Desiring Machine

This is a test blog post using Firefox and the extension ScribeFire. In a previous incarnation this program used to be called Performancing, but my particular experience of it on a Mac sucked. In particular the cursor had a hard time keeping in sync in the edit window, it would jump around or always be off by a few characters. So far so good, it looks like ScribeFire has overcome some of the previous bugs.

I have decided to make Firefox my mainstream browser. For a longtime I have been a dedicated user of Safari, mostly because I appreciate the little fit and finish details. But lately Safari has become problematic and slow for my browser habits (a gazillion tabs open all the time). Constant interrupts and the pizza wheel of death show up constantly. Maybe it is my browser habits, maybe an immaturity in the OS X/Safari code base, maybe a misconfiguration, I don’t know but I am not pleased with the performance. I feel that I shouldn’t have this kind of user experience on a fairly new Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro with 2 GB of ram. Overall my impressions of OS X are diminishing. Perhaps the intel transition was rushed, I don’t know. I just don’t remember having these issues on Power PC based hardware. Hopefully Leopard will fix things. But in the meantime I am going to give Firefox more usage and see how it goes.

Also, speaking of plugins for Firefox, if you do any kind of web development I highly recommend Firebug. It makes debugging CSS, Javascript, and HTML sooooo much easier.

The former first lady and wife of LBJ died yesterday at the age of 94. I don’t know much about her because she was really before my time. However, I am surprised that more is not being said. Many of the liberal blogs I frequent haven’t mentioned anything about her. I saw the news on CNN. I find this silence conspicuous in an odd way. Not sure if any significance is to be had.

I do know that Lady Bird Johnson was attached to numerous “beautification” projects. And this is and was a noble endeavor. If you drive down through the California Redwoods along the 101 near Orick there is tucked away a beautiful little grove called Ladybird Johnson Grove. It is important that we remember these seemingly little aesthetic achievements. Preserve a little piece of park here, a nice tree planted along a highway, a little corner of a neighborhood with a green space. These projects are not on the scale of massive healthcare budgets, war and peace, or tax reform in terms of popular and journalistic attention. But they are the things that make life a little more meaningful and a little more beautiful. If we had more Ladybird Johnsons in the world, it would be a better place.

And for the curious, here are some Quicktime VR shots of Lady Bird Johnson grove.