Daily Archives: May 6, 2005

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 3:48 pm on May 6, 2005  

Firefox speeds up

Hmmm, Firefox has finally started addressing one of my big gripes, how slow it is when hitting the Back (or Forward) buttons. Opera’s long held the lead regarding that, and is a big reason I won’t consider switching full-time.

Beware, though, it’s very early and experimental, in fact it’s disabled in the nightlies by default. Interestingly they OK’d this to be checked into the trunk code whilst it is frozen except for ‘approved modifications’, as they work towards 1.1. Plus the current nightlies won’t load themes or extensions, so don’t know that I’ll be checking it out anytime soon.

Unknown's avatar illiniguy 1:37 pm on May 6, 2005  

Music collection update

Tonight, tomorrow, what’s the difference?

OK, here is an example of the very beginnings of my ‘quest to catalog my music’. I just put in a few albums, no particular order, and voila! The software I’m using is Music Collector from Collectorz.com. It was better than some of the alternatives, none of which (that I looked at) had any capability for barcode/ASIN lookup. I mean, come on, you expect me to search by artist name? No, I want to buy a $10 wedge and hook it up to my PC to scan away! Which is what I plan to do.

Plus as you can see, I can export to different file formats such as XML, Excel and HTML. Meaning I have alot of control over the final look of my export. What you see here is the default style; there are a few templates on their website or you can easily create your own via CSS, etc.

On another music-related note (ha, pun!), last nite I was picking up The Wife’s birthday gift (which is today btw, happy birthday!), and since it was electronics-based (a new iPod Mini) I went to the ol’ standby Best Buy. Here is why I loath..er, love shopping there. The person who helped me was a 16-year kid who had a lower voice than me, which considering I give thanks for mine to 10+ years of smoking, could only imagine how much he does (or maybe he just does the Reds, as I always smoked Lights). Which is not fair of me to say, I mean some kids actually were destined to have deep voices, but this kid was small and wiry and it just didn’t jive.

Anyway, back to my point, my helper, let’s call him James Earl Jones (JEJ for short), starts chatting while entering my life’s data into his checkout terminal. I had picked up a couple CDs for myself while there, and for some reason JEJ asks if I like Beck. ‘No’, I answer, ‘weak and overrated stuff’. Then he asks about Nine Inch Nails, at which point of course yesterday’s post pops into my head, when I proclaim, ‘nah, too monotonous, but I do love Filter’. Somehow I figured this kid, who was 6 years old when Filter’s first album came out, would actually know who they were. But I also figured the NIN connection could be in effect (Robert Patrick of Filter used to be in NIN before splitting out on his own). Yet nothing, the word Filter meant nothing to him (hmm, maybe he’s a Camel guy)…

Oh well, someday there’ll be radio stations with stuff like my music on for all to truly appreciate more than the drones of today, and they’ll call it ‘the classics’ and I’ll keep rocking into my old age….