June 17, 2002

If I’ve been uncommunicative lately (and I have), it’s probably because of the chaos surrounding my sister’s wedding on June 8. Not bad chaos, mind you; just the normal level of craziness you’d expect for an event like this. Well, your expectations may be different from mine. My family, particularly on my mother’s side, is extensive (25 cousins, last time I checked) but mostly well-behaved. Thus, the logistics are daunting, but we don’t tend to see lots of drunkenness or brawling.

Actually, the wedding and reception went off without anything important going wrong. (I almost had a heart attack after I took my seat near the front of the church and the procession began, and I realized that the reading I needed was in the back of the church, where I had put it while I was doing my job as usher, but the church is small and I was able to walk to the back and then back to the front when my time came without causing too much distraction. Phew.)

Some of those who had driven in from St Louis decided to spend some time at the Jersey shore as long as they had come this far. We had explained that early June is not prime beach season, but they figured they might as well stop by as long as they were in the area. Figuring that we could use some relaxation as well, my parents and I decided to join them. (We quickly learned that vacationing in a group of twenty, most of whom are relatives, pre-adolescent, or both, is not the most relaxing thing to do.)

The highlight of the trip for me, strangely enough, may be our visit to the boardwalk. I haven’t enjoyed boardwalks or carnivals much for a long time, since I don’t especially like rides, carnival games, or the souvenirs in the concession stands, but going with young children puts a different spin on things. I also got a chance to play skee-ball and then donate the points I had won to someone young enough to appreciate the crap you can get for less than a couple thousand points.

There’s pictures, of course, and at least some of them will be available on-line in the near future. Check back in the coming weeks if you’re curious. #

0.166 Hours

I’ve become involved in a writing project called 600 Seconds, wherein each day someone gives a topic and everyone else can write about it for no more than ten minutes and then post it. I’ve only managed to do it once so far (of course, it hasn’t even been a week since it started), but it may prove a fun diversion. If nothing else, it’s provided some interesting reading. #

The alternative alternative browser

I just downloaded a copy of Chimera, one of the Mozilla-based browsers that don’t try to provide every possible Internet service and have a bizarre user-interface that looks the same (ugly) on every platform.

Chimera is essentially Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine with an Aqua-based user interface slapped on top of it. Thus, you get the excellent web-page display of Mozilla with the “lickable” Mac OS X UI style—and niceties like spiffy-looking text display.

It’s nice, but it’s not nice enough to get me to switch from iCab, my current alternative web browser of choice. Neither project is finished, but iCab has a fairly mature feature set and an incomplete display engine, while Chimera has a wonderful display engine but an incomplete feature set. iCab has a dozen nice little features that I’m not willing to give up just so I can see CSS-intensive web pages the way they’re intended.

That, and it’s a pain moving bookmarks from one browser to another. Sadly, inertia is a big factor in my decision of what web browser to use (e-mail clients, too, but that’s for another day). While I don’t ever expect to see browsers broken up on functional lines, it would be nice if bookmarks/favorites were independent of the browser. #