Oh, yeah. Major props to Ian Main, who wrote the beautiful stylesheed I just converted to using. The style’s called “Human Condition,” and took 3rd place in the WordPress Style Competition.
Month: June 2004
Post #116
I was starting a new post, and saw that I had an empty draft called “Post #116”, and I figured “heck, that’s a good enough title for me!”
Anyway, the inimitable Alex King has created a plugin for WordPress called “WP Unformatted,” and it’s pretty neat. It basically allows me to turn off the stupid auto-formatting and “happy quotes” on a post-by-post basis. I’ll probably only ever use it if I post code, but it’s nice that it’s there.
And there’s another plugin that I just installed as well called LivePress that adds some nifty LiveJournal-like features (and the ability to sync between LiveJournal and WordPress); I’ve added in “Current Mood” and “Current Music” just to spice things up.
More later? I hope to start using the blog on a more regular basis, but I guess time will tell.
Update: Ugh. I hated how those extra lines looked, so I killed the plugins. Maybe in a few versions when the “Current Mood” and “Current Music” use the same CSS elements as the rest of the stories, I’ll re-enable it. Or if I get bored enough to (a) learn CSS, and (b) decide to debug the lpmoods.css file myself.
Refrigerator poetry
This site, which I found linked from “. . . she’s a flight risk.”, is pretty cool. Virtual refrigerator poetry is a neat concept. I haven’t had much time to look at it as of yet, but maybe once I leave work I’ll check it out.
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“…sleeping is a gateway drug to being awake…” [They Might be Giants, “Wearing a Raincoat”]
Microsoft vs. Apple
Well, not really. Just an observation, to tell the truth.
Setting up a new dialup connection on a Mac (with OS X) seems to take about 5 minutes when you’re talking to a dumb user. There are two tabs to fill in, and a total of 3 essential blanks on those tabs (4 if your ISP doesn’t supply DNS servers automatically). Maybe 10 mouseclicks total, including selecting fields to type in.
Setting up a new dialup connection on a PC (with Windows XP) seems to take about 15 minutes when you’re talking to a user of equivalent dumbness. The Windows XP “Create a new connection” wizard has 8 screens, one of which has ZERO options on it. If you need to specify DNS servers, there are at least 3 additional windows to go through. And this isn’t counting the sequence of navigation tasks necessary to get to the “new connection wizard” in the first place.
If I knew how to program Windows applications, I would definitely make something that looks like the Apple Network Preferences window, and have it generate the appropriate registry settings to create a new dialup connection (complete with the two tabs on a single window), and convince every ISP in the country to distribute it to new users. I’d even make the program fit on a floppy (or even a 8MB USB memory stick for users without floppy drives). Tech support workers everywhere would love me.
New post
I suppose I should put something new on the front page, since it’s been far too long.
I upgraded a couple of things recently.
- Tasks has gone to version 2.1b1, and has some nice new benefits (most of which I’ll never use, but still…). I’m kinda glad I gave Alex some dough; it’s probably the best program I’ve ever paid for.
- b. has progressed to 1.4.3 while I wasn’t looking; I updated that. This is probably the best bookmark manager I’ve found; it does pretty much exactly what I want it to do. You should check it out.
That’s pretty much it. I’ll probably be upgrading WordPressto the 1.2 beta (if I can find it).