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.

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).