DeCaffing

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I’ve cut caffeine from my diet. For most of the past year, my coffee/soda habit has been one each a day, though I’ve been gradually cutting down on the soda out of concern for my teeth. Nowadays I average about three cans of soda a week, and until early this month, an 8 oz. cup of coffee every morning, weekends included. After reading some of the comments in the 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine thread on Metafilter, I wondered just how addicted I was, and how it would affect me to quit coffee altogether.

Iconomy’s comment is right on. I went cold turkey two weeks ago, on Friday. Through the following weekend I was slightly surly and off-kilter, with some mind-fog and a mild, throbbing headache. The following Monday, the headache was gone, and my mood evened out. Since then, my sleeping habits have improved, I’ve been able to focus better at work all day, and I haven’t been needing a cup in the morning to “get me going.” What little coffee I’ve had since then has been decaf, and I’ll enjoy a real cup of coffee or mocha for taste, perhaps once a week or so, if that.

My new preferred morning beverage is 2% milk.

Part

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With much huffing and puffing and packing and stacking yesterday, I helped Amy and her folks vacate her Baltimore apartment and stuff the remnants of her college life — and several galleries’ worth of her exquisite painting and drawing work — into two minivans and a U-Haul trailer. By 6pm, I was waving goodbye to her as she left for home, in regions farther north, while I hopped on a train heading home south. With me, some of her moving leftovers: a pot of catnip for Pandora, a yellow watering can for the “troops,” and a hauntingly beautiful multiple-exposure full-length figure portrait in ink wash.

It was not the pained, tearful parting I thought it would be. We have many modes of communication open to us, after all: text messaging, phones, email, instant messaging, “mail,” and as my mom tells me, “Paulo, DC to NJ is hardly long distance.” Above all that, there was the faithful certainty that at the end of her MFA, the parting would be ended.

So obviously I’ll be visiting New Jersey a lot for the next two years or so. And points around and in between. Definitely this is impetus for me to finally get my license.

iPhoto Eats My Albums

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I don’t know if it was the upgrade, or the unexpected rare OS X kernel panic this morning, or my using the verbose booting hack at lunch, but I just lost all my Safari and Finder preferences on reboot. For some reason, though, Safari is looking great; the font sizes are no longer too small, which was my complaint before, and the web is suddenly much more readable.

But every single album in iPhoto has disappeared. Ouch.

Oh, the photos are all there, but all I have is the library; my years of sorting into albums are gone, so every picture from the past two years now sits in a huge, uncategorized heap, arranged, at least, in chronological order. I have about ten photos left to update the photolog to its most current state; for those last ten I must hunt, proverbial needles in a massive visual haystack. Thanks, a lot, iPhoto. I sure am looking forward to recategorizing all 1,409 photos back into your tenuous album system.

Update: Oh joy, I just lost all my Mail.app settings and every message in my inbox, too.

Update: It was the kernel panic that did it. Wah.

Blogger04 Redux

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It surprises me that among fellow bloggers of faith, all the reactions to the Relaunched Blogger have been decidedly negative. Well, okay, “all” two reactions I’ve seen: Joel, Josh (cached because he seems to have disappeared).

As I said earlier, I think the new Blogger is superb. The pages are well-structured and are finally laid out in CSS, the “Dashboard” interface gives your weblogs full front and center treatment, the framed post screen (I hated that, since frames are evil) is gone, the new profiles bring in some real social networking without being over-invasive, the individual entry pages are a bandwidth, archive, and readability lifesaver, and everything just feels cleaner and faster over “Old Black.” Aside from a few publish glitches here and there, I think they pulled off the relaunch as perfectly as they could.

What was your reaction, Blogger users?

MT3d

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There’s been a lot of hubbub over the new MT3.0 Developers Version, but I am personally not much affected by it, because I, a single user, only run two weblogs on my MT installation. I’m in no hurry to upgrade; “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right? Up till last week I had thought of using one more MT weblog for my mobile section, using Haughey’s pop2blog jury-rig, but for simplicity’s sake, I’ll be going mobile with Blogger’s email-to-post functionality instead.

And so, while the current tidal wave sweeping the weblog software/service world has left me mostly unconcerned, I genuinely feel for you guys who are running multiple weblogs for multiple authors on your servers. This whole tiered pricing thing has got to sting, especially when a server setup which you had been running for free or for a standard $150, could now cost as much as $700. Movable Type is a wonderfully versatile piece of weblog and content management software, and I heartily recommend it, but for those of you who are seriously worried about the new licensing scheme, Blogger‘s recent boost back into relevance has made it an excellent solution; especially now that it offers single-entry archiving and conditional template tags, both of which are important to designing for traffic. There’s also WordPress and Textpattern. All have their advantages, and the fact that we look for things like comments, standards-compliant CSS templating, intuitive rich text management, and hyphenated single-entry archiving, are evidence of how much the medium has matured since its early days.

Update: As it turns out, running multiple weblogs within a single page counts as a single weblog, so my setup, even with the mobile blog, still counts as a single one. I am still unaffected, so I’m sticking with what’s functional. I see no reason to be afraid of MT3.0. But I see no reason to upgrade just yet either. It’s not like I have time.

More from HYCW.

unBlog

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This is going to be a bit of a ramble.

Nowadays I’m trying not to use the word “blog” — especially as a verb — too gratuitously in my speech and writing. I avoid it now, much the same way we avoid the phrase “information superhighway,” or refrain from putting a hyphen between “tele” and “vision.” The word has felt more and more out of place in my vocabulary lately, too much a trendy gush for a medium which, as it ages and matures, seeks to leave behind the baby nicknames of its childhood.

I think it started when I saw Paul Ford’s work on the Harpers site. Ford used his own site, Ftrain, as a preliminary test bed, and the result was a front page that yelled “WEBLOG,” complete with post date, recent entries list, calendar archive, and permalinks; yet, you couldn’t find the keyword “blog” anywhere on that page, or anywhere in that site. It was then that I realized: “blogs” are melting into the landscape, becoming part of the medium, not revolutionizing, but easing into, our structures of communication, sitting alongside them as a tool for publication. In McLuhannesque fashion, the medium has gone from “message” to “massage,” and it does bloggers no good to act as though weblogs can continue to distinguish themselves as potent and readable by mere virtue of their being weblogs.

As with other media and channels before it, the weblog has been through its utopian moment, that interval after the introduction of a medium or a channel when its newness, its promise, its accessibility, bring forth bold predictions that this is it, this is the revolution — or at least a part of it — that will bring about peace, togetherness, and sweeping social change. Perhaps weblogs weren’t greeted with the parades and worship services which welcomed the first transatlantic telegraph, but I still see various pundits (there’s another catchword I’ll have trouble purging from my vocabulary) lauding the weblog’s superiority over “traditional” news sources. While it’s true that weblogs are an insightful, informative, immediate op-ed-type supplement to our daily news, I don’t see them supplanting the networks and the press — any more than TV news and talk shows could have supplanted newspapers.

But then, I could be way off on this. Perhaps webloggers don’t entertain utopianist notions that their online journalling will change the world. On the other hand, perhaps webloggers are changing the world in some way, like what we see from Iranian women and connected Iraqis with weblogs. So there is a kind of publishing revolution ongoing; it is not, however, one which automatically validates the content that comes out of it simply by merit of the use of weblog services.

Put another way: when I’m talking to someone on the phone, and I say I’m watching “The Simpsons,” do I need to say that I’m watching it on TV? Or that I send email over the internet? I won’t excise the word “blog” from my speech completely, but I’ve decided to stop being so enamored with the medium that I let it control my vocabulary. Disillusionment with some aspects of the weblog world, based on things discussed in art school about media history, may have something to do with it.

This much is certain: I’m not “blogging” things anymore. I’m writing about them. It seems more dignified that way.

MetaDelay

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As Sparticus rightly points out here: yes, it took me a while to get down to the catblogging, an unexcusable delay. You see, I wanted to write about the plants first, but I was constantly distracted writing about other things, so I could never seem to get down to either the flora or fauna which live around me, not to mention the various theological issues weighing on my spirit these days. But now that I have both photographed and written about my cat in my weblog, I suppose I can now be distinguished as a bona fide weblogger, which officially qualifies me to rant about the medium. Right?

(Those of you who don’t have cats, then dogs are equally acceptable. If you have neither, then you may pass birds, turtles, ferrets, fish, or other animals for qualification. Failing that, then you must have permalinks.)

Make Opera Look Like a Browser Again

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Update, 2006: Opera 9.x is now free, and much more browser-like. Pretty much all of the stuff here can now be disregarded, except for the stuff about the status bar.

Update, Oct 2004: Opera Looks Like a Browser Again! As of Opera 7.60, only steps 3, 5, 6, and 7 from this page are necessary.

If you’re like me, you’re really trying to like Opera 7.50, not for what it is, but for what it once was: a light, zippy web browser which gave you excellent web-and-email functionality in a straightfoward, no-nonsense package. Today, however, it seems to have fallen prey to what I call “NCSA Syndrome.” No, I don’t mean that NCSA, God bless their souls; I mean the “Netscape Communicator Suite of Applications” problem, from back when Netscape, when it was still a browser in its 4.x days, tried to be all things at once to the harried web professional who just wanted a web browser.

Update, 8/16/2004: A small addendum, following some of the feedback in this Slashdot thread: It’s much to Opera’s credit, I must say, that the feature bloat and graphic cruft about which I complain has not added to the file size of the download — still around 3.5 MB!

So, you, Opera user, may have just downloaded the new Opera 7.50, and, like Asa, are staring aghast at a mess of toolbars swimming in a goopy, gradiated, blue-off-white browser chrome. I know I am; I can barely tell where the browser ends and the web begins. I don’t want any chat, newsreading, or even email functionality; I just want a nice, default-looking browser which lets me use the web, with back/forward buttons to top-left, ad banner to top-right, address bar below them, status bar at the bottom, and a wide, uninterrupted, virgin browsing space.

So if you’re like me, you might appreciate Paulo’s Guide to Making Opera Look Like a Browser Again:

  1. Tools > Preferences > Skin. Select “Windows Native.” Uncheck “Enable Special Effects.” Things will probably look a bit grayer (or bluer if you’re on XP), but for me, that’s a good thing. Skip this step if you like the goop.
  2. That “panel selector” to the left? Click on its left edge: it should disappear, but there’s still a thick left border which toggles it. If you want to get rid of that for good — I sure did — View > Panels > Panel Placement > Off and Panel selector placement > Off. Also uncheck View > Show panel toggle. I don’t know what the difference is and I don’t care; I want whatever can pop out of that left-side thing gone.
  3. We’re missing a status bar to show page and link info. Toggle View > Toolbars > Status Bar. ARGH! What kind of UI Monster puts a status bar at the top by default? Right-click in the status bar — you’d think a right click context menu for position would be consistent with the “panel selector” model previously mentioned, but no, nothing of the sort — right click the status bar and select “Customize Toolbars.” Opera doesn’t let on too well, but that orange border around the status bar element corresponds to the properties in the dropdowns. If it is not so, click on the status bar to activate the orange border. Set the status bar’s “Placement” to “Bottom.”
  4. What’s with the bookmark bar above the address bar? Me, I don’t even use bookmark bars. While still in the “Customize Toolbars” Preferences dialog, click on the bookmark bar (you should see the orange border appear around it) and turn it off. (Or move it to the bottom if you like, but good luck finding a way to make it appear below the address bar. Address bars appear one to a window in the gray work area, of which the bookmark bar is not a part. This isn’t IE-Land.)
  5. I’m not too used to seeing the back, forward, and reload buttons there to the left of the address bar; they belong above it, as with any other browser. Toggle View > Toolbars > Main bar. Voila, we have the standard browser navigation bar, and Opera has removed that full-width ad bar and floated it to the right as a more normal-looking banner. (I can see how they might have meant well with the narrower ad banner taking up less screen space, but for me, it was literally interrupting the UI with its 100% width.)
  6. Now this looks more like a browser. Only one problem left: as a long-time Opera 5.x-6.x afficionado, I prefer having the Toggle images/CSS/print preview buttons left of the address bar rather than the redundant back/forward/reload. I have no idea why they changed that, one of Opera’s best tools for developers. Go to Tools > Preferences > Customize Toolbars > Buttons and fields (tab) > Browser View. If this were OS X, you could drag buttons off the toolbar and they would disappear in a puff of smoke. As it is, Opera makes you right-click on each button and hit “Remove from toolbar” to do it. Remove everything there, then, from the “Browser View” button selection, drag the “Author mode” (that’s CSS) and “Print preview” buttons into the address bar. No need to bring in “Show Images” and “Security”; they’re off to the right of the address bar and search field. Just drag them to the left as you wish. (Or you can put Author Mode and Print Preview to the right, but I’m trying to bring Opera back to its simple old glory.) Keyboard-shortcut junkies will love knowing that pressing G toggles images between on-off-cached states, and Ctrl-G will toggle user/author modes.
  7. Finally, for you Ctrl-Tab people, get rid of the annoying tab-switch order with Tools > Preferences > Windows > Cycle pages > Cycle in page bar order.

I still use Opera a lot today because of two things: first, quick CSS/image toggling, because sometimes I don’t want to bother with images and layouts; I just want to read! The unstyled text-only browser mode is perfect for that. Also, quick author/user mode toggling lets me test CSS layouts for structure and hierarchy, so have an idea of what the page will look like in Lynx or Netscape 4.x without having to open either. Second advantage, tabbed multiple-window work area which doesn’t overflow into desktop and taskbar. I love Moz/Firefox, I love tabbed browsing, I hate popups, and I don’t like that Firefox opens popups in a new window on the taskbar without the option to have them open in a new tab. When I click on a popup or new window link in Opera, I get a new page which doesn’t leave the Opera window. Everything in one place, an uncluttered workspace, and my Windows taskbar breathes a sigh of relief. (The popup problem isn’t an issue in OS X, by the way, where you have a Dock instead of a taskbar, and transparent application work areas, so every application has its own window grouping as you switch.)

Still, the way it’s going, I’ve been finding myself using Firefox more and more on my PC these days. Opera gets less and less viable as the bloat increases. Perhaps Opera should take a cue from Moz and release a browser-only package with the features I so love. I might even pay for that.

(Opera email client? Please. It was great in version 5.x, but Opera’s new “M2” email client is confusing and nonintuitive. Just ignore it and get Thunderbird or something. That’s my opinion. Some of you, on the other hand, especially the ones who never move messages out of the inbox, might enjoy sorting your mail by “Unread” and “All” rather than with a clear tag/folder structure.)

Update: More from Asa on Opera 7.50.

Update: Sparticus has more tips for getting rid of default Opera cruft:

  • Delete the mess of default bookmarks with Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, select them all, and Delete.
  • And to stop using M2, Tools > Preferences > E-mail > Use default e-mail client on computer.

Note: Those of you who come to this page looking for a way to remove the Opera ad banners, follow the instructions here. ;)