Daily Bloggery 2009-03-24: Them Ch-ch-changes

Time till meeting Gwenny: 4 days, 9 hrs (as of this writing, approx).

Health: Morning SGL reading was 109. Green zone = happy RichO because I am doing things right. My weight down 30 lbs since April. I will be see an eye doc for a diabetic retinal exam and new glasses soon. I'm taking my multivitamins and eating my veggies, too.
Yesterday I got a haircut and beard trim. I sent Gwenny the before and after photos from the iSight camera on my MacBook. I look pretty damned good when I keep the hair and beard trimmed. I also bought an overnight bag and travel sundries at Target while texting with Gwenny until the battery in my phone died.
This fairly short jaunt to the store, barber and doctor yesterday brought out two of the shortcomings of the RAZR: one, talk time of 3-4 hrs is shorter than I'd like. Texting is talking, as far as phone power consumption is concerned, you see. Two: I would really like a QWERTY keyboard for textual communication.

On the horizon: Tonight Marty hits Level 75; he ended last night less than 2k xp from leveling. Gaining that 2k XP and followup stuff like training in new spells would have cost me another hour of sleep. Gwenny has promised me a BOYD run through the Violet Hold dungeon tonight. Tomorrow the QoL (Quality of Life) team at the office is serving us breakfast, courtesy of Chik-filk-a.
Finally: The WoW servers go down today for maintenance and, it is hoped by many, patching to game version 3.1. This version introduces a new raid instance for progression junkies, quick-change dual-specs for a one time 1k gold payment to a trainer and more.


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Now playing: Tempest - Hal-An-Tow
via FoxyTunes

Monday Musings

1. Safari 4: Apple's web browser for both Mac (and Windows!) looks kind of neat. Outside of work, I do not use Safari all that much. One reason is that some web sites and Safari simply do not get along very well. Firefox seems to work better on these sites; the reason there is even a browser called "Safari" at all is because Microsoft ceased development on Internet Exploder for Mac OS X prior to the release of Panther (OS X 10.3).

I use Safari 3.2.1 at work under Leopard (10.5.6), and at times, I am not amused by its miserable performance.

Lately Firefox has been showing signs of acting just like Safari 3.2 -- beach ball of doom (think "hourglass busy signal" in Windows), random unexpected program quitting, etc, on two systems that are meticulously maintained. And, these are sites I visit all the time, not sites with wonky logins and SSL.

Safari 4 seems faster than FF. Apple has always marketed Safari as the fastest browser anywhere, based on small-print benchmarks. Small print benchmarks do not impress the typical user all that much. They want speed they can perceive and experience, hands on with their system. Safari 4 launches faster (and does not pollute the startup group with "helper" launch on login crap, thank Odinn) and seems to render the same pages faster, even when both browsers start with nothing cached. Apparently Safari 4 is using a new rendering engine, not good old open-source WebKit (as Firefox does).

I was able to bring my Firefox bookmarks over without pain. Import them (of course you have to know where FF stores bookmarks, but damn it, I'm a tech!) then stick them into the Bookmarks Bar or Folder as appropriate. A nice Automator or AppleScript program would make this easy cheese even for a novice.

Safari 4, in the tradition of all Apple products, has some nifty innovations. Tabbed browsing has been around for awhile; Safari 4 puts the tabs at the top of the window instead of below the bookmark bar. This is actually less confusing to novices. Toolbar customization has been simplified and made friendlier to new users (and it is a LOT friendlier than FF). The big enchilada is Top Sites. Top Sites is a way to view the most frequently visited web sites on a single page. It reminds me of Cover Flow view in Leopard and iTunes -- something that gives me the willies in the former -- as well as the "Spaces" feature of Leopard.. It is visually spiffy and easy to use.

Of course, Safari 4 does this by taking caching to a much higher level than ever before. This means that marginal Internet connections are really going to feel the pain. If your Internet connection is lousy, then the time it takes to fill the caches will make Safari seem dog-slow.

Not to mention the total lack of anything like "Foxytunes" in Safari. I like the ability to post the song I'm listening to -- or a theme song of some sort -- into my blog posts. Safari lacks this ability because the Foxytunes browser addon does not have a version fro Safari. Yet a version exists for IE. Go figure.

2. WoW: I got some good playtime in this weekend. Did a 25-man Heroic difficulty raid on the Obsidian Sanctum with my guildies. Just one wipe (the first time we did OS, I think we wiped a dozen times), but we took down ol' Sarthiron (he's a big-ass black dragon) in what a Brit would call "a close-run thing." The best loot this guy drops is a token that you can cash in for a piece of top-end raiding armor tailored to your class and specialization, aka "Tier 7 gear".

Well, I got the token on a percentile dice roll of 96. And I bought the Valorous Earthshatter Grips

I've been waiting a log time for some tiered armor. I never got a single piece of Tier 4+ gear in 6+ months of near-weekly raiding of Karazhan in the last expansion.

3. Health: Serum Glucose levels are right in the middle of the Green Zone (80-140), and I actually feel somewhat energetic. I have a dressing change later.

4. Photo stuff: iPhoto 8's editor really does a number on red-eye. I got some shots on Saturday that make my Goddessdaughter's eyes look like something out a bad horror flick where the kid just reaches puberty and it is revealed that she was sired by a malevolent entity with the express mission of removing the collective soul of humanity as painfully as possible through its nostrils with mere mind powers.