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Wednesday, June 16, 2004 |
One of my favorite recent reads, Larry Kirwan's Liverpool Fantasy, is a finalist for the Sidewise Award
for long-form alternate history. Can't say as I've read any of the
other nominees (though I certainly intend to), so I don't know how
stiff the competition is. It's very cool, though. Winner to be
announced at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston Labor Day weekend. Thanks to Plokta for the info.
10:02:33 PM 
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An outsourcing-to-India joke with a Wisconsin reference. I love you, Helen!
9:41:30 PM
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Downloaded my fresh copies of Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 from Mozilla.org.
I've been using Thunderbird as my default Windows email client for
several months now, and it has broken me away permanently from my
beloved Eudora. I never responded
to the siren call of Outlook and still only use that if I have no
choice. But Eudora was groaning under the weight of a well thought out
folder tree and filtering combo, effectively refused to let me read
mail while downloading (it would basically hang whenever it would
filter something, which seemed to be always), wanted to charge me for
its anti-spam components--and then kept telling me it couldn't serve
its ads anymore (on a freaking DSL connection with no ad-blocking apps
in sight)!
Thunderbird does an adequate job of filtering spam from the get-go
(with very rare false positives), and gives you a one-click "This is
spam" button to manually remove the rest. It has never complained about
the number of folders I have or the filters that service them, and I
can always read mail. Never hangs up. I wish the newsreader would let
you select multiple headlines for download from a newsgroup (a habit
I've retained from the offline-newsreader days that I see no reason to
break), but otherwise I just love it to bits.
Firefox has been my browser of choice at work since I started my
current job in April. It's speedy, tabbed, has its own Googlebar (a
downloadable extension) and doesn't have to run in the background like
its big (or is that gargantuan) brother Mozilla. Now if I find out it
supports the Radio editor, I can probably stop using big Moz
altogether. Which is how it's supposed to happen, anyway.
It seemed to take forever between Netscape's open-sourcing of its
browser code and the first public release. Now that both the Mozilla
suite and its standalone components are moving along so well, we can
say that it was worth the wait. If you haven't left IE yet, now's the
time.
9:26:38 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Mike McCallister.
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