I’ve been slowly fixing up a house and things have been going pretty well if i do say so myself. I’d been dreading renovating the kitchen however and as such it sat in 50’s form for quite a while before i touched anything.
Well i’d finally had enough of it and decided (with a little encouragement) that it was time to start on the daunting task of fixing things up. New cabinets, floor, appliances, the works. And though there’s still one damaged cabinet to be replaced it’s just about finished and i have to say i’m fairly happy with the results. It’s taken up the majority of my free time over the last month (save for a trip to Reno in there) but it’s been worth it.
Was just chuckling at the idea of using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to play online board games; after all this is where Amazon got the name. Would be fun to set up a service to allow users to play games this way. I’m sure the quality of opponent wouldn’t be amazing - especially in games like chess where moves are required to be setup in many cases.
I was happy to switch to Firefox from the wasteland that was Internet Explorer years ago. Firefox promised standards compliance, tabbed browsing, add-ons, and a list of other improvements over the rather stale (even at the time) feature set of IE. I liked Firefox, I really did. I even went so far as to get my name in their New York Times Ad. I convinced family and friends to “make the switch” and “get firefox”, in general life on the web browser front felt good again.
Then, Firefox 2 came out, and i quickly downloaded the latest installment and browsed away. Sure it was getting a little big, but nothing to worry about, right? Firefox still didn’t have a user-trapping interface of Opera and IE was still the same old browser it’d always been - two steps behind the trends as usual. But as the point releases increased Firefox slowly became this bloated monster that felt more and more like it wanted to be the only thing running. People created media player and instant messaging add-ons for it, and slowly there was no reason to leave Firefox. Or so it seemed. Really there was one major reason to leave firefox: it was the fat kid on the block, at least memory-wise.
Having made another switch at the time - to a shiny 12″ PowerBook - i decided to start using Safari, the then OS-X-only browser - while i waited for my trusty Firefox to go on a diet. Well i waited quite a while, and never saw much. Eventually rumors of Firefox 3 surfaced with tales of less memory. But by that time i’d grown to like the sometimes flakey browser that could. And with the upgrade to Leopard (OS X 10.5), and Safari 3 i actually liked Safari. It shared a position with Opera for being one of the most standards compliant browsers around - something Firefox used to claim. With the finalization of the Acid 3 test Safari faltered but the Webkit team just kept making progress, until they finally got there. Yes there are plenty of other measures of web standards, but the dedication of the Webkit team is really what impressed me here. Meanwhile the Firefox team seems more interested in other areas, whatever those may be.
The fact is, i’m a Safari user now and it’s going to take a lot of effort to get me back.