The font was Perpetua, and it is now the more playful “Chronicles of a Hero” from BlamBot. Now I am tempted to go back to the tasty serif Apollo, which as reviewed by Jon Coltz has me salivating. In fact all of the fonts he reviews are outstanding. I must visit there more often.

It has been a while, but it seems like my laptop has finally been fixed. Of course, they took just long enough to mess my schedule up, and get totally used to this laptop. The good news is that the old laptop should have all my stuff on it, and it will be nice to get back to the 1600×1200 screen, but I will miss the built-in Wi-Fi on this one. Now it’s time to do the dance of transferring all my stuff over. Since my email is all in IMAP that usually isn’t a problem, but somehow I always seem to accumulate tons of junk all over the hard drive that is important for whatever reason.

I have a really funny story about the Best Buy people fixing it: My mom calls them up today to see if it’s ready, well the guy says they got the pesky power button problem working, but now there’s something else wrong with it. He wasn’t able to log in to my account (good) but he tried to guess the password anyway (Umm, why?). Apparently when he pressed the keys, it would type a different letter than he was pressing. When he pressed “a” or “m” it was fine, but every other letter was wrong.

Sound familiar? As everyone who has ever used my laptop knows, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature . I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout two years ago and I haven’t looked back since. In addition to allowing me to type faster and more comfortably, it also has (as demonstrated above) a security benefit. (Unless of course you know the secret combination to switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.)

I hope everyone had as nice as a holiday as I did. It feels good to be back though.

Don’t you hate it when you’re working on a really nice post through the web interface and you lose it? Bah humbug!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. 🙂

. . . as I head out into the massive throngs tomorrow (today) to do Christmas shopping. I’ve made the list; I’ve checked it twice. If I had any sense this would have been done weeks, if not months ago, but this should be an adventure. If you want to join in for the time of your life, give me a call :). Or not: apparently my phone has been giving “Ciruit busy” messages to people all day. Hopefully T-Mobile will resolve all that by tomorrow.

My laptop has 512MB of memory. The W3C should encourage WYSIWYG editor makers to output valid XHTML. MB RSS XML.

I just took my last final and turned in my last papers. I’m golden until January :). Now it’s time to party like it’s 1999!

My mother would be proud.

While I am a fan of Dante, I think he may have missed something in his portrayal of the netherworlds, and I just want to assure the guy who went out of his way to splash me with his car as I was waiting to cross the street that there is a special level of hell reserved for people like that. Geez.

I’ve been using the new Cross Ion pen for a few months now, and it has worked wonderfully. I think my favorite thing about it is the small size it goes to, which is easy on my pockets. That’s also why I think I’d like a Tungsten T. But apparently I just ran an entire load of clothes through the washer and dryer with this pen, unknowingly of course. I saw the pen first thing when I opened the dryer, and even though some of my favorite shirts were in there for some reason the first thing I did was see if the pen still worked! Even better yet, it did. On to the clothes: as far as I can tell there are no ink stains on anything! I’ll do a closer examination in the morning but things look good.

Note to self: I will stop labeling CDs before I actually burn them.

Okay the weirdest thing happened to me today. I’m just going about my business, and chatting with a few people online, when all of a sudden everything I type goes in backward. The cursor would stay at the start of the line and the letters would just go in normally, albeit in the wrong order. At first I really didn’t even notice, because I was typing and looking at my other monitor. Then it started worrying me. What could have caused this? Did I somehow activate a international feature in Windows for languages that read right to left? Well I racked my brain, and also kept up my conversations on instant messenger, mostly because it was really funny seeing different people’s reactions to it. To my surprise no one at all had trouble reading the backward text, and they all recognized it immediately. Two people were cracking up while another was convinced I had downloaded some program to do it. The other possibility of course in the back of my mind that I had gotten a virus with a sense of humor. I suspected this doubly because I never get viruses in my email but today I received (and Norton caught) four of them.

Anyway, back to the mystery of the backward typing (gnipyt sdrawkcab), it turns out that when I had gotten a call I put an hard drive down on my desk, however it was on top of my wireless keyboard. Specifically, on top of the left arrow button! Try it, hold down the left arrow button with something and then start typing. It was a very chance thing as well, because if had been in Word or a text box like I am now I would have seen the cursor whizzing by and suspected a key down, but in the chat boxes there was nothing to indicated that the cursor being pushed to the left. Now I better go before they take my geek license away :). (Actually, I was installing GNU/Linux on said other machine so they let me keep it. Whew.)

Very seldom do I read anything on the web as well-written or as well-researched as Understanding Web Typography. It was a long read, especially with all of the juicy links, but I enjoyed it immensely. Via Anil Dash

Well I tried out everything, except Eudora which for some reason wouldn’t install, and I’m back to using Outlook Express, which in my opinion is simply the best IMAP email client out there currently. The application I’m going to start looking at closer is Outlook XP, because I think it does everything I want it to do, it’s just clunky. Perhaps with some more customization it could be what I need though. Honestly though I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Outlook’s bloat anymore.

Update: It’s now about a year later, and Mozilla Thunderbird is by far the best IMAP email client around for Windows. Give it a try.

So I actually went shopping this morning, and it was the first time I’ve really been caught up in a holiday rush like that. Everything I could find said that Best Buy was going to open at ten, so I set my alarm for 9:30 and decided to go to the one on 59 to get a 75GB Western Digital hard drive and 256MB stick of memory for $50 (after rebate of course). On the way over on the radio I heard them say essentially that all of the sale items from Best Buy and Walmart and Circuit City were long gone. I felt my heart sink even more as I pulled into the parking lot and saw it packed, obviously it had been open for a while. Cursing my lack of experience in this matter, I decided to head in anyway. I made my way through the throngs to the back where the computer things were. A few words to a frazzled employee later and he led me to another area, where they had several of exactly what I needed. The friendly sales lady remarked they had plenty and I didn’t need to get up so early next time. I was suddenly conscious of my just-rolled-out-of-bed look, but appreciative at her ability to keep a sense of humor in such a busy situation. Then it got interesting.

Where it took mere moments to get the hard drive and memory, checking out was another manner. They had the store roped off so half of the store was actually a checkout line. It was probably only about a twenty minute wait, so I’m not one to complain judging by some of the shopping war stories I’ve heard. Still, it was not what I was accustomed to. Overall I’m very happy with the deal, even though the memory is the wrong kind for my machine, the hard drive alone is a steal for that price, and I’m going to sell the memory to a friend. Now I’m tempted to head out to Circuit City, where they’ve been advertising $10 CDs, every CD in the store! I thought Best Buy was doing that but it wasn’t till I had painstakingly picked out some jazz ones for presents when someone told me it was only the advertised ones that were cheap, all the rest were list. I think CDs are overpriced anyway.