Archive for May, 2006

Mostly annoying?

I have ordered a new leather jacket, the old one mysteriously having become several sizes too large, and it got me thinking about how useful those online parcel tracking services that any shipment company with self-respect has nowadays really are. I really don’t have any use for the knowledge of where between points A and B my leather jacket is, but still I check the link every few hours to see what’s going on. Maybe it has a positive psychological effect on some people, but I’m not one of them. And especially not in this case, when there’s a weekend involved, and the status has read “The parcel is on the way to the recipient’s Post-agent*” since Friday. It could as well have said “Yeah, we moved your parcel to the right stack, but we decided to let it sit at the loading bay for a few days to annoy you, you restless twat” for all I care.

*) The Swedish Post doesn’t deliver parcels to individuals anymore, it only transports them. Shortly after it became a government-owned company in the 90’s, they decided to save money by closing all post-offices and delegate the consumer services like stamp sales and parcel-handling to local businesses like convenience stores and gas stations. I’m pretty sure they would have replaced the mailmen with trained monkeys if it weren’t for the animal rights-people.

Suggest me some art blogs

By the way, I’m interested in finding good blogs about what’s going on in the art world, so feel free to drop a comment with any links you might think of.

Holy frack, it’s fast…

Just wanted to mention that I’ve just installed Bon Echo Alpha 2 (which is the code name given to what will become Firefox 2), and I can report that it feels damned fast. In fact, I must say that it’s the first time I’ve noticed a significant increase in such things as rendering speed and tab switching when changing from one browser to another. A very enjoyable feeling, maybe not completely unlike that of getting off a long bus ride and getting into a car. I can even live with the fact that most of my extensions aren’t updated yet.

If it helps me increase the frequency with which this blog is updated is another matter, though…

Bon Echo SearchUpdate: I just had my first crash, and got acquainted with the “session restore” feature. Nice one. Remembered all the pages I had loaded in my tabs. And when I opened the Windows task manager to kill it a few more times I noticed that memory use looked much lower that the last version. And another feature worth mentioning is the context menu option that sends highlighted text to the search engine currently selected in the search box. Probably something that’s been availible as an extension for ages, but I’ve never thought of how useful it could be.

Update 2 (May 27th): Bon Echo Alpha 3 released. A few months, betas and RCs left to the final release of Firefox 2 in August, but it’s really shaping up now, feature wise. I must also add that I really like the name Bon Echo for a browser. Too bad it can’t be more than a project code-name.