Monthly Archive for October, 2007

This is just mean

Published
by
Matthew
on October 30, 2007
in Internet and Rants
. 9 Comments

Margot blogsMargot has been really into blogging lately.

I can be very particular sometimes. By “particular” I mean I can be an asshole. There are certain things that bother me to no end. Maybe talking about them will help?

Two Spaces
I really can’t handle when people put two spaces after a period. It frustrates the crap out of me. YOU AREN’T USING A TYPEWRITER. Welcome to the 21st century. We use computers. We don’t use monospaced type anymore. There is no need for the extra space. And it’s not a specific kind of person who does this. It’s everyone. I don’t really understand. When I have to remove all those extra spaces, oh man! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE remember! Never EVER put two spaces after a period. It’s WRONG.

Excel
I hate excel. I hate having to take text from excel and bring it into quark. Maybe it’s just not my thing. I’ve never really needed to use it for anything. I’m not really even sure what it’s purpose is. The only thing I’ve seen them used for is lists. Can’t you use word instead? There is so much less work in formatting when using word vs. excel.

“Free”
The other thing that has been getting to me lately is about cost. People forget that everything costs something. Nothing is free. The food in the fridge was bought by someone who carried it in their backpack on their bike in the sun. So when you eat it that really really sucks. Also, websites aren’t free. Not only are their hosting/software fees, there is the time it takes to make stuff. I have felt frustrated at times about EM and PF in regards to this. I’m going to stop here before it goes too far. Also, Mikey really has said it best:

Well, there is still a fee, it’s just invisible to you. A lot of resources go into creating this space (examples: hosting fees, design work, etc on UHX) and maintaining it.

But we allow certain forms of advertising, such as when our friends make things, but we don’t allow other less targeted forms (like spam).

There is always a cost to getting the word out: paying for posters, sending CDs out for review, or just the time it takes… A lot of “fee-for-speech” advertising models (newspapers, magazines, etc) is more ethical because there is a clear line between editorial and advertising. On UHX that line is blurred because the editorial is making the product and the advertisements and it’s all blurred together.

How do you promote shows at the DOS w/o advertising them?

Is advertising okay if it comes from a trusted source?

While some of the ways in which advertising happens can be sleazy, is the entire idea of paying for promotion evil? And if so, where does that leave “news” and other ad-based media?

How can we know what is happening in far away places unless someone foots the bill? Removing advertising would be worse for the world than removing religion.

(via EMX)

An organized life

Published
by
Matthew
on October 23, 2007
in Internet
. 6 Comments

I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s the sort of thing that happened gradually. I have been doing a lot on the internets just not in the form of writing for Merde (Prescott Family dot org, 10/25!!!!). So, in the vein of getting back to it, I’m going to bring together a few blurbs I’ve written from around the internet. Little tiny guys. Hopefully you will see the connections. These closely resemble reviews.

I REALLY like Google Reader
I REALLY like Google ReaderI used Safari’s built-in feed reader, but being at school/home/work I wanted something I could use in all the places easily. Voilà! Google Reader. I really, really like it. I think I like it so much because I used (feature-less) Safari RSS for so long. Seasoned aggregators might not like it as much, but it has a lot of features you don’t see on the surface. I’m really just talking about the keyboard shortcuts. My faves are j and k, which are next and previous post. And in a close second n and p, which scan within a post. (Oh! and v, which is used to view the original post). Anyhow, something I just stumbled upon is gu. gu is great for isolating a single feed. Which is a REALLY good thing when Digg and BBC and such are filling up your screen. (Lifehacker has more about the keyboard shortcuts.)

buzzword
buzzwordBuzzword is an Adobe product. It’s an all flash and all web-based word processor, which is good and bad. I am most impressed with font selection. Obviously. I haven’t actually used it to write anything serious, more to just play around with, but it seems to have potential. Also, I would like to see more formats than Word and RTF. (A note: I haven’t extensively tried Google Docs either, so I don’t really know how buzzword and Google Docs compare).

Browser Choice
Firefoxed (EDITED)I have struggled for a long time about browser choice. I like Macs. I like the look of the applications. I also like features and ease of use. Here’s what I said on 10/6:

I finally have completely given into Firefox. Don’t get me wrong. I love Safari. But I’m tired of Safari crashing on my bank’s site. Firefox is also very open source and can be used on any platform (for the part of me that want to use Linux all the time). (Also, I know Safari is pretty open and is based on Konqueror.) Plus, so many sweet plugins. I tried Camino, but it’s too close to Safari in the lack of really cool plugins. Not as many people use these browsers. I will still use Safari occasionally, but Firefox is my lady now. (Plus FF 2 isn’t as slow as 1.5 was for me.)

…

Also, what happened to Firefoxy? It seems it hasn’t been updated since 2006 (probably the last time I’ve really used Firefox).

Obviously Firefox is good for Linux and Windows, otherwise I don’t really like it. There, I said it. It’s not Gecko or anything like that, it’s just too slow and ugly. On 10/9, I retracted my statement saying:

So I’m pretty much sworn back to Camino. It’s so tiny and fast. It makes my heart race. And it’s so damn pretty.

So that’s my choice. Camino. It’s small, fast, cute. It’s really a win/win situation. It’s uses Gecko, but is written in Cocoa. “Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style” Damn right. (With that being said, I’m not that hardcore. I use Safari and Opera occasionally, but only for testing websites. And I haven’t quite deleted FF from my applications folder. But 99.9% of the time I use Camino.)

(Use Camino with Google Reader with Reader Notifier.)