Every now and then I have to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, but even then it’s satisfying to get things to work. This is still not done, but I’m on the homestretch in the preparation portion.
Next comes the tedium of upgrading eight servers, but with this working that should be less painful. And also? Dealing with kickstart on a “foreign” distro (I’m a Debian guy by preference) is probably some useful work experience.
No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry just ran.
(Photo: Unknown; Dwell, July 2009)
The other day I suggested this would be a useful thing. Lo and behold, there it already was, in the View menu where I wasn’t looking for it (it’s a submenu item under Developer).
Chrome, I now want to buy you another cupcake.
I’m no fan of arbitrary adjustments to time, but I’m actually somewhat more ambivalent about Daylight Saving Time (note: “saving,” not “savings”) than a lot of people I know. But I should probably rewind a bit.
I’m an insomniac. Anything that messes with my ability to get enough sleep is unwelcome in my life. Changing the clocks by an hour twice a year always messed me up pretty badly, to the extent that I’d sometimes even fall asleep at work during the first week of DST. For the same reasons, I’m pretty badly affected by jet lag, and whenever I travel across time zones I now try to prepare a few days early so I’m already better-adjusted to the new time before I even arrive.
So a few years ago when DST started I tried something new: I didn’t reset my clocks. I’d been going through a rough stretch with the insomnia and it was just One More Thing to deal with, and I announced to my manager at work that I was probably just going to be late for a week, since the alternative was worse.
A curious thing started that week, though: I had quit using an alarm the week before in an attempt to reset my body clock, and I kept not using it that week. I slowly came into line with the rest of the world, and I never turned the alarm back on. And for the most part, years later, I still haven’t turned the alarm on for daily use.
My sleep cycles are more regular without an alarm clock than they ever were with one. I now have a so-called “dawn simulator,” an alarm clock that uses light instead of noise, and I use it when I have to get up earlier than usual (for me), but my mornings are almost entirely free of wretched beeping. Not everybody can go without an alarm, but it has worked better for me than any other single approach to sleep regulation.
Anyway, back to Daylight Saving: by common practice and law, we all agree to set our clocks forward by an hour in the Spring and set them back an hour in the Fall. What this means for the alarm users among us is a lost hour of sleep and several days of, well, jet lag. What happens when you’re jet lagged? Your reactions are slower, your mind is fuzzier, you’re a little bit clumsier, and you probably have more coffee than usual in an effort to perk up. This is supposed to save energy, but it turns out that the difference is within the margin of error, and all the best guesses were estimated anyway. So if we’re not actually saving energy, why are we losing sleep over it?
3. HOW TO ENTER
Visit your Twitter account and confirm that you have read and agree to these official rules. You may enter the sweepstakes by incorporating “#Macallen12” and “#Macallen15” in your Macallan tasting notes twittering, derived from current or previous Macallan tasting experiences. The content of all twittered tasting notes will be featured in a topic cloud hosted on the http://themacallan.com website.
Um. If it’s your own brand, wouldn’t you know how to spell it properly in the hashtags you’re using for your sweepstakes?
One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.
Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.
None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).
Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.
I propose the Ringtone Jar. It’s like the swear jar— if we hear your ringtone in the office, you put a dollar in. After $10 or so dollars, I’ll bet they remember to put it on vibrate when they walk in the office.
Wow. Meeting boy is much nicer than I am. At an old job the guy in the next cube had a bad habit of leaving his phone in his cube with the ringer on full volume while he was in meetings, and he was a manager so he was in a lot of meetings. I think I might have told him I was going to break his phone in half. It solved the problem, though.
A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.
I dislike the intrusive…
Well-reasoned post from Marco that says much of what I think about pagination of longer articles on the web. The one site that really got to me was Slate, since the second page of many articles was a single paragraph, but Slate at least offers a link for a single page view. That one annoyance, which I did complain about, has in fact caused me to read fewer articles on Slate, and it changed my reading habits there. Now when I open an article the first thing I do is scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out if the article has been broken up, and then I scroll back up and click the link for single page view. There’s a link at the bottom of the page too, but that link sends you to the anchor for the top of the second page, which I find just as annoying. The “single page” link at the top of the page, though, is also annoying because it’s always there, whether the article spans multiple pages or not. The NYT has a similar setup, but their UI only displays the “single page” link when the article spans multiple pages, and once you click on it to get the longer view, the link is absent from the resulting page.
I know they’ve probably got some numbers to back their annoyance, but my willingness to deal with it is pretty low in general and depends on how much I value the content and how intrusive the ads are. But I’m with Marco - nobody owes me anything, and I’m willing to vote with my page views.
- Segway directions
- Shriner go-kart directions
- Walking and chewing gum directions
- Angry-walking directions
- Clowncar directions, with an algorithm that maximizes your ability to unload fourteen clowns at your destination
- Heartbroken moping to a sad indie song directions
- Just-got-laid…
I think they need skateboarding directions too.
New Breed of Brewers of No Buzz - NYTimes.com
Ha. I should go ask my local roast monkey what sort method his decaf is.
And for the record, while Kate claims she has fooled me with decaf, I don’t think she has, although maybe me pronouncing a cup “weak” or “terrible” and muttering something about decaf under my breath still counts as my being fooled in her book. That said, I’ve been known to order a decaf gelato affogato for dessert, but I think that’s more about the gelato than the espresso anyway.
