I had a great blog post going in my head while I was cooking dinner, and now that I have time to write it all down, I’m too tired. It’s been a long day. We woke up without power this morning, which happens way too often in Stillwater. No power means no heat and no water, since we’re on a well and our pump is probably as old as I am. So I got out of bed, lit a fire in the fireplace, lit the burner on the stove and got to making pancakes. We were out most of the day, hence my tiredness. Made an awesome black bean soup for dinner. Not your typical black bean, but more of a Cuban influenced recipe that calls for a couple of tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. It’s awesome. Maybe I’ll start a recipes section on this site, which will be fully searchable as soon as I figure out Apache SOLR…
So anyway, today’s tech discoveries. First of all, Google Chrome for Mac was finally released yesterday. It’s not bad. The thing with browsers now is that there is NO user loyalty, at least not with me. Think back to the good old days when you didn’t know there was a thing such as a browser. IE was the internet. I felt like I was cheating the day I went and downloaded Firefox, even though I was telling myself that I was merely subverting the paradigm or something like that. I stuck with FF for a few years, for at least a month into my Mac-hood. Then one day a weird thing happened (I don’t remember what), and the advice I got was to try a different browser. Opera was the one that was advised to make this broken site work, but Camino was the one that I was told was “generally the best Mac browser”. So within a month I’d skipped out on MS completely, and had gone and stabbed my open source friends at Mozilla square in the back. I mean, sure, Camino is a Mozilla product, but I’m sure they knew where this was headed. Safari 4. JavaScript rendering so fast that it makes you actually say “wow”. And when your main email client is GMail, which is nothing but a mountain of JS (or AJAX if you wanna get particular), you start to notice such things. That was only 6 months ago or so. Now I’m typing this post up in Chrome. God knows where this ends. I’ll probably join some open source project one of these days.
Discovery #2. JQuery Lightbox. I can already tell that it’s going to be derided as overused, but DAMN it’s sweet. Click on my “Contact” menu link up there. That superfly effect that superimposes the form over the screen? Seems kinda familiar, right? That’s JQuery in action. Sweet.
Tomorrow, or sometime this weekend, I promise you a post on quitting a band, and the many ways in which it can go down as well as a state of my noggin report.
thanks, all…