So they think that having a baby will make them “snap out of” boyhood into manhood and suddenly they’ll take on the responsibility of being fathers. I had initially assumed that these manipulating women kept the baby because they could afford to support the child in case the duped father backed out of parenthood. But…

We don’t hear about the cases in which a guy suspects he’s been duped into fatherhood- but ultimately turns to mush in the soft glow of the sonogram monitor. But as cavalier as certain women are about the “nudge,” not all men react so favorably when the “good news” is delivered—especially if they find out they’ve been snowed. Jody’s boyfriend more or less freaked out. She terminated the pregnancy, then their relationship slowly dissolved. “It felt a little like the fun was taken out of everything,” she says. “He was shocked and scared.”

I think those women are selfish and manipulative. Having a child is not just a woman’s choice, especially if she thinks once the guy sees the sonogram he’ll want to have the kid. It’s definitely something that’s talked about and planned BEFORE conception. If the scenario was different where the woman says she’ll support the child by herself after going through the entire scheme (and the father is still shell-shocked by the news), then I have nothing against those women; that just becomes a case of natural in vitro fertilization. As one enraged father said, “She was pregnant all of May, all of June, and all of July…I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?’ She’s like, ‘I didn’t want you to influence my decision.’ Something that has potential impact on me for the rest of my life, she doesn’t want me influencing her decision!?”

Giving that guy the nudge into manhood wasn’t these women’s only justification. “I think that’s more the way it is now than it was back in the day when you had to marry someone before you got pregnant. Marriage doesn’t matter now,” says the same Jody as above. I think our standards and sense of values are in a pitiful state if it’s come to this. It’s pretty sad that a well-respected account manager in her 30’s doesn’t think marriage is necessary to have a child (sounds like another stupid girl to me). No it’s not necessary, but it’s unfair for the child and the guy who has to pay child support when he was lied to from the beginning about safe-sex. It’s always fun and games until someone gets hurt.

With the near-imminent releases of IE7 and Firefox 2.0, there has been much debate over which browser is better. I’ve stumbled upon several articles saying that IE7 has a lot of improvements and is a much better browser now, even more superior than Firefox, while others still say Firefox 2.0 trumps IE7. Being pretty biased, and if I may add a professional internet surfer, I am in favor of Firefox. Unfortunately for IE7, all their new features are unoriginal and long overdue.

But there is one thing that I read on Firefox 2.0 that I didn’t know before (and I’d supply the link but I don’t remember where I read this).

In Firefox 1.5, if you had too many tabs, Firefox would cut off the titles in the tabs or even overrun the menu. In 2.0, they’ve added the scrollbar and set an automatic width so that every tab title is still readable. Even though arrows are provided at each end of the tab menu, you can hover over the tabs and use your mouse to scroll between the first and last tabs.

I could say a lot of things about the people who still think IE7 is better than Firefox, or the critics who think Firefox will never overtake IE’s market share, but I’ll refrain. Just this time.

This street-legal 1971 Vauxhall Victor, dubbed Red Victor One by creator Andy Hall, does 0 to 60 in 1 second. Hall estimates the car costs $187,000 (a mere £100,000), which is a lot more than you can get from an £850,000 Bugatti. Red Victor One includes 2200bhp 9.3 liter V8 engine and does the quarter mile in 7.8 seconds, whereas the Bugatti does it in 9.4 seconds. As the interviewer says, “it’s naughty…sitting in here just feels perverse.”

A funny article written by Lore Sjoreberg detailing his adventures in MySpace. In part one, he succumbs to the allure of the garish social network and sets up his profile. His first encounter brings him to the birth date box, where he’s “not clear on the details, but I understand that on MySpace, no matter your actual age, you generally say you’re 14.”

Further down the road, he notices that his first friend is Tom, who agrees to answer all his questions only if he’s read the FAQ first. According to Lore, “I can’t say that I know what makes someone a true friend, but I’d say one of the major qualifications is that they’re willing to answer questions without making you read a FAQ.”

As he makes his way through the forests of uploading pictures and filling out about me sections, personality, interests, music, books, etc. he finds himself at the “People I’d like to meet” section. And as Lore smartly points out, “If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn’t be sitting on my ass filling out a MySpace profile.”

It’s comical, and very true. Especially the part about the ugliness.