Archive for the 'Review' Category

An ongoing investigation: Browsing the www

Published on April 11, 2009 in Internet, Rants and Review. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

I’ve had a very ter­ri­ble cou­ple of years com­ing up on the Inter­net. When it began, it was easy. I had my gate­way lap­top, I used IE until 2004 when I heard about Fire­fox. It was a sim­ple choice. Fire­fox had tabs, it was faster, it had the lus­ter of being open source. (In fact, it inspired my fanati­cism for all things open source). But in 2005 I got a tiny power­book and Safari was so cute and new. I was dis­ap­pointed with Fire­fox on my power­book. The wid­gets were ugly and pix­e­lated, noth­ing like aqua at all. At this point I was ded­i­cated to Safari, only using Fire­fox for sites that rejected Safari for what­ever reason.

But I wasn’t sat­is­fied. I started flirt­ing with other web browsers: Shi­ira, Opera, Omni­Web, Camino, Opti­mized Fire­fox builds… It was a con­fus­ing time. I exper­i­mented heav­ily. Even­tu­ally I began to fall in love with Camino. It had the ten­der­ness of real mac app, but also the cer­tain flare of being open source and dan­ger­ous like Firefox.

When I upgraded to Leop­ard, it was back to square one. I went with Safari for a while because Camino was strug­gling with 10.5. Then Fire­fox 3 came around with its hype and fancy Smart Loca­tion Bar. I fell back into my old ways. I was using a PC at work, Fire­fox felt right, cut­ting edge, cus­tomiz­able, fun.

Since then I’ve not set­tled. I can’t decide. I’m switch­ing weekly. Nobody has exactly every­thing I want. Here is where I stand now:

Safari 3

  • I love to use cmd-1, cmd-2, etc for links on the book­marks bar
  • You can­not set Google Reader as your default feed reader
  • In gen­eral, works fine, but
  • is bor­ing

Safari 4 beta

  • “Smart Address Field”, sim­i­lar to Firefox’s Smart Loca­tion Bar
  • Top tabs, makes sense.
  • Devel­oper Tools are very cool
  • Top Sites? Yuck!
  • Chokes here and there
    • Espe­cially in Word­press
    • And with the Tum­blr book­marklet: when I use a key­board short­cut to open, in my case cmd-1 because it is first on my book­marks bar, it opens into a new tab instead of a new win­dow. Very frustrating.

Camino

  • Uses cmd-1, etc for book­marks bar
  • Uses Key­chain to save passwords
  • Feels very at home in OS X
  • But but­tons suck in Leopard
  • Some sites still reject Camino

Camino 2 beta

  • But­tons fixed for Leopard
  • Del key no longer works for going back a page
  • Finally has drag­gable tabs
  • No smart loca­tion bar, which I’ve become very com­fort­able using

Fire­fox 3

  • No key­board shorcuts for the book­marks bar :-(
  • Doesn’t use Key­chain to save pass­words, which is very annoying
  • One mil­lion awe­some extensions

So I have no idea what to do. I was using Fire­fox for the last month, but last week I went back to Safari. It is hard to choose. What are you feel­ings? Do you have such trou­ble deciding?

I read this book: The Survivors

Published on April 11, 2008 in Literate, Ocean, Polar and Review. 1 Comment

The Survivors by Hammond InnesI just fin­ished a book that I must rec­comend. It is called The Sur­vivors. I feel so down since I fin­ished this book. It is the essence of every­thing I love about books lately. Adven­ture, suspense…

I bought The Sur­vivors along with Ren­dezvous with Rama, another gem from Coun­ter­point. I mean, it was on the vin­tage paper­back shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Per­haps my great­est find at a used bookstore.

I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same rea­son I’m obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It’s the unknown, it can­not be con­tained. We can­not really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sub­lime. It is beau­ti­ful and bleak.

Polar regions have incred­i­ble occur­rences that only hap­pen at the poles. Auro­ras? High con­cen­tra­tion of mete­orites? Yeah! Talk about feel­ing small. The thought of it all over­whelms me.

The Sur­vivors fol­lows the story of Dun­can Craig, who left his job in Lon­don in search of some­thing new. He trav­els to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far dif­fer­ent than he imag­ines. He becomes a skip­per of a catcher in a whal­ing fleet. The cir­cum­stances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and spec­u­la­tion of mur­der and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.

As the story begins to become monot­o­nous, Craig goes into the floes in res­cue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This sim­ple res­cue esca­lates and many ships go down, includ­ing the large fac­tory ship The South­ern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must fig­ure out how to sur­vive with­out freez­ing to death or being crushed by the ice­bergs mov­ing through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how lit­tle con­trol we actu­ally have.

And this is the real deal. While research­ing this post I came across this blurb about the author: “Ham­mond Innes was a writer who made a point of research­ing the mate­r­ial for his adven­tures in great depth. If he was writ­ing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarc­tic then he spent time in the frozen South.“1 Ham­mond Innes had per­sonal con­tact with the forces of the Antarc­tic. He wit­nessed the mag­ni­tude of the ice. I can’t imag­ine any­thing more per­fect. This book is “a rous­ing adven­ture yarn of derring-do on the Antarc­tic” writ­ten by an author who expe­ri­enced it first hand.

1 Asto

So I upgraded to Leopard

Published on March 16, 2008 in Review. 0 Comments

A cou­ple weeks ago I finally upgraded to Leop­ard. I wanted to doc­u­ment some prob­lems I’ve had.

Trans­parency
I have a G4 Power­book and the dock and menubar trans­parency do not work. I tried edit­ing some plist files, but that didn’t work. It actu­ally really messed stuff up. I had to boot into sin­gle user mode and fix it. Don’t do this. Trans­parency is not worth it.

LastFMHelper
Force quit that sucka in Activ­ity Mon­i­tor (located in Appli­ca­tions > Util­i­ties). Makes my CPU run high. Quit­ting this won’t affect Last.fm app in any way. From what I gather, its main pur­pose is to auto­mat­i­cally rec­og­nize your iPod when you plug it in.

Adium
Adium got painfully slow. I tried dif­fer­ent Mes­sage Styles, but it still hung a lot. It stressed me out for it not to keep up with my typ­ing. No fun. I love Adium, but I’m back using iChat. iChat isn’t awful, espe­cially in Leop­ard because it has tabs.

Camino
Camino! My love! Slowed down a lot since I upgraded. I feel so sad about this. Hav­ing a bunch of tabs open makes my fan turn on. I still use it occa­sion­ally, but Safari is now my default browser. I do like Find being in the same win­dow and also find-as-you-type in Safari 3.

Flash
Infa­mously bad in Leop­ard. Works on 90% of things in Safari. I had to unin­stall and renin­stall even though I was up-to-date in Tiger. Per­sis­tent prob­lems include Google Street View (not all of Google Maps), the audio player for Tum­blr, and a few oth­ers I can’t think of right now. These both work in Camino though, which is weird. Other weird things, watch­ing Fox online only works in Safari, but watch­ing NBC only works on Camino.

MAXIMUM EDIT:
DOY! My prob­lems with Flash were all my own. I tried going through the process of unin­stalling and rein­stalling Flash again and I found that the Adobe site showed be the INTEL ver­sion instead of the PPC ver­sion. So I down­loaded the PPC ver­sion and every­thing works well. My bad. Sorry.

Panic
On a pos­i­tive note, Coda, Trans­mit, and Uni­son work per­fectly. I was really wor­ried about these because they are so much a part of my daily com­puter exis­tence (apart from web brows­ing and IM).

These prob­lems are not all encom­pass­ing. They are few and far between. I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend Leop­ard. It works bet­ter on newer com­put­ers, but what doesn’t?

Klean Kanteen

Published on February 26, 2008 in Review. 4 Comments

Yes­ter­day I got a coupon in the mail for REI remind­ing me I had div­i­dend to spend. Today I took that coupon and div­i­dend spend­ing spirit to REI, and bought the 40 oz. Klean Kan­teen with Loop-Top Cap. I’ve been dream­ing of get­ting a Klean Kan­teen since I found out my Nal­gene was killing me. I am very excited about my new water bot­tle. It taste cleaner. It prob­a­bly doesn’t really, but I thought and stressed out about it so much. I mean Nal­gene is prob­a­bly not killing me. (They are killing baby bun­nies.) But I’ve thought about this damn water bot­tle sit­u­a­tion for many hours. I like Klean Kan­teen because it doesn’t have a coat­ing inside like Sigg and the cap is even metal. No more leach­ing for me. Or less leach­ing I guess. Also, another plus for Klean Kan­teen over Sigg is that Sigg says no hot liq­uid. I guess that’s a plus. I don’t think I would put a hot bev­er­age in a steel bot­tle thought. It’s 8 oz. more than my bunny killing Nal­gene though.

On a side note, as I was writ­ing this post, this came up on my feeds: #76 Bot­tles of Water. (Also, if you haven’t heard of Stuff White Peo­ple Like, there was a good inter­view with the blog­ger on Talk on the Nation.)

Let’s turn art into rent

Published on February 17, 2008 in Music and Review. 1 Comment

I told Patrick I would write about this before Pitch­fork, but I didn’t get to it in time. Think­ing about High Places makes me feel very sen­ti­men­tal. I first heard High Places when they played with Lucky Drag­ons, Bobby Bird­man, and YACHT at il cor­ral. I went with Jon and we got there too early and met Jen­nifer Fodor of G-RAD (this was before G-RAD beat us) and went to an arcade. I really like High Places. They had already run out of CDRs when we saw them so I sub­sisted on down­loads from their myspace. (Later I bought this seven inch on Ancient Almanac.) But my point is that they needed to put out a legit album and the rad cuties at eMu­sic just did, 03/07 — 09/07 on eMu­sic Selects. Ok, here is the scoop. eMu­sic Selects is “a brand-new monthly pro­gram fea­tur­ing exclu­sive music from hand­picked, unsigned new artists.” Whoa! To me this sounds heart­felt. They really want to help out new artists. It ben­e­fits the artist and it ben­e­fits eMu­sic. So far I think it has worked. And guess what? February’s releases? Not only High Places, but also Breathe Owl Breathe. I’ve been really dig­ging both albums a lot and I’m going to tell you why. Or why you should buy them right now to sup­port these rad artists.

emusicselects.jpg

Now the music. High Places con­sists of Rob’s sweet beats and Mary’s ethe­real singing. Rob only uses tiny drums and shak­ers, but the sound is so full you would think there was more. There is no more! Well, there is. There is Mary’s singing. You can’t have one with­out the other. They sort of just move in your mind to be one solid noise and you for­get that shak­ers can’t sing. Or I do. Mary’s voice is always echoed in this per­fect way. You can imag­ine it. When they play she moves and dances around singing with bells around her wrist. When I say ethe­real I don’t mean ethe­real like Laven­der Dia­mond, the pace and the atti­tude is dif­fer­ent. Laven­der Dia­mond ethe­real feels del­i­cate and light. High Places ethe­real feels light, but full. Full in a lofi way or in a low tre­ble way. The best way to under­stand is to hear:

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03 Banana Slugs/Cosmonaut

(Plus High Places always favorites my pho­tos of the Mar­got and Travis.)

Breathe Owl Breathe is not an artist I was ter­ri­bly famil­iar with before I got Ghost Glac­ier EP. I knew those Michi­gan folks were deep into it, but oth­er­wise no. Ok. Imme­di­ate reac­tion: famil­iar­ity. Not famil­iar­ity like “I think I’ve heard this before”, but famil­iar­ity in the way “I think I’ve ALWAYS heard this.” It feels like a dis­tant mem­ory. A fond dis­tant mem­ory. Prob­a­bly from your child­hood. But like a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence. Not like when you were chubby and were bad at sports. More like a sun­set or a Sun­day after­noon. I sup­pose also sen­ti­men­tal. Their music feels like a fond mem­ory. That’s the best I can say it.

Breathe Owl Breathe would be filed under “folk” I sup­pose because they play folky instru­ments. Their voices are com­fort­ing and make me weepy. Such mel­low vibes!

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04 Ghost In The Morn­ing Moon

“First there was dust, then there was a squirrel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat”

Published on February 5, 2008 in Film and Review. 1 Comment

The Big BangLaura and I were flip­ping through chan­nels last night and came across the Big Bang. It was that or Puppy Bowl IV so we decided to watch it. I really enjoyed the movie. It was bizarre at times and it clearly was made in 1990. The lit­tle syn­op­sis pro­vided by Cox said: “Film­maker James Toback con­ducts rad­i­cal inter­views with var­i­ous peo­ple on sub­jects like sex, death, God.” Basi­cally the movie is the direc­tor James Toback inter­view­ing peo­ple, ask­ing all sorts of peo­ple the same ques­tions. There is the Girl, the Mother, the Boy, the Bas­ket­ball Star, the Vio­lin­ist, the Artiste, the Humorist, the Jazz Man, the Astronomer, the Restau­ran­teuse, the Model, the Philoso­pher, the Painter, the Med­ical Stu­dent, the Writer, the Film­maker, the Gang­ster, the Boxer, and the Survivor.

James Toback asked them how they thought the Uni­verse began, what they believed about God, about sex. It was great. It was amus­ing at times and it was really intense at other times. I was mes­mer­ized by Fred Hess, the Astronomer, because the way he spoke about the big bang, about the con­cep­tion of the uni­verse, about our star, the sun, was very much like a Bap­tist preacher. It seemed wrong. The con­tent of what he was say­ing vs. the way he was say­ing it. It was mov­ing and con­fus­ing. Appar­ently, that’s his thing. He is often called the Evan­ge­list for Astron­omy. Bar­bara Traub, the Sur­vivor, Holo­caust sur­vivor, Auschwitz sur­vivor, was quite intense. She talked about los­ing her sense of iden­tity. HEAVY. The Lit­tle Girl, Emma Ast­ner, says about the con­cep­tion of the uni­verse, “First there was dust, then there was a squir­rel, then there was a dog, then there was a cat.” It is inspired and bizarre, but it holds up just as soundly as the other responses. The Bas­ket­ball Star talked about hav­ing sex with so many women. The Mother talked about almost los­ing her mind when her daugh­ter was killed. Don Simp­son, pro­ducer of Top Gun, talked about his con­ser­v­a­tive upbring­ing in Alaska and how he became a humanist.

The Big Bang was an unex­pected gem. It was the ran­dom out­come of a night of chan­nel surf­ing. I’m a sucker for inter­views. It was exactly what I needed.

The New York Times hated it. “What kind of peo­ple want to reveal their most pro­found thoughts and fears on screen? As it turns out, peo­ple who ulti­mately say very lit­tle, who are at best amus­ing, occa­sion­ally affect­ing and more often sim­ply bland.” Well then.

Each per­son had their own envi­ron­ment that matched their con­text. The Evan­ge­list for Astron­omy was in a large dark room with a sin­gle light focused on him. The chil­dren were sit­ting on the car­pet in a liv­ing room. The Mother seemed to be in a dark closet with only half of her face lit. The Artist was in a loft. The Philoso­pher is sit­ting a table next to a bright open win­dow. The prob­lem with the envi­ron­ments was that they lacked an over­all cohe­sion. They almost seemed overly inten­tional and some­what annoying.