Link Dump, More GMail

[kate_nepveu]

Forgot to dump these links in last night's post. Work has gotten even more interesting today, so this may be it for a while:

• Book review cliches.
• Two short stories by Will Shetterly: "Dream Catcher" and "The Princess Who Kicked Butt" (in order of increasing cheerfulness).
• 30 Days to Becoming an Opera7 Lover. Yes, Firefox is nice, but I still prefer Opera.
• You really ought to be reading Fafblog (also syndicated on LJ: fafblog).

And we have even more Gmail invites. As Gmail for Troops has only claimed half of the invites I gave them a while ago, I'm throwing it out to you all. All comments are screened so that people may leave their e-mail addresses (standard deal: if you're not on my friends or friends-of list, it would be polite of you to say how you got here; and anonymous people with disposable addresses are cordially invited to bite me). I'll unscreen any non-e-mail-address comments. (Edit: okay, NOW they're screened. Sorry.)

I also forgot that it was just over a year ago that Chad brought home the best Emmy ever. I can imagine life without our dog—it lacks cleaning up dog vomit from the carpet, and walks in the rain, and expensive dog boarding, true, but it also lacks happy wiggly doggie when I come home from work, and that alone is such a mood-lifter that it's all worth it.

Comments

[sloanesomething.livejournal.com]

The Princess who Kicked Butt made me smile. A lot.

[kate_nepveu]

"Did the fairy really call her the Princess Who Read Books?"

"Maybe she read a book about riding," said the other guard.

Yeah, it's a fun little story.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Hm, Fafblog does seem pretty amusing. I'll have to think about adding fafblog to my LJ reading list.

[kate_nepveu]

I resisted for a while, but it was really on during the convention and after the third consecutive time I giggled at a link, I gave in.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Happy Anniversary, and thanks for the links.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Thankfully, I appear not to use too many of their cliche words in my own reviews; if they'd put "kinda" on the list, I'd be sunk, though.

As for Opera, I read their thing comparing it to "Firebird" (http://tntluoma.com/beyond30/2003/08/opera_vs_mozilla), and while it was biased, it also convinced me that Opera is not not not what I want:

If I have counted correctly (there are so many I may have lost count!) there are 18 search options and 11 general options on the first screen, and 48 options on the second screen. Opera actually has another panel of options, large icons, which I didn’t even bother to show because they are mostly the same as the small ones... However, this shows clearly that Opera gives you more options than Mozilla.

"78 options spanning multiple screens, with more panels we won't even get into here" is not a selling point, thanks. And in fact, it gets at the problem I've had with Opera: Its UI is insanely cluttered and nothing behaves like you'd expect. (Double-clicking on random text, for instance, which is something I do as a little tic while I'm reading long passages, brings up pop-up menus in Opera, in defiance of every application ever, where double-clicking text selects a word.)

Combine an open-sourcey UI with a mediocre core engine (it's better than IE, standards-wise, but nowhere as good as Mozilla) and the fact that unlike every browser since the dawn of time, it costs money, and I'm just not seeing it.

[kate_nepveu]

The double-click thing baffles me, because mine doesn't do that and has never done that. But I seriously can't live without mouse gestures and single-key toggling of images.

I really didn't find the ads that obtrusive, for people who want to try it out, and I'm actually willing to pay for things that are useful.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

The double-click thing happens on what I believe to be a stock install of Opera 7. It's possible I did something to enable it, but I can't imagine why I would have, as I only keep it around for testing purposes.

I can't live without mouse gestures, either, but Optimoz's mozgest plugin for Firefox works very well. It's the one plugin I install on all my computers. Image-toggling isn't something I've ever wanted -- toggling them off? So you don't see them at all?

[kate_nepveu]

Toggle between off, cached only, and all. Even with broadband, it speeds browsing considerably; it gets rid of many horrible ugly backgrounds (and Ctrl-G, which toggles page format/user format, gets rid of horrible font and CSS--I can't believe I forgot to mention that, because I can't do without it either); and it gets rid of a lot of ads.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(smile) Yay Emmy! :-)