Author Archives: brad

So, what are all these sites I link to? Here’s a couple.

I just added Will Leshner’s blog, REALbasic Gazette. Will’s a cool guy who frequents the RB NUG and has helped me (probably without knowing) many times.

Etown, of course, is my place of employment. Yes, I do their website. Yes, it stinks right now. I’m working on a major overhaul though. Soon it will be powered by an unstoppable combination of Movable Type, RSS, PHP, PostgreSQL, mySQL, REALbasic, and Frequency.

Mike’s weblog is listed as well. If you visit and you’re wondering, no, he hasn’t been in a horrible accident or anything. He just hasn’t had anything to say, I guess. Frequency-powered!

Split Focus is David’s aptly named site. That’s all I care to comment. Frequency-powered!

Westwood is my church. Fully W3C compliant HTML hand-coded by Mike Schlossman.

Bill’s weblog is called The Other Way I See Things. You have to know Bill. Frequency-powered!

Bill has a blog-based game called Just Five Words that’s usually a real hoot. If you haven’t played yet, you should!

And there’s Desktop Joe. He doesn’t post often, but he posts more often than Mike. Frequency-powered!

We finished all of Jungle Book 2 tonight. It wasn’t bad, but as I said earlier, Kipling is assuredly rolling in his grave. The highpoint for me was the closing credits, which featured Smash Mouth’s awesome ska-punk-swing-hip-hop cover of “I Wanna Be Like You”, which was probably my favorite song from the original movie. When I was 18 and planning on being a professional rock star, I thought “I Wanna Be Like You” would be such a cool song to cover. I had forgotten about until Smash Mouth’s rendition.

Is it just me, or John Goodman probably making a mint off Disney right now? I think he’s a voice in every Disney made these days.

This is a cool story. Good idea.

You are Neo, tadalafil from “The Matrix.” You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmmm. I expected to come out as Tank.

(Well, half of it anyway. We watched some yesterday but had to stop for supper. I’ve written this review in Bill’s Five Words style.)

Kipling turns in his grave.

Gene Weingarten: The only catch, sale I said, prescription is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.

Question: “Why haven’t we found the remains of a bigfoot that died of natural causes?”

Answer: “No serious work has ever been done to look for remains of surviving wood apes in areas where they are rumored to reside. No one should expect remains of such an elusive species to be found, collected and identified without some effort.”

Hmph. Sounds like an excuse to me.

Bet you didn’t know that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (1) exists and (2) has a website.

Well, I guess everyone saw this coming. Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement that there will be no more standalone versions of Internet Explorer for Windows, Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, has confirmed that Microsoft will no longer be developing Internet Explorer for the Mac. As of about three years ago, apparently, since that’s how long it’s been since a major update to the once best-of-breed browser.

I love the reasoning they give: “Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access…” Wow! Irony level: a perfect 10. But then, Microsoft has really been doing well in the irony department lately.

On a related note, Jimmy Grewal, who was the MacBU’s lead developer on Internet Explorer, has left the company: “With the end of development of Mac Internet Explorer, I will be leaving Microsoft and moving on to pursue other interests back in Dubai.”

No word yet on when Microsoft will abandon Office for the Mac, but I have hunch they won’t be able to do so until Apple has its own office suite.

But it’s very likely that by then, Apple will come out with something so nice that we’ll all be happy to let go of the products that Microsoft has given us. Kinda like how I feel about Safari and Internet Explorer right now.

In its day, Mac IE was really something. At one time, it was the most standards-compliant browser you could get, and it blew its Windows brethren out of the water. But time passes, and things change. I stopped using IE for regular browsing about a year ago. I became quite annoyed at its insistence on rendering some or all of certain web sites as plain white boxes. Usually refreshing did the trick, but still. It was annoying. Quite annoying.

So I switched to Mozilla when it hit one-point-oh. I stuck with that for a few months, and while it did a great job rendering, its interface was, for lack of a better term, piss poor. Granted, the Mozilla team was making a cross-platform browser, but there’s something to be said for native widgets. And it was a bit slow. In the same way that a glacier is a bit slow.

Enter Chimera, the browser that OS X was yearning for. It was fast, it used Gecko, and it was made by Mac guys. Sweet. Crashy, but sweet.

And then Safari came. And I haven’t looked back since. Safari is, bar none, the best browser out there. The interface is stunning, as is the speed, and Dave Hyatt’s openness with regard to its development is nothing short of remarkable. Of course, there are those that try to take advantage of this, and that’s a shame.

But these days, I use IE only for testing sites.

I’ve reconstructed my top ten lists from my old site. They weren’t part of the weblog, technically; I just wrote them by hand and duplicated the template. That’s why they kind of disappeared when I switched over to Movable Type. Anyway, they can be seen here. Enjoy! I’m still working on moving over my old articles and photo albums.

When something has already happened, physician and has, in fact, been documented, it is no longer a rumor.

That is all.