Under a Gibbous Moon

It’s that time of year again, Beloit College in Wisconsin has put out their annual list of milestones, touchstones, minutea that make up the generation of the years incoming freshman.

Key items on the list is the lack of watches (who needs one when you have a clock on your cellphone?), computers have always had CD-ROMs (but who the hell needs CDs anyway?), and Hollywood has always been making terrible movies out of old sitcoms.

SEVERE WARNGING – reading this list may make you feel extremely old.

I’m going to go somewhere and cry now.

Ok, probably not. But this infographic from Information is Beautiful shows exactly how petty people can be on the internet.

Fights ranging from whether or not to capitalize the “The” in the Beatles to how to spell yogurt have raged back on forth across the Wikipedia servers with neither side willing to give an inch.

With all the difficulties that face this world I am glad that some people are willing to stand up and fight to say that traditional mayonnaise is indeed made with lemon juice.

God bless you all. (sniff)

Here is a bit of advice for those of you in the business world or graduates sending out resumes for that job you want. The letters “t” and “g” are close to each other on the keyboard. Way, way too close to each other. For this reason, I will never close a work-related e-mail with “regards” again.

It’s been almost a year since Geocities went dark. Now, for all of you who miss that tacky goodness, you can convert the web page of your choice into the artistic meme that was Geocities.

Here’s mine.

WARNING: May Be Hazardous to Vision and/or Sanity

Along with a change in operating system, I decided that I would give a new browser a try. Opera was on the list for Mint’s repository and so I figured what the hell.

Big mistake.

I used it solely for about a week before dumping it. I’ll start with the minor complaints. First off, the UI is a cutting edge if you’re still a big fan of Netscape. Of course, eye candy isn’t everything and I will have to admit that Opera has the fastest renderer that I have ever used, too bad it doesn’t render about 2/3 of the web pages I visited correctly. Most of them were minor with overlapping or oddly sized elements but a few pages were completely unusable as the menus did not display right.

I find it odd that a modern browser would have this much trouble. Apparently the people at Opera haven’t heard of web standards. In lieu of that, they put in a context menu for you to report a broken page.

In short, if you like the modern web, use a modern web browser, if you still only use Usenet and long for Geocities then Opera is for you.