Eccentric Flower talk:201101/Sorry
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:201101/Sorry
I'll bet anything the reason there's no RSS reader built into Google Chrome is that Google expects people to use Google Reader for RSS instead.
Same goes for the disappearance of the RSS button in Firefox. The browser is not the only way to read RSS feeds; there are a ton of separate clients for that. RSS will continue to be valuable as a content syndication mechanism, but a plain browser window may not be the primary method by which users consume RSS feeds. Not really a big deal here.
-- 17:21, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
Hee! My problem is not with reading children's books in public. I'm currently reading Decision Points, with that stern picture of Dubya on the dust jacket. Although I'm thoroughly enjoying it, I sometimes feel a little weird carrying it in public. It's almost like having a political bumper sticker. (Which I don't.) So far, no one's mentioned it. I read somewhat slowly, though, so it could happen. Sadly, it wasn't available for my iPad when I purchased the hardcover version. If I had a lick of sense I'd leave the dustcover at home, right? Sigh.
-- 17:36, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
Yah, Bunny, I hear you. Maybe you could order that "How to Be a Pedophile" book that Amazon was selling recently and put its dust jacket over "Decisionizing Pointlesseries" -- it'd definitely be less embarrassing to carry around.
-- 17:54, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
Robert, I don't think it's available anymore. And anyway, I think it had a plain brown wrapper. Where's the fun in that? 8-)
For the record, whether or not you agree with him, and I know the answer to that, it's instructive to see who Dubya consulted and what he based his decisions upon. Too many were based upon faith for my taste, but hey, that's why I left the Republican Party. And he does acknowledge what things turned out to be mistakes, or he would have done differently, or whatever. For example, remember the infamous "Mission Accomplished" sign on the carrier? It wasn't meant for us. It was flying for the crew of the carrier, whose mission was, indeed, accomplished. It's unfortunate the way that worked out, and he acknowledges it as something he regrets.
Whatever. He can be respected for not saying anything about his successor. He feels it's destructive to a President to have his predecessors criticizing his actions. He has also not badmouthed any of his own predecessors, particularly, and only insofar as their decisions had an impact on the challenges he faced. He only critiques his own years. I find that admirable. And he must have had a good editor, because his English is damned near flawless. The things I respect about his book are things I would admire about any presidential autobiography.
-- 19:12, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
Yeah, I get that. Better you tease me than hate me for reading it in the first place.
On a different topic, I had my very own Facebook account for about 8 hours, last night, before I deactivated it. Boy, was that scary! A friend whose blog I enjoy has started posting his links on FB instead of on his blog. I thought, what the hell, how bad can it be? I soon found out. That thing has tentacles everywhere! It's insidious! And evil! I had limited my personal info to practically nothing, and had not given permission to search my email address book for potential contacts. And yet, I'd completely discounted the fact that other people had given FB authorization to search their address lists, and they found me anyway! It's terrifying. I have no interest in being connected, either directly or indirectly, to 500 million people around the world. I find the concept appalling. I shall remain a luddite, using email and/or blog comments, until such time as email disappears, which Sean predicts will happen sooner rather than later. I probably should have confined this comment to email, but I was profoundly shaken by the whole thing, and maybe others have been, too. Or maybe I'm just overly paranoid.
-- 20:03, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
To be clear, I never hate people for what they read; I only hate them (and rarely at that) for how they (mis)behave. I do want at some point to explain to you why I actually do hate W -- and note I-hate-broccoli kind of hate; I mean real, deep, I-wish-him-misery-pain-and-prison hate. But to sit down and dwell on it deeply enough to actually write it all out in a coherent manner is -- enervating. But I'll try to get to it at some point.
I will not touch FB with Roman Polanski and Wojciech Jaruzelski laid end to end. (That's eleven foot of Pole that you'd never want to touch anything with, if you're wondering.)
-- 20:31, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
Iain:
Christopher Hitchens tells USA how to make tea
Piffle. Douglas Adams already told the USA how to make tea,a good decade ago. And I'm sure that plenty of others have tried, as well. Hitchens is just a johnny-come-lately.
nonelvis: Same goes for the disappearance of the RSS button in Firefox.
I have a feeling that the writers of the various RSS extensions for Firefox will simply rewrite their extensions to put it back. Which is silly in a way -- they shouldn't have to be making up for Mozilla's boneheaded design decisions -- but then, most people, I suspect, use some sort of extension to handle RSS anyway; Mozilla's Live Bookmarks always made me crazy, for some reason. (Not entirely sure why, since the readers I've use essentially coopt the bookmarks anyway, but there you go.) I do wonder why Mozilla is ignoring so many people who are telling them that this is just a terrible idea -- it sounds rather strongly as though someone in power is very very invested in the idea. I suppose it may be as simple as the fact that having taken it out and rewritten so much of the interface already, it would make for a long delay before they could put it back. They already have the appearance of being well behind in the browser wars, even though it's not quite true -- IE is headed to version 9 by summer, reportedly; Opera is at version 11, Chrome is already at version 8 (they would seem to define "version" quite differently from everyone else], and Firefox is at ... version 4. Even Safari, most insecure browser in the land, is up to version 5, and everyone started in the browser game later than Mozilla and its predecessors did. They may not want to hold things up to make the change, since that really would make them look very behind.
-- 23:31, 3 January 2011 (GMT)
... and to be totally random, I am contemplating monkeys and math ... http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/17152/given-an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-an-infinite-amount-of-time-would-one-of
(for some strange reason I have been on Twitter link-posting binge and this splashed over. I am very sorry)
-- 09:03, 20 January 2011 (GMT)
My favorite comment was this one:
@Fredrik Meyer: ...and there was I thinking the decline of English was down to textspeak and all forms of youthful disregard for conventions; when actually the inaccurate spelling movement is being led by a band of thespian-tendencied research monkeys. – Orbling Jan 12 at 3:38
Whenever I'm tempted to rant about the decline of grammar,etc. I'll think of this and move on.
I've often wondered if Hamlet has to be in the exact order as written for it to satisfy the problem, or can the monkey have, at one time or another, typed every word in Hamlet, but not necessarily in order. It just seems a whole lot less likely that he'd sit there and type 'em all as written. But then, I suppose we ARE talking infinity. Not trying to initiate a discussion, just musing a little.
-- 16:44, 20 January 2011 (GMT)
Patrick:
You shouldn't apologize for writing an entry that's longer than most of the people who are writing Holidailies entries.
I found that forcing myself to write journal entries every day (back in the 90s and early 00s) helped me expand my writing style and the topics on which I liked to write. I'm trying to get back into that disciplined approach, but the fun of looking back over my daily activities through the years has kept me somewhat locked in a "what did you do today?" kind of entry style.
-- 17:19, 3 January 2011 (GMT)