The Lair

Valleywag has been running a fake word competition all week. A long time ago, my mother gave me a book with various punning neologisms like sarchasm. I can’t remember the title of the book; but reading the entries submitted for the fake words contest brought many a fond memory back.

In no particular order:

Ringtone rage: Violent behavior exhibited by cubicle dwellers, brought about by hearing their colleagues’ ringtones repeatedly. [S. E. August]

Aspergered: state resulting from pouring a lot of time and energy into an obsessive hobby or project, usually pointless to outsiders. [Arnaud Hubert]

BILF: Blogger i’d like to f***. As hot as MILF, except probably younger, and smart enough to blog. [Dan Tam]

Blogna sandwich: Reading blogs on a lunchbreak. [Jim Frost]

Mutual blogsterbation: When two bloggers blog about how great each other is. [Scott Case]

Blamethrower: The flaming of the guilty when projects go bad, and the accompanying Dragonslayer-esque deflection of blame. [Randy Hollingsworth]

Dot Mom: The woman who has a husband whose money she’s using from his Web 2.0 startup to buy the Escalade and keep the nanny around 24/7, even though she doesn’t work. [Rick Dobbs]

Fooky: Having very poor implementation and/or concept to the point of not being usable. Often recognized by all except the founder. Bill thought his idea was great, but we all knew it was FOOKY and wouldn’t last. [Makinde Adeagbo]

Blemeworthy: Worthy of being propogated via blog. By all accounts, Jude Law and Sienna Miller’s makeup sex was certainly blemeworthy. [Michael Krantz]

Typerventilating: Rapidly sending instant messages. Having a panic attack via AIM. [Exa Grubb]

Blogamy: Having more than one blog at a time. [Bill Green]

IMbush: A coordinating attack using instant messenger to beat the truth out of a third party. I admitted to lying to my boyfriend when he and a friend who knew the truth IMbushed me. [Maureen O'Connor]

Blush: A crush on a blogger — a person you’ve never met but whose blog you read. [Natala Menezes]

It would be less funny if I didn’t relate to most of those concepts personally. Also worth noting that Blurf was coined by someone in the neighbourhood – like two years ago.

In other news, I have performed a periodic stock take of my Winamp playlist and discovered Queen’s Stone Cold Classics cohabiting a playlist with Culture Beat and uh.. James Blunt. This may also explain why I’m not using last fm or other social music services. For one, it’s slightly embarassing to let my Winamp playlist be seen in public. Secondly, I think a recommendation service would go slightly mad at my music choices. Yeah. Now I’m listening to Freedom 90. Beyond reform, that’s me.

And finally, I have discovered yet another Firefox extension which may give Chris Pederick’s Web Dev extension a run for it’s money. Firebug deserves just a single word description. Awesome. And you can even disable the irritating error count display without restarting the browser. I’m sold.

Well, I’ve almost finished the first round of tweaking for the application alluded to earlier. It’s my first lifesize encounter with asynchronous Javascript calls to the server (yes, I’ll call it Ajax if you insist) and my impression thus far has been remarkably positive. The Greasemonkey experience taught me lots about DOM manipulation which I’ve put to good use here and astonishingly, the app functions pretty much as I envisioned. And that was actually without sacrifices to the dark altar of browser detection. Ye gods!

Somewhat weirdly though, the otherwise marvellous Opera has some deficiencies with image opacity support – but that’s a minor blip as far as the overall app is concerned. At one point, I feared that Opera would start declining in quality and features compared to other browsers once it became free – but at least as far as the latest snapshot is concerned, this doesn’t appear to be the case. The list of changes include a Firefox/Mozilla style about:config interface, some revamped keyboard shortcuts (I won’t need to redefine them any more, thank heavens) and brilliantly, support for XPath 1.0

Staying with the browser discussion, I’ve also noticed that the Firefox nightly builds have changed the version string from 1.4 to 1.5 in the last couple of days… breaking extension compatibility yet again *sigh*. Well, on the plus side, this indicates that a Firefox 1.5 final release is drawing ever closer. Sadly, there are still several bugs that I can see (the addressbar bug is particularly annoying) – so there could be a release candidate or two after the announced RC1. Some of the more irritating UI bugs don’t even have an assignee yet.

Lots of words have been written about Flock recently – ranging from the gushing “Oh my, this is so cool and the theme is so beautiful” to skepticism about the need for another browser, albeit a specialized Firefox variant. Funnily enough, lots of the truly innovative parts of this new social browser (that term makes the browser sound very outgoing, doesn’t it ? Not like your stay-at-home fuddy duddy Firefox) like, for example, the Shelf is called Places in Mozilla-speak – and the interesting idea of integrating bookmarks with a social bookmarking service was discussed here – both features planned for Firefox 2. Perhaps Flock might never ever be as widely adopted as Firefox is at present – and I’d still think that’s ok. All I really hope that Flock accomplishes is to spur on the mainline Firefox. We don’t have a testbed for experiments with radically different user interfaces and toolsets for browsers – and Flock could provide this – even if they’re discarded or never make it into the mainstream. Remember Firefox was spun off from the main Mozilla and eventually became bigger than its parent ? Who’s to say the same won’t happen with Flock some day ?

Having said that, I do far more things with Firefox than merely bookmark stuff and write blog posts (the length of this post notwithstanding) – so I’m holding onto my bleeding edge Deer Park nightly for the moment.

So I finally removed the dastardly Firefox stable version. Stability ? Feh. Over rated. Why not live on the cutting edge and install the newest Firefox 1.5 beta. From now on, I live on the edge ladies and gents.

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