I have changed the appearance of this blog by importing a stylesheet called Tiny Green from Movable Styles. I also got around to upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type.
Monkey Taunts
More on soccer fans acting like dumb monkeys.
Firefox notes
I have been trying to see which browser functions are slower in Firefox than in Windows IE. Some of the interface with MT seems to be as fast as when I use IE, but some pages are slower in Firefox. Some of the administrative pages that build a list – the comment approval/editing list, or the Blacklist item list – seem to take a long time compared to the same page in IE. But Firefox seems to build an entry list very quickly. WTF?
Minimalist Blogging
Steve has simplified his blog by writing his own basic CMS. No trackbacks, comments submitted by php mail, no spam. Just content. He makes writing his own CMS sound as easy as installing MT. He could market his CMS to engineers as Nano-blogging. The word minimalism may not register with engineers. His choice to blog lite is appealing when I look at the grief Randy is having with his blogs after he upgraded to MT 3.121. Imperfect CSS, pages not displaying in any browser …
Snowfall
Yesterday Mike and I rode through Assiniboine Park and St. Charles. The ground was dry, except for a few places where condensation had formed ice on the road. The temperature was around zero (C) and the wind was about 20, gusting to 30 kph. Not too cold. We had numb toes by the end, but otherwise our gear held up to the conditions.
Spanish Simians
My RSS feed to BBC World news today has two stories which mention England, Spain, racism, football (soccer), monkeys, apes, and paleontology.
Firefox Redux
It was the ads. I became furious at the ads cluttering the pages I was reading. In the early versions of Netscape, I could turn off images to speed up page loads, which was handy when I was using a 14.4 K modem, and even a 56 K modem, on a dial-up account. That capability has disappeared in modern browsers, and setting a browser to ignore images would ignore content. There are hosts of pop-blockers but no effective ad blockers for IE. Ad blocking in IE is generally limited to blocking new windows (pop ups) and banners – images of specific size at the top of a page. There is a product called Webwasher which tries build a blacklist of banned sites which was promising but configuring it was a problem. There is a free classic version, with no help files and the full version is not cheap. Finding a real IE ad blocker on Tucows or the Web is just a nightmare. Lots of cookie-cutter pop-up blockers, lots of shareware from little.wannabe.dot.com ventures.
Missing Mozilla Firefox
After a few days of using IE again, I am missing features of Firefox. Tabbed browsing was good. I miss the Adblocker which showed the feeds connected to a web page and allowed very fine control. I could block a feed to one ad, or block all feeds from a source by wildcard. I had a problem using it on sites (eg the NY Times) which had several feeds because I had to reopen the tool for each block.
The Frog Prince
I started to write this as an update on n’s struggle to come home now, and my struggle to trust him enough to assess his progress, but not to be pressured or conned. He is disappointed that I won’t let him come home right now. He is reacting by withdrawing and threatening to live on the street again.
As I thought about the last few days, I began to think about how his girlfriend may see him, and I thought of the fairy tale of the girl who finds a frog, trust him, kisses him and finds a handsome prince. The full story is of course more complex as folklore web sites here and here will show.
Next?
Another few weeks have passed since n. came home sick. He didn’t stay, but he has made some changes and wants to come home. We are talking a lot, and he is being less angry.