I never knew

Sarah McLachlan’s new video, World On Fire was produced for $15, instead of spending the “normal” $150K on production costs she donated it to various charities and presents them in the video. Great idea.

Since it was built for the olympic games the Big O has been nothing but trouble. It cost a bundle (that’s an understatement if there ever was one), it looks good from afar but like it’s about to crumble from up close. Actually, it has crumbled, roofs have ripped, fallen, been changed, changed again, been retractable, unretractable, etc. No team has had any success playing there, the Alouettes got big only when they moved, the Manic died (or was it the league? don’t remember) and now the Expos are moving away. Certainly not the stadium’s fault completely but I’m thinking the damned thing is cursed. Lets just tear the fucker down.

A pretty interesting article at Linux Insider which presents a good comparison between Macs and Dell PCs at various market levels. When you equip (if you can) the Dells like the Apples the Macs always come up cheaper; desktop, server, laptop. Cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Obviously, if you don’t need any of that you can save money with the PC but as soon as you need it, Macs are a better deal and that’s not even considering the ease of use and “lack” of viruses, malware, trojans, etc. End of commercial.

I’ve been trying or re-trying a few apps in the last couple of weeks. First off I went back to using BBEdit, I had been using SKEdit but a couple of bugs got me in trouble on a couple of projects, messing up code and keeping me working on them longer than I should have, so back to the classic it is. I’m especially enjoying the HTML Tidy feature. Save Word document as web page, hit “clean up HTML”, “convert to XHTML”, “translate” accents, curly quotes, apostrophes e all, save and there you go; cleaned up text file ready for website use.

Second, NetNewsWire was updated and it kicks butt. Much quicker and a couple of little tweaks that make it more fun to use. For the first couple of days I was using it’s built in browser (based on the webkit Apple coded for Safari) but with a 12” screen and the subscriptions sidebar there just wasn’t enough room so I’m back to poping the links in new tabs in the browser behind the reader.

Which brings me to the next one, Shiira. It’s a webkit based browser but with a different interface, Aqua styled to be more precise and it also lets you re-order the tabs which, to someone who keeps quite a few open like I do, is very useful. I tried it months back but it didn’t play well with the “beneath the reader” thing I mentioned so I ditched it but that’s been fixed so I’m giving it another try starting tonight.

For BBEdit, NetNewsWire and Shiira I’m also being a bit of an Hicksfreak and using his icons for all three. Nice eye candy that fits well with the rest of my desktop.

My best “discovery” though has been Proteus. Ok, I didn’t really “discover” it, m-c pointed me straight to it. It’s a messaging client that can play with all networks, gorgeous interface, fun to use, no bugs so far. All the others I had tried I would use only when I realllllly needed to talk to someone on MSN and then go back to iChat. With this one I can just leave it open.

Finally, I installed the Tomato Bittorrent client and I’m currently downloading a couple of things, we’ll see how patient I am with that stuff.

Well, haven’t been blogging for a while, pretty busy and not finding much to blog about anyway so, no posting. Still, there’s bound to be something worth writing about so I’m starting a new program. When you visit, if there hasn’t been a new post in the previous 2 days, comment on the most recent and tell me to get my blogging ass in gear and post something. Sometimes you might want to consider the linklog in your calculation but mostly, lemme have it.

The Global Soul

Échecs amoureux et autres…

Hooo Baby! Free Videotron Wifi signal today at the Starbucks on Mont Royal. Sweet. Unofficial and probably not free when live but for the moment, strong signal fo’ free!

Second Jacquo news in two days, while he’s testing with Renault to try and finish the season with them we are learning about his signing with Sauber for the next two years. Great news to have him back but too bad it’s not with Williams, BAR or Renault. Sauber is using a copy of the Ferrari but somehow don’t end up being all that fast. There’s also been a lot of rumbling about possible team directives helping out Ferrari a bit, I don’t see Villeneuve doing that. I wonder if that might be part of the reason for the signing, aside from his talent and the attention he brings they can say “see, we’re not a Ferrari farm team, we’ve got one of his “ennemies” driving for us!”.

Sweet. Villeneuve will be testing with Renault and might finish the season with them. Not sure why they would do that since they already have their two drivers for next season (they could use the test driver, Montagny, for the last 3 races) but if he does well it could certainly help Jacques get a permanent drive next year.