Post-Debate 2

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I missed the first half of last night’s debate (Full Transcript), so I didn’t see the part where Bush appears more hot-tempered than he was in the latter half. The part I did see shows Bush performing a lot better than last time, and somewhat wittier as well. “Want some wood?” But I don’t think I would have even gotten the part about “battling green eye shades” had I not read L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz this morning, where the inhabitants of the Emerald City all wear green-tinted spectacles to make the city appear greener. I’m not sure what the reference is supposed to imply.

(Update: Apparently it’s something to do with accounting.)

Kerry elegantly dodged the “taxpayer’s money for abortion” question by talking about his own Catholic faith and how he would not legislate that faith as president, but, unfortunately, that still means he can’t deny the use of taxpayer’s money to kill babies. Bush’s response to that was subpar, failing to firmly elucidate his moral stand that abortion is murder and therefore cannot be legislated as a health issue. (More on abortion in some other post. One can of worms at a time.) Ironically, Kerry, though captive to his party, made a far better moral case on abortion, choice, and responsibility than Bush ever had. I don’t appreciate, however, his answer on stem cells, something to the effect that “frozen fetuses must fall to the march of science!”

Bush completely failed to answer the “Three Mistakes” question, which was obviously Iraq-War-Was-Wrong Bait. I’m not sure whether evading the mistakes query is politically shrewd or stupidly, proudly evasive.

More from Barlow, Talking Points Memo, Rowie, DCist, Wonkette, and lots of links from Instapundit.

A Larger Tremor

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Big late-night earthquake in Manila just now. Mom texted to say that everyone’s okay. Initial reports of an intensity of 6.2 on the Richter scale, with epicenter west of Tagaytay, from the Manila Trench. Anyone know if Taal or Makiling are affected by that trench?

Somehow, after last month’s tremor, I had a feeling a bigger one might follow. Here it is.

Update: A bit of a dispute: PHIVOLCS says MagnitudeIntensity 4-5, epicenter near Tagaytay, while USGS says Magnitude 6.4, epicenter in Mindoro. Here’s the USGS preliminary earthquake report.

Update again: This ABS-CBN story puts the epicenter at “61 degrees west of Tagaytay.” Degrees? Are we talking longitude? Wouldn’t that put it at about 14Nx59E, somewhere in the Indian Ocean between the Indian and Arabian peninsulas?

Update yet again: Official report from Phivolcs. Okay, epicenter was Mindoro, and 61°W simply refers to direction from Tagaytay as point of reference. That clears it up a lot.

Opera Looks Like a Browser Again!

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While searching for ways to make Opera work with GMail, I stumbled across Opera 7.60 Preview 1 for Windows. (Current stable Windows release is 7.54.) I downloaded it, started it up, and I’m quite happy to say that many of my complaints have been fully addressed in this version.

First off, I admit I was talking through my hat when I said Opera should go back to “just being a browser”; it was always a suite of additional applications, but I wanted just the browser, since the M2 mail client wasn’t doing it for me, and I had no need of IRC, feedreading, or “Notes.” In prior versions, the bells and whistles stayed out of the way, but Opera 7.5x would not let you ignore them, with multiple, hard-to-hide, too-easy-to-toggle nested toolbars. 7.60 rectifies that right from the start by asking you whether you want the full suite or just the browser, and if you want to hide the Personal Bar and Panel Selector; selecting just the browser without the panels gives you a clean, toolbar-free GUI. Some of the extras are still lurking around the corner, mostly in the menus, and the Panel Selector can still be toggled with a click in the left window border, but Right Click > uncheck Show Panel Toggle, and it’s like they were never there.

I still don’t like the default browser view, but that’s easily fixed with steps 3, 5, 6, and 7 from Make Opera Look Like a Browser Again. (I also found that the Main Bar / Google Ads annoyance in step 5 can be circumvented simply by selecting “graphical advertisements” from the advertising options. The interface adjusts itself accordingly.)

Oh, and the greatest improvement: Opera 7.60 supports XMLHttpRequest, which means it runs GMail! You need to bypass the initial browser warning (“sign in anyway”), but once you’ve logged in, it works fine.

It gives me a smile to know that I’m on the web with a client application that listens to feedback and stays true to its roots as the web’s simplest, zippiest browser for power-users. Great work, Opera!

More input on Opera 7.60 from Martin at City U HK, Redemption in a Blog, Exclipy, E-Musings Non Immorata, and TechWhack.

Hunger in the Philippines

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More depressing commentary on the state of the Philippines from Superblessed, with a link to commentary from Raul Pangalanan on Filipinos and government. Also see Conrado de Quiros today on hunger, and Sassy Lawyer on free lugaw, the poor, population, and the Church and NGOs.

Teddy Benigno, back from a writing break, never changes, and zealously pronounces his standard forecast of revolution, violence, and death from the bubbling “social volcano.” (From experience, however, if the Philippines is like a volcano, it’s more like Mount Saint Helens in recent weeks, making lots of occasional smoke and noise, always bubbling and seething with underground [MSH: liquid hot magma / Philippines: civil unrest] but never really erupting into a full-scale explosion like it did in [MSH: 1980 / Philippines: 1986].)

Post-VP-Debate

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The veep debates were kind of boring, so I watched Simpsons reruns, and read the full transcript later on. You know, hate Cheney for Halliburton or not, his reticent, “evil overlord” reputation belies the eloquence of a forceful and articulate speaker, especially on issues of defense, intelligence, and military technology. War is Cheney’s home turf, which should come as no surprise given his background as Secretary of Defense. That’s why he’s President.

Nonetheless, John Edwards did an excellent job of answering the most baldfaced inaccuracies on Iraq and the war, and the attacks on his and Kerry’s Senate records. As expected, he showed levity, charm, and grace, in contrast to the VP’s standard “Vader” disposition. The idea that Edwards’ happy-cutesy demeanor is a liability to his credibility is plain vilification; you don’t even need last night’s debate to know that Edwards is serious and set on business. Smiles and charisma don’t detract from that.

(Oh, and Mr. Vice President, it’s Factcheck dot org — which just drives home how important it is to get a unique .com domain these days if you want good name recognition.)

More input from Instant Replay, Staunch Moderate, Josh Marshall, Jonah Goldberg, Time, and Achewood.

Pickles the Parakeet

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I’ve been pet-sitting a neighbor’s parakeet for the past few days. His name is Pickles. He’s smart and friendly and green, eats apples and cheese, lives in an open cage, and would love to sit on your shoulder. I feel like a pirate. AAARRR.

Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.

(!$ev)

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Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, is leaving it. It just won’t be the same. End of an era, folks. Evlovers, take note.

On Dropdowns

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Zeldman on Dropdown Menus. He’s of the mind that dropdowns are the product of corporate groupthink trying to make every page at every single level in a site hierarchy accessible from every other page at every other level.

In my experience, however, especially with Mambo, it seems that developers are using dropdowns to make their web apps seem more like PC desktop GUIs and less like web pages. That’s not a good thing — at least, not all the time. We’re already familiar with how web pages look; we usually know to check for a sidebar or navigation strip, so if you have an easily navigable hierarchy with clearly defined sections, why burden your audience’s web browsers and your own bandwidth with the bloat of an all-containing dropdown sidebar?

Update: Do dropdowns suck like a remora? “Mousing furiously in a vain attempt to navigate the timing of sublinks” just about describes my experience with a lot of dropdowns out there; only with positioning as well as timing thrown into the mix.

One more update: A Flying Menu Attack Can Wound Your Navigation. David Walker pins the exact piece of jargon I was looking for: “cascading menus,” with lots more insight as to why they don’t work from a usability standpoint.