2001-04-28 - 3:53 a.m.

Use Opera

Jill, who I assume knows these things, told me that I was working out too often for someone just started on strength training. Between that and a sore back, I blew off my scheduled Thursday night workout and used the time to get Emacs running on my PC. Armed with Emacs, only a good FTP client remains to be obtained before I'm ready to use my home PC as a testbed for web sites and then upload them to a hosting provider.

No, I won't be redoing this Diaryland site. I know people like Fatal-error loathe the standard layout and complain about crappy design, but IMO they have it all wrong. We ain't publishing no magazine. I write to be read. Experimenting with funky, low-contrast color schemes and weird fonts mostly breaks things. I'm sure those fancy web sites look great to the authors, but they probably haven't check to see how they look when viewed in Opera on a 1280x1024 display. Let me tell you something: People who specify font size="2" or other tricks end up with tiny little fonts. Gar.

Rant over with.

If you haven't downloaded the free version of the Opera web browser yet, you should. Just as advertised, it handily outpaces Netscape and offers full standards compliance. Except that for some reason the JavaScript used by Blogger breaks it, so I have to fire up Netscape when I want to rant. Opera also gives me much better control over what cookies I accept than Netscape or IE would.

Wow, that went far afield. Anyway, I stayed up a bit late last night tinkering with Emacs for Win98. I got my bare minimum of sleep, but woke up with a headache and no capacity whatsoever to think. Just signing on and sending an "out sick today" email message seemed remarkably complex. I went back to bed and slept until 5pm. Now it's 4am and I'm online. Oops. Must sleep soon.

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