Eric Mills

No, this is not some Ayn Rand novel, it’s the “sounds like” box of Jott.com, a great service that transcribes your phone messages and then sends them as email or text messages. Nice.

I have never, ever had anything negative to say about Flickr. I’m sorry, however, because now I do. Their old slideshow rocked. This new one, well, sucks. I liked the colors, I liked the white background, I even liked the purple (pink?) and blue balls spinning around eachother as a way of letting you know things were happening. Am I the only one who thinks things have spun around backwards? This feels too Yahoo-ish…

And, who wants to know that this photo (to the left) is named wv020? I say bring back the slider for speed, bring back the choices, and why fix something that isn’t broken? In fact, I feel it is time to quote the immortal words of the drummer of my band in college, Matt Cassell: “If it ain’t broke, don’t hurt it!”

I’ve always extolled the virtues of Firefox before. Over at /dev/null, however, they have the ultimate lineup of browsers, and still Firefox comes out at number one. Check out the list:

I’ve been using Firefox since the very early days. If I don’t remember wrong I moved over to Firefox from Opera when the version number still was around 0.6. It rocked at that time, even though a few crashes and strange behaviours had to be accepted. I guess it didn’t help that I nearly daily downloaded a new nightly build from their FTP site, ensuring I always knew what new stuff which would pop up in the new releases. I’ve been using Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari, Opera‘, Internet Explorer, Camino, Flock, Omniweb, Mozilla (now rebreanded to SeaMonkey), Netscape, Dillo, Mosaic, Amaya, Galeon, ICEBrowser, Arena, and Chimera (plus text-based Links, Lynx and w3m) in addition to Firefox, but no other web browser have given me such a capability of customizing my own web-browsing experience, thus also making it personal and tailored for my needs and preferences.

Read more here

On March 12, 2003, I was accosted for being in possession of food in the Lockwood library on North Campus. The all-but-courteous ‘cy-brarian’ (or, perhaps more appropriately, ‘cyborg-ayran’) simply looked up from his computer screen and mumbled, “No eating or drinking in the library.” “That’s all right,” I said, “I am not eating or drinking,” and continued on my way thinking that that would have been the end of it; because, after all, I was not eating or drinking—these verbs being in the present progressive and denoting present action. I was, instead, merely transporting my commodity from one place to another for the simple enough reason that if I left it outside in the Baldy hallway chances are someone else would engage in their own present progressive activity with my banana.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. Followed me, persuading, etc. said look at everyone else, then he went around to everyone and asked them, each with their own lascivious smirk that said screw you buddy I’ve got work to do and sugar and caffeine are inextricably linked to this work. I’ll give up my shoes before I’ll hand over this cup of coffee, etc. etc. Finally I decided to leave the Banana on top of the desk and go about my business, noticing the whole while that no one had stopped their eating or drinking. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t think I would purport eating a three course meal while doing your work, but a glass of water, or a cup of coffee, consumed safely and ungregariously (I neologize) keeps that mouse clicking and pages turning in the library. What should, though, be more stringently regulated is the use of cell phones.

While my cy-friendly-brarian was garrulously expounding my piece of fruit and its social purlieu, I noticed three or four phones ringing in the computer area. And as I, in my open-mindedness, see the need for cell phones (and yes, we all know that they are certain people’s only phone), I cannot understand the passive attitude people have taken to enforcing the library’s traditional role of fortitudinal silence with respect to this behavior.

Turn your phone off or on silent notification mode, tell your friends you will call them back if you do have to answer it, and by all means, don’t you even think about telling me I can’t drink my drink after the entire third floor has had to suffer through your recount of last weekend’s illegally consumed substances as you guffawed and gloated with glee.

We were not impressed. We’ve got better stories than you…so as Paul Simon sings: “if you want to be a writer, use a humble pen.” I re-write these lyrics to sing to you, cell-phone user, “if you want to be a public talker, use a humble voice.”