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Or better yet, the ability to force your computer/applications to use presto rather than IE for in-application browsing.

IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community

How I wish that could be true.

Agreed! Why's Ruby guide is a classic - it is worth learning the language JUST as an excuse to read that document!

If only such things existed for Javascript, PHP, Java etc etc.

Note quite as fun as the book for Ruby, but what I've seen of it thus far I'm quite pleased with http://eloquentjavascript.net/

im bugged by peeps who wast my bandwidth with unecessary punctuationmarks an whitespace 

And I can assure you the product manufacturers aren't the ones eating the costs involved in this asinine packaging.  I'd be curious (or perhaps loathe...) to see, statistically, how much an individual pays in their life time for all this.

we should have ate the fiscal difference and gone satellite

It's what I use.  If it's of any comfort to you, I find it disappointing. 
The cost is high, and performance is not nearly as fast as one would like.
(My only alternative is dial-up.)

Indeed -- unfortunately, my isp is generally very slow; but subject to frequent downtime.  Any change in weather, or if I run the washer/dryer/microwave or if if I look at it wrong.  And dial-up isn't really an alternative, as our phone lines are so lousy out here I'd probably end up with 14.4 on a good day.

Then of course there's the pure ineptness of my ISP, hence my being unable to get my connection fixed properly. . . and inability to get on efnet.

Heh . . . Nessie at SETI is an amusing thought. "All right boys, time to flood the dish. We need a big pool."

The anti-theft precautions in children's toys piss me off like nothing else.  I buy my son something small -- a little 4 dollar toy -- and I'm doomed to spend five to ten minutes trying to untangle and remove all the wires holding the thing in place.  Or, worse yet, the toys that have *screws* anchoring them into the package, in addition to the wires.  Or my favorite -- screws, wire's AND plastic casing that requires a sharp knife to penetrate. Of course, in the car, my son wants it open . . . but, of course, you need a damned toolbox just to get the toy out.

rjbull: I am running this program now. I set the Popup key to ctrl+V.

Upon pressing that, the popup appears but when the item is selected by using arrow key and pressing enter or when double clicked by mouse, the item doesn't get pasted. The menu flickers and appears again.

The default means through which ArseClip sends the clip to the program is ctrl+v -- so by setting your shortcut to ctrl+v, you're just re-envoking Arsclip each time you try to insert a clip.  I'd suggest using a different keystroke, as rjbull said, but if you want to use ctrl+v to envoke arseclip you can change the way arsclip pastes the data,  Open the arseclip Configuration and select the "pasting" section. There, you can change the pasting method used to shift+insert.

Then I am screwed. Because my ISP consists of a half dozen people, none of whom seem to have anything resembling a clue. (They've been to my house making my connection worse no fewer than 8 times in the 8 months we've been robbed by... I mean in the time we've been paying them.) The only other option where we're at was satellite--in the end, we should have ate the fiscal difference and gone satellite.

Can we move off efnet?
I can connect to gamesurge.net!

Fox News? Oh, dear. There goes credibility out the window.  

Fortunately, they didn't break the story--they just discovered that someone else had and wanted to make fun of it.  The people on the show were quite convinced the video was BS, so . . . there may be some truth to it!

do i need to set up a special sub-forum on the site for LochNess Monster Related Discussions?

What, you don't like us waxing mythic in your living room?

The video is pretty unimpressive -- which is either a sign that its creator is smart, and understands that some times "less" is "more" or who knows? Maybe there's something in there. It's not nessie, though--it's a giant squid tentacle.

--Meanwhile, those Fox News desk jockeys are positively idiotic.

I'm the odd man out here, I think it looks too pretty. Partially because their obvious attraction to making a beautiful website makes me worried they won't let me utilize its content via rss in the future. . .

My silly anti-aesthetic tendencies aside, the important stuff--what's going on behind the scenes--seems really solid.  I love that it's real news scoured off the net by a machine, I have no stomach for pseudo-news scoured off the net by idiots ala  Digg, etc. 

Since it won't be pumping into my feed reader automatically, there's a good chance I'll forget it exists--but it is my intention to try to get some use out of it.  Fortunately it seems to work fine in opera 9.5 betas.

I'd be curious to see the video.  I've been enamoured with these surreal stories--Loch Ness Monster, Yetti, Chupacabra -- I'd love nothing more than for these stories to prove true.  But, of course, they seem unlikely. It's not unreasonable to assert that there are massive, undiscovered creatures of the deep oceans and dense forests -- but Nessie seems a bit unlikely.

But of course, they can't be *disproven*, as that would require categorically knowing everything that *was* with which to eliminate everything that isn't.  So here's to hoping, or at least imagining.

I really never cared about the format war much; as it stands, about the only thing I had vested in it was a preference to the utilitarian, function over form name "HD DVD".

Things that benefit the absolute most from HD, in my opinion, are video games and programming on television -- Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Travel Channel.  I don't really enjoy a movie any more than I would have just because now, I can see his makeup -- actually, the few times I saw Bluray in action, I hated it.  I don't *want* the actors to look like stage actors in makeup! Give me 1970's sci-fi space opera film grain any day.  But that's just a matter of preference.

For me, the reality of it is that I love watching movies but hate DVD's -- and that loathing is sure to extend to BluRay. I find that there are precious few I actually will re-watch frequently enough to justify the cost of the media and the space it occupies thereafter.  And this is all assuming neither my son nor dog get their hands on (and ruin) it.

I prefer to rent -- either from a video rental place or just snag it on PPV.  At 2-5 dollars, I'd have to watch the movie 4-10 times ( depending on price v. rental fee, of course). With the exception of a handful of real favorites, I'm unlikely to watch the same movie more than once in 2-3 years.  Increase the price, now, with a new storage/playback medium, and the rental becomes all the more attractive.

Legally speaking...

You must be a Local OEM Channel Partner. Definition of a Local OEM channel partner (“partners”) includes resellers and System Builders who resell other branded hardware (PCs and Servers) with Microsoft OEM Licenses or who build hardware to sell directly to end customers.


Entry is only open to Australian residents residing in NSW, VIC, QLD, NT, or SA who are Microsoft OEM Channel Partners. The promotion commences at 09:00am (Sydney time) on Friday 14th December 2007 and closes at 11:59pm (Sydney time) on Friday 14th March 2008 (“Promotional Period”). The Promoter’s decision in relation to all aspects of this promotion is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

...which counts most of us out, anyway. I suspect they'd notice the shipping address wasn't AU.

Just a small heads-up for users of Billy. It recently got a update 

Version 1.04i beta - Feb 15 2008
FLAC support
Last.fm support (playing history)
ID3v2.4 tag support (view only in properties)
Musicbrainz support and replaygain values extracted, no support yet.
Recording with "pre" functionality in radio streams
Dedicated shortcuts for Shuffle/Repeat
Thanks all for the patients..

Quite a nice update if you ask me. Definatly ensured its spot on my usb stick

Wow! I really didn't expect to see Billy updated, ever. . . thanks for the head's up!

I have to admit to, when it was on, watching Knight Rider. Every episode. At least once. So my DVR is set. I expect the new one will be a superior show -- the original was very hasselhoff. Which is to say, cheesy.

There've been a lot of great revisitations of classic properties in recent years-- Dr. Who is by far my favorite to date.

Same problem . . .
[sigh]

So, lately when I try to join the chat, I get this:
You are banned from this server- Temporary K-line 1440 min. - Blacklisted IP found. Visit the website openrbl.org/dnsbl?i=72.87.52.2 for info. (2008/2/16 08.38)

I know my isp is a small company run by monkeys, and very likely has been abused by people more competent than them (There are so many haaxors here in northern maine...) but why must I suffer? There any way to convince openrbl I'm not a spammer?

Mmmm, a tool to sync cookies? Is that even possible?

I don't see why not -- as it stands, Firefox can import cookies from IE and maybe Opera. Just need someone who knows enough obout the big three's cookie storage formats to convert them back and forth a bit.

One of the things I like about Opera is site preferences. I have configured the browser to accept all cookies, but delete everything on exit, except for those sites that I visit often, and keeps settings in them, which are configured to not being deleted.

This is precisely how I do it as well -- I'd once upon a time started out blacklisting everything and allowing only preferred cookies, but that made browsing . . . difficult.  After adopting this method, my cookie jar became just right. Not too many cookies, just my favorites. Easy to find without digging.

My general feeling is that it's not a big deal at all.. I think it's fine to leave all cookies alone forever and don't worry about it.  But on the other hand i get a small sense of happiness when i wipe out all these annoying cookies that i don't want   Sort of like the feeling out of having a clean house

My sentiments exactly. I'm not really *worried* about the cookies, I just prefer to have things a bit tidy.

--Anyone know a good tool for synchronizing cookies among browsers? I'd love to copy my tidy opera cookies over to IE/FireFox.  I used to have an Opera/IE/Netscape app that did that, but it stopped being useful back before Netscape died. . . d'oh.

I've gotten better about it, but I still have the occasional "Drink too much, crave a new app to play with, buy the first thing I find" occurrence. It's how I ended up with a Core FTP license fairly recently.  I was struggling with a bad ftp connection and it became obvious I needed to use other means of uploading files than I was presently using, as neither my text editor nor rcftp handle their connection being dropped mid-transfer well at all.  I decided it was time to shop around for a new ftp client, and wanted to use one I'd never used before. Discover a little known, great ftp application.  Enter CoreFTP.  It's not the *worst* ftp client I've ever used . . . but certainly the most disappointing one I'd ever paid for.  After purchasing I came to find it offered almost no keyboard shortcuts, and really in general just isn't a contendor for "Best" or even "Good" ftp client, all things considered.  To make matters worse, feature requests, bug reports and general inquiries go unanswered -- support is allegedly offered via e-mail for paying users, but I'm not having any luck with it.

Long story short, impulse buy that turned out to be money thrown in the wind.  The upside is, my horrible experience with Core inspired me to bring my CuteFTP license up to date.  Much better.

I'm surprised no one has posted this here yet, as Aquaria has been out for a couple months now.

Aquaria by Bit-Blot is an independently developed game that exudes brilliance, style and beauty.

It's an underwater exploration/adventure game that really seems to hale back to the glory days of SNES adventuring--but is an experience all its own.  It features a large, open ocean for exploration.  Rather than walking around land in a 3d over head view (ala zelda) or running and jumping (ala metroid), you swim about an open ocean surrounded by gorgeous sea life (hostile and benign alike).  There's a great variety of things to discover -- materials from killed sea life to use for cooking (lots of recipes to discover), treasures/decor for your home, new outfits (most of which are not merely cosmetic but lend you different assistance, from healing to armor).

The games ambience (both aesthetic and aural) is positively stunning.  It's a fun and immersive game well worth checking out.  I haven't finished it yet (I think I'm getting close). . . have bene playing it rather leisurely and have logged 25 hours in game time.  It's fun, yet difficult; brilliant. The pacing is a bit different -- as it's more open than most games I've played, making it easy to find yourself unsure what to do next.  But I've found it a positively enjoyable experience.

A massive ocean world, teeming with life and filled with ancient secrets. Join Naija, a lone underwater dweller in search of her family, as she explores the depths of Aquaria. She'll travel from hidden caves, shrouded in darkness, to beautiful, sunlit oases, all lovingly handcrafted by its two creators.

Naija's story, narrated fully with voice overs, will become yours, as you join her on this magnificent adventure.