Jason’s Pointless Blog

I just can’t go back to Safari. For all FireFox’s quirks, its lack of suckage makes up for it.

To celebrate, let’s all have some porcupine pie!

I’ve decided to switch to FireFox 3 Beta for a week. I have been a solid Safari user and supporter since it came out, but the latest versions have all been horrible. Terrible even. Always beachballing and freezing up causing slowdown and making the OS run sluggish.

In the half hour I’ve used FireFox I’ve noticed quite an improvement over Safari. So I will use it for a week. After that time I will decide whether or not to keep it or go back to Safari.

Some pros:
It looks nice. Very Safari-ish. Clean and streamlined. After setting the icons to small and getting rid of the huge oversized back button it looks almost liike Safari from the future.

It’s fast. To me it feels much better than Safari. No beachballs. No slowdown. Nothing but browsing bliss.

It brought in all my Safari bookmarks. I don’t have too many, a few sites here and there all neatly organized. First thing I did when I opened Firefox was DELETE ALL THE STOCK BOOKMARKS, all of them, and import Safari’s back in again. Clean, fresh, none of that shitty “New PC, here’s a bunch of crap software we install by default because the companies paid us to do it but you can remove it if you fell like a few hours of deleting software you never wanted in the first place” feel anymore. I’m a Mac user. I like it simple. So long default bookmarks! Sayonara!

Some cons: (Maybe they can be remedied)
I miss my vast history. I had every page I visited for the last year in my history. I could open OS X’s Help menu and search my history to find anything I was previously looking at. Obviously I can still do that with Firefox, but it only imported my bookmarks, not my history. But such is life.

It’s not WebKit. Call me crazy, but I get off on how something looks. I can tell if an icon is a pixel wrong or if a page looks a pixel off between browsers, I was used to Safari’s CSS3 effects and shadows and such. Also, I was used to Safari’s lack of “focus rings” (i.e. those dotted lines that form around links when clicked.) and to now have them back and burning my eyes is just a small complaint. If something looks wrong, I will make it look right or damned if I put up with it.

I miss Inquisitor. More often than not, I will type something in Safari’s “Search” box and hit Shift+Return (My key combo for searching Wikipedia instead of Google.) to open it in Wikipedia. This allowed me to search normally, or search Wikipedia on a whim without having to change an option. Now, Firefox does allow me to switch between searching each site, but that actually means I have to manually change it. I’m a lazy son of a bitch. I want my shortcuts dammit!

In a week I expect to write up whether or not I will stay.

Watching Back to the Future (The whole thing) again a thought crosses my mind, as it does every time I watch the movies. Why in all those years could they not afford to save the clock tower? Replacing a clock can’t be that expensive. Not only had they been raising money for 60+ years (From 1955 when it was struck by lightning to at least 2015 at which point they were taking in hundreds of dollars in donations per person as opposed to the pocket change they were getting in 1985. If not since 1955, then at least since 1985.) but a clock like that couldn’t have cost that much.

Sure it’s a big clock. It’s about 8 feet in diameter or so, but it’s still the same components as a normal gear-based clock mechanism.

The clock tower was installed in 1885 and struck by lightning in 1955 causing it to stop. Now how did it stop? In 1885 it was probably, most likely powered by a pendulum. No electricity. If they kept it pendulum powered until the 1950’s then logically, could lightning stop the clock? Now, it could have been damaged, maybe a gear was broken by the force of the lightning hitting the tower. If so, a gear would be a lot less costly than a whole clock, right? Now, if they did switch to electricity in the early 20th century, logically couldn’t they still afford to replace the electric motor?

It looks like a fairly simple clock. Nothing special and elaborate. Just a clock with big gears and big hands. If they wanted the clock to stay stopped for historical reasons, there wouldn’t be a fundraiser running to fix it.

The logical answer to this question? Plot device. Still, other than to provide Marty with a piece of paper to write Jennifer’s number on (If she’s his girlfriend, why doesn’t he already have her number?) and give Marty and Doc a means to return to 1985, there’s no reason. Plot device.

Okay, stupid title. Who cares?

Apparently the MacBooks have a well known design flaw that causes part of the thin plastic around the edges of the palm rests to crack and break off. Thankfully this is covered by AppleCare and their warranty.

Unfortunately early last week my poor MacBook got the crack on the front right edge of the palm rest. But fortunately my MacBook is still under warranty. So tomorrow I am taking it over to MacOutfitters to have it fixed. Of course this will take a few days, hopefully just two, but maybe more (Depending on the speed of delivery of the part.) so I am now preparing for her absence by transferring what files I will require to survive over to my trusty old Mac mini. It’s a first generation G4 Mac mini with a “slow as moles asses in winter” 4200RPM HD and a dead FireWire port.

Tomorrow she goes in for repair. Here’s to a speedy recovery, and new keyboard.

Kristen, we worked together at K-Mart #3737 from 2003 to 2004. I’m sorry I pushed you away three years ago. I was caught in my own little introverted world. I didn’t know what I wanted and I didn’t realize what I was losing. Now you’ve moved away and I can never get you back. Not only that, but you will probably never read this. I don’t even know your last name.

I still have those notes you left for me at work. And the paper plane we made together. Remember “The Chronicles of Riddick”? Remember how they accidentally played “Garfield” instead? Remember the library? Remember sitting with me making me watch “The Nightmare Before Christmas”? If I could have that time back I would do it differently. I would do it all so much better… (Cue The Bravery.)

It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. It’s that I was “comfortable” where I was. And you were trying to change me. Back then I wanted to be alone. I wasn’t ready for the real world. Now I wish I had let you change me. In a way you did. You helped crack my shell so to speak.

I wish I had kept in touch with you. I wish I had gotten a forwarding address, a phone number, something to keep you from becoming a fading memory.