So last week was my first back after vacation. I’d never taken two weeks off before, so it was nice to go home and see my family and friends for Christmas and come back here and lounge around for a week. Two week vacations are nice because while you can just be an amorphous blob that first week, eating whatever holiday goodies are in sight, that second week is boring as hell and you need to get out and do something. For me, it was the other way around.
Shaver’s been in town for a few days… he came down and watched his Maple Leafs get handily beat by the Bruins. Woo. And the B’s traded John Grahame today, which makes me feel more at ease. It’s too bad things didn’t work out for him, but dear god, I could not handle his jumping while in net.
Whenever Mike’s around, there’s always two things: gluttony and video games. The former was fulfilled (and I mean “filled”) by Shona’s turkey last night and some mango fried rice today. And the latter by Halo. I still die an awful lot, but I am getting better at the finer aspects of the game, namely killing the other people. I even won a couple of games!
Tonight we saw Catch Me If You Can and it was a delightful romp. It had a very Spielbergian feel to it. I read the book about two years ago, and the movie seemed pretty true to it from what I remember. Of course, how much of that is true I’m not so sure.
It’s cold outside.
A lot of noise has been made lately about Apple’s new Safari web browser. Now that I am a member of the club I gave it a spin. It’s a fine browser, although a few things bother me about it (not the least of which is that god damned brushed metal UI… at least you can hack it out. It’s fast, but I really wish they’d turn the status bar on and move the MSN Explorer-like progress bar out of the address bar. I’m definitely in the tabbed-browser-or-something-like-it camp. The browser to me is so much about content delivery that I almost never need to cut-and-paste from one browser window into another and I rarely ever need to see more than one page at a time, although I do often have ten or more pages open, so I find tabs much easier to manage than separate windows. I think if I were ever to use Safari as a serious browser, it’d have to have something like that.
It has been interesting to see a huge backlash against Mozilla and Gecko after the release of Safari. What seems really amazing, though, is that a lot of these Mozilla guys aren’t really defending Gecko. Yes, it’s the most standards-compliant browser out there and can render some hideously laid out pages, but it takes forever to start up and users megs and megs and megs of memory.
Like Konqueror Safari is based on KHTML, and while everyone hailed its quickness before, its rendering was crap. These days, though, it probably renders more sites correctly than incorrectly, and they’re working hard on it. I think we may find that KHTML is the layout engine of choice as a middle ground between performance and proper layout and rendering for future open source (and perhaps some commercial) browsers. The GNOME folks may need to be dragged kicking and screaming, however.