Welcome to the Internet, circa 2002

A quote from a web company I have cause to deal with:

I recall you folks are using Safari on Mac. Unfortunately, 99% of the population are not on this browser / OS combination. If you can test on Windows 2k/XP using IE 6.x and higher we should reduce the number of "issues" you're seeing/reporting.

This is 2006, people. Ignoring their obviously false numbers, how long has the standards-based development mantra been part of web development now? It's unreal to me that a company could get away with shunning large segments of the market these days. But I guess if you have a client that doesn't know any better you can get away with most anything.

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New Discoveries All the Time

Is it weird that I just discovered my bedroom has an overhead light?

To be fair, while we've been in the apartment for a little over a year and a half I've only been in this bedroom for a few months. Still, though, I had no clue it was there.

I even had a light switch on the wall that baffled me. It didn't control any outlet in the room. I'm now guessing that's because it controls this little ceiling light whose bulb probably burned out a long time ago.

I'm not sure that this discovery will really affect how I light my room. That fixture is in a pretty random entry location to the bedroom, and not near anything useful.

But how odd to be walking to the bathroom and all of a sudden say, "Interesting. My bedroom has a light in the ceiling."

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Time is Relative

I'm getting set to head home from work, and it's about 8:35pm. Over the last three days I've probably averaged close to ten hours a day in the office.

But you know what? That's my choice, not my employer's.

During high school I worked at a place I really enjoyed, and I'd go hang out at work just because I didn't have anything better to do. On the weekend I'd get up in the morning, drive to the office, and stay there until I had something fun to do in the evening. I was getting paid to play with computers; why wouldn't I be there?

That's sort of what I'm feeling like right now. I'm getting paid to mess around with computers. I mean, I either hang out here on the computer or at home on the computer and it just so happens that the stuff I'm doing here is cooler right now.

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Checking Out Basecamp

I know I've heard of Basecamp many times over the past couple months, but only sort of in the periphery -- one of those things where you know the name, but you don't know much more than that. Today, though, I was in the market for a system to manage collaboration between a few people here and two different clients as we tweak and bugfix an app that'll be going live in the next couple weeks. I found that Basecamp was actually what had been used for a previous project with different clients, so I took some time today to play around and see what all the hype's about.

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I Guess That's Inflation

In school I wrote all my papers using LyX, a document editor that lets you worry about the structure of your text while writing and handle the actual bits like how it'll look later. I love it before it creates really nice looking output, and typesets worlds better than a normal word processor like Word.

In any case, last week I started on a document using LyX running on a G5. Then Friday I got the iMac, but all I could find online were PowerPC binaries. So I figured, hey, it's open-source. I'll compile my own.

First, though, I had to compile QT, since it's used by the nicest of the LyX frontends. Simple enough. The open-source version of QT is a 25mb download. I unpacked it, ran configure, and started it compiling. Some decent value of a long time later it finished. And, well, the tree got a little bigger during the compile:

erichardson:~/src eric$ du -hs qt-mac-opensource-src-4.1.0          
2.6G

2.6GB out of a 25mb download. Yikes.

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