Four Seasons, Il Giardino Armonico

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Tim mentioned this in my comments, and I think it very much worth posting to my blog: Yes, I have heard the Il Giardino Armonico playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and it’s breathtaking. After ******* let me listen to a copy at the station, I simply could not listen to any other recording of the concerti. It’s that darn good. If you ever listen to only one performance of the Four Seasons, this is it. (Oh, and if you do get it, be sure to get it from the links posted here so you can help me pay for my MA. ^^,)

(Ha! Take that, Bond and Vanessa Mae!)

Mozilla 1.0

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Mozilla 1.0 has arrived. I just downloaded and installed it, and the browser works great. Certain CSS properties which were still unsupported as of 1.0rc3 are now supported (most notably the overflow: scroll property), and the whole system runs fine, without kinks or bugs. (Not as far as I can tell, anyway.)

What’s not so great is the mail application, which in some ways still works like the Netscape Mail of old. Most annoying is that it doesn’t give an option to qeue messages by default and send them later. (You can use the “Send Later” function and then select “Send Unsent” from the File menu, but that’s still less convenient than just setting an option to make it a default. There aren’t even keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process.

(But then again, that’s why this is an open-source project, isn’t it?)

Philippines Senate Coup

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Senate “Coup?” Pah. Let them. It’s not like either side was getting anything done. The opposition can make all the obstructionist power plays it wants, but no matter how you shuffle the labels of “majority” and “minority,” Filipino political stagnation continues regardless of who is in power. Until a cultural paradigm shift is enabled, the grimy wheels of government will remain at a standstill.