Been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life’s been stagnant – in many ways, and maybe the word “uninteresting” is a good summary. Today is a lazy Sunday, and I am home reading up links on the www. Been looking at the travel photographs by Christopher Herwig – mostly of Central Asia. Most of it is amazing.
And among the “better” things, I dumped digital. Well, I had Canon digital for 2.5 years, with the EOS 300D, and I do have a D70s body(which I don’t use all that often), but I bought a used Nikon F5, to replace the old and battered F90 body. The F90 was my best camera whie it lasted, and it has been through a lot. And I am liking the F5 – and still learning its many, many features. Walking around with a f/2.8 lens is so much better than the silvery Canon body. All I need now is a nice lil slide scanner 
Mozilla’s Firefox browser has become heavier and heavier with recent builds. Well, it is either that, or maybe there are issues with some of the plugins I use with Firefox – but the end result is that startup load times have gone up dramatically, and performance with 8-9 tabbed panes open is very sluggish. So, I have been looking for ways to improve performance. And..
Came across Swiftfox – an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox. You can install Swiftfox by downloading the bzipped binaries for your processor directly, or by using the new Installer that they have come up with. It is a simple shell script that the user runs, selects the client processor version, and the script then wgets the appropriate build.
I have not really been a proponent of optimized “built for processor” binaries, but Swiftfox is an exception. It seems to really work well, and the loading time is noticeable, even on my relatively powerful laptop.
Wisdom
When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I have looked Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange — my youth.
– Sara Teasdale
Temporary Well Being
The pond is plenteous
The land is lush,
And having turned off the news
I am for the moment mellow.
With my book in one hand
And my drink in the other
What more could I want
But fame,
Better health,
And ten million dollars?
– Kenneth Burke
I logged onto Yahoo Mail’s web interface today, and got a pleasant surprise.
After agreeing to test the new Beta Mail, I was asked if I wanted to configure an alias/secondary email to my already existing $firstname@yahoo.com address – and was taken to a neat looking new interface.
What I like with about the new interface is the ability to
- view the message in the bottom pane
- open the message in a new sticky window
- open the message in a popup window(which can be made sticky)
There is one catch however.. I tend to use Mozilla Firefox most of the time, and this new beta “crashed” Firefox .. so all my experiences are with MS Internet Explorer.
All in all, changes which have been long overdue.
Now why did Apple do THIS?
Windows on the Apple sounds great. Meaning to buy a the new MacBook Pro.. if/when
- They get clued and name it something more appealing than MacBook Pro
- The new models have more USB connection options
- Newer models of the MacBook with FAR better specs are released
Downloaded the second issue of Beyond Shotz. This is a wonderful new photography magazine put together by enthusiasts from Bangalore.
Here are a few photos from the Mumbai Marathon 2006. The Flickr link for the same, here. The run started around 7:30am and there were about 20-25 thousand runners. Was loads of fun.
Here are photos of the winners.
