I’ve decided to give Galeon a try while I use Gnome at work. In case you’re lazy and don’t want to follow the link, Galeon is a Gnome-based web browser based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. Galeon actually requires that Mozilla be installed on the machine (which is sorta odd), but I got over that pretty quickly.

So what does it have? Everything that Firebird has…tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, prompt page loading, low memory usage. What else, you ask, to make me leave my beloved Firebird? A full Google toolbar, better intergration with the overall Gnome theme, and the ability to use my mouse scroll wheel button as a back button. Firebird can do that on a Windoze machine, but not with Linux. And it restores your session should it happen to crash (which it just recently did for me).

Complaints? None, really. The page rendering is just a little bit slower than Firebird, and there’s screen repainting funkiness when I drag a smaller window across it, but otherwise, I really like it so far….

Posted on 11 July 2003

In case you’re interested, here’s a screenshot of my Gnome desktop. This will also be a fine test of your browser’s standards compliance, as the image is a .png 😉

Posted on 11 July 2003

Just a bunch of random stuff today:

• Seb got his first immunizations yesterday. What a truly heartbreaking event, seeing the boy in pain like that. He seems to be a little less grumpy today though…
• After an all-too-human start to the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong and the rest of the US Postal Service team flexed their muscles yesterday and crushed the field in the team time trial. Armstrong is now one second off the lead, held by teammate Victor Hugo Pena.
• I have trouble believing reports that both Karl Malone and Gary Payton will end up the LA Lakers. Malone would have to take a $15 million paycut to join the team…is a championship that important to him? I also have trouble believing that four superstars can exist on that team, giving how long it took Kobe and Shaq to get along. Plus, there’s the little hurdle of learning the triangle offense. Payton and Malone are bright basketball players, but expectng them to contribute immediately in that system might be a little too hopeful.
• I finally switched over to Gnome at work. I found a nice Aqua-esque theme, and I’m quite happy at this point. I’ve found when using a distro like RedHat (which is required where I work) many of the system-related apps are GTK+ based (the programming library for Gnome), so even if you’re using KDE and the QT API, you lose consistent interface. But within Gnome, you don’t have to use any KDE apps, so the theme is applied across all of the apps. Quite nice.

Posted on 10 July 2003

Liz Phair has responded to the NY TImes review of her new album. While I still think I won’t run out and buy her album, this behind the major record label contract, the real Liz Phair still exists….

At least the review itself isn’t trying so hard to be clever….

Posted on 9 July 2003

We lost our electricity last night, thanks to another storm of Biblical proportion. It was kinda nice — candlelight, no distractions like the computer or the phone (ahh, the joy of cordless phones). It wasn’t kinda nice at 2:00am though when the nice cool breeze stopped and there was no fan to stir the air. Fortunately, Duquense Light got it together, and power was back by 3:00am or so. By the way, one of the advantages of having an infant is that you never ever have to set an alarm clock….

As soon as time allows, I’ll be putting together some short video clips of Seb for the website. Keep your eyes peeling on the front page for updates….

Posted on 9 July 2003

The Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles rules for registering a moped.

I’ve been trying to find a decent used moped to get back and forth to work when it’s wicked hot and I don’t want to ride my bike. Thanks to EBay I found a nice one in Slippery Rock PA, and the owner was willing to deliver it to me for $50. Good deal. I was stoked. The moped wasn’t registered, however. The owner suggested I call the DMV, and he also forwarded a few emails from other people who got mopeds registered here in ye olde commonwealth. I discovered one basic premise of registering a moped in PA:

If it isn’t brand new, and it isn’t already registered elsewhere, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO REGISTER THE MOPED EASILY — IF AT ALL.

The person I spoke to actually laughed when I told them my situation. “Good luck,” he said. Great.

So here’s what the law actually says…if the moped isn’t registered, if you provide a Manufacturer’s Certificate of Origin, a bill of sale, and verification of the VIN. Well, the owner of the moped had all these things, but….he sent me an email from another angry PA moped owner….basically, this guy had all this stuff, brought down to the DMV, and they rejected his request for registration. The VIN verification was even done by STATE POLICE OFFICER!!! Sorry, they said, they couldn’t confirm the MCO. So he said his only recourse was to find a scrapyard, “sell” his moped to the scrapyard, then “buy” it back and register it as salvage.

Ahhhh, bureaucracy. We’re talking about glorified bicycles here. I’ve got no problem registering a moped, or getting insurance for it…but make easy for crying out loud. Why the stiff regulations? I’m trying to cut down my gasoline usage (average MPG of a moped? About 150), so they should let me register the thing for free. I’d even be willing to get the thing inspected instead of wading through seas of red tape…..

Posted on 8 July 2003

LeBron James’ agent thinks he should get to play in private before he plays publically with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Funny how folks couldn’t wait to get “King James” to the NBA, and now that he’s there, they can wait. Suddenly his agent is worried because “he’s only 18 years old.” Funny how he didn’t think it was bad for 18 year to sign over $100 million in endorsement contracts. Sorry, but I can’t feel sorry for LeBron James right now. I might feel sorry for him the first time he gets left in the dust or gets an elbow to the face from his new opposition though….

Posted on 8 July 2003

I wouldn’t use a strong word like hate for these things, but just a little overview of some things that perturbed me this weekend:

1. Our neighbors. They had a cookout at 11:30pm on Saturday night. With their very young children. What?!?

2. The PA fireworks laws. Why do these laws exist if they aren’t enforced? You can’t own or possess fireworks in our fine commonwealth, yet all night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, all I heard were firecrackers and fireworks. Personally, fireworks don’t really do anything for me, and I find them a bit annoying at 12:00am when I’m trying to sleep, but if you’re not going to enforce the law, why not take it off the books and collect tax revenue from the sales?

3. The weather. I heard all spring how we were going to have a cool, wet summer. Well, they got the wet part right, at least. This humidity has to go, and soon.

4. Equitable Gas. Don’t ever, ever signup for their budget program. It’s great in the winter to spread out your payments when it’s cold (and you live in a house that’s only slightly better insulated than an appliance box), but it’s nothing but trickery in the summers. We were doing the budget program this past winter, and when I was paid for a consulting job, I just paid off our balance since we had the cash. The next month my bill said we had a credit. It looked as if the previous balance that I paid was based on their estimates (which I’ve never understood — “we’re going to bill you based on our guess…so we may owe you money, or you may owe us more money” — what a great business plan!) and I had in fact overpaid. Well, this month we get another huge bill. Not because we’ve used our furnace, but because we had a budget credit, not a real credit with them. So even though our bills looked like we shouldn’t be paying anything (I was fooled by the Current Balance: $0.00 at the bottom of our bills), that was just some new math on their part with our budget balance. Whatever.

Posted on 7 July 2003

Wow. I want to be a music reviewer. Then I can write nonsense like this review of Liz Phair’s new album. I can really tell if the reviewer doesn’t like the album or not. Some choice bits:

But you can’t always get what you want. And if you try sometimes, you just might find you’ve made something that isn’t a very good record. The music on Liz Phair is average, and the lyrics are, with a few slight gleams excepted, horrendous.

The thing is that Liz Phair is no Avril Lavigne. Phair has integrity and aesthetic subtlety, and she’s so much better than Lavigne that when she fakes being fake, it sounds, well, fake.

Nevertheless, on 18th listen, you’ve got to concede that Liz Phair, while not a very good record, is not so much a very bad record as it is a record about which it’s easy to say very bad things.

I’m not sure what the reviewer is trying to do. So the record is bad, but it’s bad in a good way, because Liz Phair is such a genius? She’s trying hard for a commercial hit, so she’s playing the corporate music game, but she makes a bad album just to prove she’s still an indie queen? Huh? If I have to listen to a pop record 18 times to decide that it’s bad record that might have redeeming intellectual qualities, something is wrong. If I have to listen to math rock, or dense ambient music, 18 times to decide that I like it, that’s ok, because it’s probably not meant to universally loved on the first listen. But this is pop, indie or otherwise. It shouldn’t have to grow on you…..

Posted on 30 June 2003

If you’ve never been to the little cafe behind Enrico’s Biscotti in the Strip District, go there immediately and have lunch. Jen and I were turned on to this place over the winter by a couple of friends, and a week rarely passes when we don’t have lunch there. Simple Italian fare — pizzas, sandwiches, soups, greens — but all the bread-based items are made in a brick wood-fired oven. Delicious. And the space is about a close to a real Italian cafe as you could probably get here in the ‘burgh…long tables, an open kitchen, bottles of wine everywhere, and mismatched flatware. We’re also anxious to go to one of their Friday night dinners. It’s a set menu, based on what looks good in the markets that week, and it includes more food than most people could eat (generally it’s 4 or 5 courses, plus dessert).

In other news…we’re working our way through season 7 of the X-Files. I must admit, I’m a bit disappointed. Some of the storylines are a real stretch (which is pretty amazing, considering the subject matter of the series), and the plot lines tend to wander a bit too much. And I must admit this — the whole Mulder/Scully foil thing is getting a bit old. Nearly episode includes the Mulder “aliens did it” vs. the Scully “it’s about science” argument, and it is a bit trite. Granted, sometimes it works well with the particulars of the plot, but other times it just as if the writers put it in there because they had to.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’ll stop watching them, or wait anxiously for the release of season 8. It’s a bit like a crack addiction…I hate it will I’m doing it, but I just can’t live without it….

Posted on 30 June 2003