April, 2007

Personal stuff — 2 Comments
30
Apr 07

learning

i’m struck today, for like the millionth time, how much there is to learn, how much there is to practice, how much there is to improve. i realized some this afternoon that i’ve been unintentionally communicating a bunch of emotions that i don’t actually have — i’ve been emoting very grouchy/grumpy, when that’s not something i actually feel. as i’ve mentioned a bunch of times, i feel that i’m in a super-charmed part of my life, where everything feels great, including work, family and health. i remember having the same feeling at stanford in the spring of my last year — everything was lazy afternoons at Sunken Diamond eating a slushy. but i guess that’s not what my external visage has been communicating to everyone here, so i need to work on that some.

anyway, i’m just reminded that no matter how long i’ve been doing certain things, no matter how much i practice, there are always, always things i need to work on more, get better at, and relearn.

sometimes that realization is tough for me — but at the moment, i’m sort of refreshed by it.

Mozilla — Comments Off
30
Apr 07

attack on the web

ray’s speech today about silverlight is a full-on attack on the web, on open tools, on multi-lateral approaches to moving things forward. it’s a pitch to keep the web static and use proprietary & closed stacks. the demos look great of course. but make no mistake: this isn’t the world wide web (in every sense).

Ozzie’s quiet revolution at Microsoft | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

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Web/Tech — Comments Off
30
Apr 07

Letter Perfect, by David Sacks


I’ve had this book around for 2 or 3 years — I kept reading a chapter or two, then putting it down. I finally got through it the past few weeks — it’s an interesting book. It’s all about our alphabet, and how it came to be the way it is, in terms of which letters are in our alphabet, how they look, and how they sound. After the introduction, there’s a chapter for each letter — some are better than others, for sure. My favorite is on the letter “E” (always the glory hog, at least in English — see, there E goes again, starting that word) — and how it’s derived from a semitic character that is itself derived from an earlier character that was effectively “hey!” — both in meaning & pronunciation — and that the capital E letter shape itself is really from a person with both arms up yelling (rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees — teh end bars are the person’s arms, the middle is the head). Funny.

Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.

OSX / Web/Tech — 1 Comment
30
Apr 07

dual booting into Vista experiences

i may have mentioned this before, but i’m going to try pretty hard to start booting into Vista from time to time. i’d like to understand what it feels like to use Vista, and i want to keep in touch with what things feel like on the Windows side. although i have to say that right now, i think Vista is still on the exotic side. most things don’t work quite right, the visual effects are interesting, but mostly not productivity-oriented.

one small thing: i’ve gotten my bluetooth mouse & keyboard to work, but it wasn’t enabled by default. or, rather, i had to go into properties for each one after i set them up & let Vista know that i wanted my mouse to “use mouse capabilities”. sigh.

on the font stuff in my blog, the reason that it’s showing as significantly more readable in Firefox is that there’s a css setting called moz-opacity that’s set to 40%, but that’s not supported by Safari. matters less on Windows because the font backs up to be Lucida, instead of Futura, which is installed on Macs by default. need to figure out a different styling to make it work better on Safari, otherwise might need to go to dark text against a light background again.

Personal stuff / Weblogs — 2 Comments
29
Apr 07

still monkeying

starting to understand wordpress, css & this particular theme a little better. definitely not finished yet — not happy with the colors or layout quite yet, and realized that the Hemmingway theme is using some moz-specific stuff to make the text look better than it does on Safari & IE, so still have some work to do.

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