Looking for a book

This is a test of the power of the internet:

About 10 years ago, I read a book with a couple of really funny lines, and I’d really like to know what the book was. As I recall, it was sort of Carl Hiassenish. One line was something like “he wore an old blue blazer kind of smile, practiced and worn in.” Another line went something like “the wind cut through his clothes like a saw through ribs.” I’ve Googled approximately three million variations of these phrases, but no luck so far. Any idea what book this could have been?

IE7

So I bit the bullet and downloaded IE7. Despite its many flaws, I liked Internet Explorer 6, but I was very worried about IE7. I gave Firefox and Opera another try, but I just don’t like them, particularly the fact that my wonderful discovery on making tooltips invisible didn’t work in Firefox. So this weekend I backed up my whole computer and downloaded IE7. The installation went fine, though I had to reinstall a couple of other programs, including Microsoft Money.

There are some things that are better: the tabbed interface, though I’m still not used to having to look at the top of the screen to see the open windows, rather than the bottom; when I go to Gmail, I no longer get a blank screen and have to refresh; and when I hover over a link, I always see the URL in my status bar (for some reason, certain links didn’t show in IE6), rather than having to right-click > view properties. On the other hand, IE7 is far less customizable than Microsoft claims. I hate the security alerts, but managed to disabled most of them. I also figured out how to do some of the customizing I needed – I’ll share more about all of that later.

Netflix, take 2

A while back I blogged about how much I like Netflix. Since then, I’ve discovered what most people already know: they engage in a practice called “throttling” (by subscribers) or “smoothing” (by Netflix), whereby Netflix prevents you from getting more movies per month than they think is reasonable. Though the subscription is for unlimited rentals per month, if you turn movies around very quickly, they will withhold your next DVD or send it from a distant center so that you never get quite as many movies as you thought you would.

I was pretty annoyed when I figured/found this out, so I thought I’d switch to Blockbuster, but it turns out they aren’t much better. (And I know they now let you return movies in person and get a free one, but that defeats the purpose of DVDs-by-mail.) So what I’ve done is kept both subscriptions, with Netflix reduced to 2-at-a-time and Blockbuster 3-at-a-time. I’ll have up to 5 movies out at a time, but each company individually will be unlikely to throttle me because I won’t usually be returning movies the day after I receive them. I just started this new arrangement, but I think it will work.

Disable tooltips!

For years now, I have been annoyed and exasperated by tooltips in Windows XP. They pop up unexpectedly, obscuring what I’m trying to read (in Internet Explorer, on my desktop, in the Control Panel) or type (in FrontPage – why must it tell me to use ctrl+click every time I hover over a link? After 7 years of web design, I know, believe me). Most of the time, tooltips are worthless. For years I have been trying to find a way to disable them, with little success. Tweak UI (a Windows configuration utility that I highly recommend) helps some, and there are various registry hacks that get rid of a few of more, but nothing that disables all of them. Today, I discovered a brilliant piece of software called AlphaXP. While it doesn’t disable tooltips, it does the next best thing: it makes them invisible.

AlphaXP actually has a whole bunch of features related to transparency, but the only one I care about is the one that lets you set the transparency of tooltips. Putting it at 100% makes them invisible. It’s not free, but the $15 price tag is well worth the disappearance of my number 1 Windows pet peeve. Note that the “lite” (free) version of the software doesn’t offer this feature, though I’m sure it’s a fine program for other transparency needs.

And now back to real life

I for one am ecstatic that this poisonous, vicious election is finally over. I’ve been reading the news all morning, and once the last two Senate seats are decided, I’m done with it. Whether or not you’re happy about the results, you can’t deny that things are going to be different.

Note how I skillfully avoid expressing my opinion about the actual results. I should be a journalist. 😉

Don’t forget to vote!

I’m so glad the American elections are almost over. The personal attacks from both sides have been horrendous – I’ve heard very little “why you should vote for me”; the majority of ads have been “why you should not vote for ___ – s/he is bad, stupid, incompetent, a liar….” The venom spewed from both parties is shameful. Now it’s time to choose between the lesser of two evils and be done with it – I’m off to vote.

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