I just discovered how to bring a 2.8GHz 2.0GB RAM machine to its knees: work on 16 Word and Publisher documents simultaneously, with a few PDFs thrown in, sending jobs to three different printers, several of them being mail merges.
This is, I think, the first time that I’ve had to deal with lag on this computer doing anything other than installation/uninstallation or copying files (not counting the partial hard drive failure I had a few months ago). Not bad! :-)
As seen in a letter:
Your prayer support is detrimental to the success of this ministry!
I really hope the person meant instrumental… Otherwise, I’m not sure it’s a ministry that the recipients of the letter would want to be supporting…
I have a bit of a cold, a result of which being that I have more or less no voice. Therefore, I’ve been ignoring the phone over the past couple of days, since people probably don’t want to talk to the raspy, squeaky-voiced prayer letter producer between coughing fits.
Yesterday went by normally — I almost never get phone calls anyway, so it’s not as though this is a major inconvenience to anyone.
Today, though, has been insane. I’ve had no fewer than five phone calls, and someone who wants to call me to discuss at length how the service works. By way of comparison, a normal month will have about that many business-related incoming phone calls, plus a few that I initiate.
The only other time that this tends to happen is when I dedicate a day to programming. I must emanate “Steve doesn’t want to be disturbed” vibes or something…
Christine took a look at some of the things on my bedside table, and declared that I’m very odd, which of course wasn’t news to either of us. But, admittedly, this is a pretty good example of the breadth of my areas of interest. So, I thought it’d be fun to make a list, and ask what y’all have on your bedside tables.
So, here’s what’s on mine, in no particular order
I was never a subscriber to the whole “beds are just for sleeping” paradigm. Just ask my parents — there was always a mound of stuff at the foot of the bed (homework, leisure reading, etc.). My college dorm rooms were no better (even freshman year, when I had a top bunk, and the bed itself had to double for a bedside table).
I’m mildly surprised there isn’t an O’Reilly or other computing book there currently; otherwise, this is pretty complete, and pretty normal. My ESV Bible (paper version — I normally use my Treo for Bible-reading) is usually there as well, but is currently still in the car (just got back from a conference this afternoon).
(If you’re wondering how all of this fits, my bedside table is actually a microwave cart with an extra shelf and a cabinet underneath, though the latter is currently empty. When we moved into this house, the microwave fit nicely on the counter, so the cart became the bedside table instead of the little wooden folding table we had in our apartment.)
At least for the time being, I would not recommend that you upgrade to Firefox 2.0, which came out a week or two ago. It has some nice improvements, but they’ve removed some of the flexibility, which has resulted in me needing to change hidden settings and (just now) code in order to get behavior that used to be default. In my opinion, the improvements don’t outweigh the drawbacks.
For instance: in FF1, clicking on a link to a PDF would either open it in an Acrobat applet or prompt you to either open the file in the Acrobat program, or save it to disk. Which of the two it offered depended on what MIME type was used (application/pdf or application/octet-stream). This was reasonable.
In FF2, it either opens the PDF in an applet (depending on how you have it configured) or prompts you to save it to disk. The “open” option is gone, because of a decision that all application/octet-streams are potentially dangerous, not just .exe files, and that the user can’t be trusted to decide for himself. From my point of view, that’s not reasonable. I can accept the .exe case, even if I don’t like it (and I hear there are extensions that let you get around that problem), but not for .pdfs.
It’s compounded by the fact that this is a task that I do literally dozens of times per day for work, and I’m certainly not about to save each of those files to disk just so I can go hunting for them, open them once, and then delete them. That would be going from one keystroke (“Enter”) to “Enter-Win-E-mouse-click-[figure out what the file was called]-scroll-mouse-click-click-Alt-Tab-Alt-F4” or “Enter-Alt-Tab-Tab-Tab-Alt-F-O-[figure out what the file was called]-[type first few letters of filename]-down-down-down-down-Enter-Enter” (and it doesn’t help that most of the files will be named something like “November letter.pdf”).
What’s worse, though, is that, unlike the other gripes I’ve had with FF2, this one isn’t configurable, even from a hidden configuration option in about:config. You just need to put up with it. Or change the code (which is the classical example of why open source is better than proprietary software, and it’s what I did, but I’m still annoyed).
I’ve yet to see what else is going to slow me down (I’ve been running FF2 for about two hours of light usage so far), but based on that find and the default minimum tab width (described in one of the recent links), I don’t think you should install FF2 at this time if you’re more than a novice user (and less than a code hacker) — wait for 2.0.1 or 2.1 and see if there are enough complaints that the developers open things back up and set the defaults to be a little more friendly to power users. Or, at least, keep a copy of 1.5.0.x handy, so that you can go back if you find that the changes aren’t to your liking.
