Sometimes, I plug my laptop into the little amplifier we use for the TV. It’s nothing special, although I’ve got a nice pair of Bose bookshelf speakers connected to it. The sound quality is really great compared to my laptop’s built in speakers, or even to the little panel speakers I have in my office. This should not be surprising to anyone. What is a little disappointing, if not quite surprising, is that I get nowhere near that quality out of my iPod headphones. The problem isn’t the headphones’ drivers, as far as I can tell, but their fit. When I accidentally (or intentionally) press the little earbuds into my ears, tighter and at a weirder angle, I get a really superior sound. It’s like several accompanists just joined in.

Really, I think Firefox deserves mostly cheers. I reserve most of my jeers for lousy extensions or extension incompatibilities. (That, despite the fact that I know how hard it is to write code that will Just Work when plugged into an existing larger system with other plugins.)

This software can post to del.icio.us as well as other similar sites. It will probably be supported by NNW, so I’d like to make sure that it can support posting to Rubric!

I’m not sure if this is really round two, three, or what. It’s not the first time that I’ve made an attempt to quit OmniWeb for another browser.

I had trouble with this at first. I think -0 is required when rebuilding the jar.

For a very long time, I had a small number of images that I used as my desktop. Most of them were symmetrical, easy to ignore, and blue. They were easy on the eye, provided enough contrast for my desktop icons, and didn’t distract or irritate me. Too often, I see people running with elaborate landscapes as their background, or family photos, or women wearing bikinis, or other busy, distracting images. The even crazier thing is people who do that and use transparent terminals.

Sometimes, I get caught up in the metaphor, and I start to imagine my software in terms of its convenient abstraction. I picture my Template Toolkit sitting on my workbench and I wonder where I the stencil for drawing an undef. I create a Socket and get visions of other programs plugging into a small opening in mine. I wonder whether Perl::Squish will someday collect the juices squeezed out of my code.

My PowerBook’s original power brick died. Well, actually, the bit where the cable met the laptop-end power plug fell apart. I got a replacement, and that one did, too.

Recently, Jennifer asked me whether I’d seen that TiVo had Connect Four. I said I hadn’t, and thought that was really weird. A few days later, I went digging around and found it; it’s actually called Skull and Crossbones, probably for some stupid copyright reason. I wasn’t really interested in Connect Four, but there were some other things I liked: SameGame, a podcast reader, traffic and weather reports, and probably some other things I can’t think of now. There was also a game called Wordsmith, which was listed with Scrabble piece as its icon.

We got a phone bill about a week ago, and it listed a $10 charge for Blinko. What’s Blinko? Who knows! Google suggested that it’s some sort of scam, which seemed likely. Gloria said she’d received some sort of opt-out SMS from them, and replied to opt out. I checked their web site, and they look like one of those wretched little “we send garbage crap to your phone for too much money!” operations.