The One with the Thoughts of Frans

He has been back for a couple of weeks already, but until today I had not freed the time to read his recent log entries. If you followed my old log, then you are probably aware that my customized Opera browser relies heavily upon his work.

If you use one or more of his customized ini-files, then you should head over to Moose’s new site and download the latest editions. If you have never used them before, then you should go to the site and discover all aspects of it. It will take a while, but it is worth it. From the old CSS experiments to the thoughts behind the keyboard- and menu-setup.

Try out the keyboard setup. To say that it is unconventional is an understatement. But give it some time. It might grow on you. Opera’s browsing speed combined with those keyboard shortcuts make my browsing an experience where almost no futile time is lost on controlling my browser.

Last, but not least, looking at the beautiful layout of the site, the lean markup and well-written CSS is a 100% convincing argument to drop support for IE.

A must-visit for everyone who is interested in Opera customization.

I never quite followed Friends while it was still on. Over the past two months or so I have been watching all of the Friends episodes (mainly because I liked the show Joey which is a spin-off of Friends) and yesterday I watched the final double episode. In the end I realised that all I had already seen quite a few episodes from the last season, because a friend of me was a big fan.

The strange part is more how you can grow so easily accustomed to things, especially if you have them so straight-forward available to you. While having no new Lost episodes for another 2 weeks is a little bit annoying, it’s not like I really miss it a lot. That is more because I find season 2 incredibly less interesting than season 1, I would have missed season 1 a lot.

Anyway, on average, I watched like 2-3 episodes of Friends every day. So all in all that was two months without any shortage. But now it’s gone all gone. It feels like such a huge gap. I could start watching it from the top again. 😛

I simply didn’t realise in the past that so many people liked Friends because it describes real life so well (disregarding too expensive apartments and clothes). Probably it didn’t do so because I didn’t live on myself back then…

Until now, I wasn’t aware of the fact that regions will still exist on Blu-Ray discs. I have to say no more then that the following quote of the article fully represents my opinion.

Of course, the pirates who engage in video swashbuckling are quite capable of removing this region encoding, meaning that the black market goods are user friendly, while the white market goods are a pain to deal with, and limit consumer choice.

As far as I could discover in a quick Google-search, HD-DVD does not carry this heavy burden on its back. Why shoot yourself in the foot like this, Sony?

Actually the release of WordPress 2.0 and this new weblog have no connection at all, it just so happened that Ethan gave me this as a Christmas present at the same time WordPress 2.0 was released. I knew for sure that I wanted to try something other than WordPress 1.5 and what can be better for that than WordPress 2.0, the tool which already served me well for almost six months?

So far I only set up a few basic things. It should be noted that a few setting related things, most particularly the permalinks, are even smoother than they already were. The usage of AJAX in the entry management is nice (it makes deleting so much smoother), but that doesn’t make me hate the (in my view) abuse of the name of Ajax any less. Also it still displays replies related to a post after deleting it, which isn’t bad, but it did cause me to click delete and get a “this reply doesn’t exist” message, which certainly could confuse new users.

The rich text editor is nice and can easily be disabled, but sadly a few tiny things like inserting links don’t work on Opera. That’s more likely the fault of the incomplete Rich Text implementation on the Opera Technical Preview I use than of WordPress.

Before the end of the year, I will finally put the Calendar back online, as I’ve had many mails requesting it. Further I doubt I will post much here during the rest of the holidays.

For this entry we’ll have to go back in time. It was last year, September 2004, the second week of my first year in university. I was in Amsterdam switching trains. A blond pretty girl sat down next to me. She was 20 years old and happened to study psychology at the same university. You could say she was a bit of a movie-style stereotype college-girl.

It was around 18:00, so after the conversation where I discovered what I just told you, I took out my lunch package, which I had prepared at my parents place earlier that day. She did the same. It was not a lunch package however. It was half a bread, a knife and a can of peanut butter. She then took a book out of her bag and put it on her bosom. As you can probably imagine she put a slice of bread on it and started to put peanut butter on the slice.

Intrigued I inquired further about this behaviour. Her reply was simple and effective. “I am a student, students do that. For example see that guy at the other side of the train eating pickles from that jar of pickles? He’s a student.” “Interesting, how can you be so sure?” “I know him, he’s in my year.”

I don’t think ever I saw her after that trip, or else I didn’t recognise her. I don’t think I ever thought back at this until yesterday. Last Thursday we went out and came home around 5. I didn’t get to sleep until something like 6. So when I got up around 11:30 I didn’t do much except being lazy and tired. So when I wanted to catch the bus around 13:00, without thinking about it, I put half a bread, liver sausage, a knife and half a carton of grapefruit juice in my bag.

When I got a book out of my bag, put a slice of bread on it and started to use my knife to cut pieces of the liver sausage, suddenly all of this entered my head and I thought: “Aha, I am a student”.