First Firefox, then Safari, and now Epiphany. I was looking through the Gnome 2.2.6 release notes, since I think that’s what’s going to be in Jaunty when it’s released next month, and found this:

Imagine my joy. What’s next–a “not so awesome” bar in Lynx, FFS? Hell, for all I know, IE 8 has something like that now, too (dunno, haven’t seen it yet, haven’t even used IE 7 more than a few times). Anyway, I found the way to turn it off in FF, L. found the way for me to turn it off in Safari, and there has to be a way to turn it off in Epiphany. I’ll find that when the time comes, too. Muahahaha! 😈

Go home, you old bastard. I want the windows open because it’s beautiful outside, I love to hear the birds, and besides, open windows make the cat STFU, but that doesn’t mean I want them open with you spending half your time roaming under the windows of one side of the house, and the other half standing right below the bedroom window, close enough that I can sit at my desk and hear you mumbling to yourself. Go HOME. Go somewhere. Go anywhere. Just find something to fucking do that doesn’t involve hovering around my goddamned house because that stupid mouth-breathing white trash next door can’t figure out how to work the goddamned sump pump in his basement. Fuck off. Go…away. I don’t like people very much, I don’t like neighbours at all (specifically my neighbours) and I damn-sure don’t like old dudes farting around right outside my house all day. Leave, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been hanging about the entire morning and show no signs of leaving–how long can it possibly take to show that idiot how to work a fucking sump pump??? Stop fussing with weeds, too–they’re fine just where they are, and that’ll only mean you’re here longer. GO HOME!

Well, it’s early spring once again, and maybe this year, I’ll actually get around to doing it. “It” would be a wildflower garden. Just a small one for now–enough to attract a few insects, hopefully including butterflies–but I think this might actually be the year! I considered it in 2007, but decided it was probably more work than I really wanted to do. Last year, I actually looked at some native wildflower species and went outside to scope out where I might put it, but then it got to be April, and then May, and I sort of went, “Meh.” This year, I’ve found a vendor for wildflower seeds, chosen about $50 worth of a mix of full-sun (my back yard gets sun from dawn to dusk), medium-to-dry soil seeds called “Prairie Jubilee” that has a bunch of different native flowers and a few grasses for filler, plus some small packets of individual species for extras (specifically milkweeds for Monarchs and other flowers that attract butterflies and hummingbirds), and have decided where to put the wildflower patch. I have to remove the grass that’s already there, and I can’t fuck around because it’s already mid-March, but the seeds I chose don’t need any cold spell to “activate” them, so I think it’ll be do-able. In a perfect world, I would’ve started last autumn, but this isn’t a perfect world, and since autumn means the end of bug season, it’s not exactly my favourite time of year, so I’m less “inspired” to do….well, pretty much anything. Spring, though, is different. There are several ways to prepare for a wildflower garden (it’s not as simple as “chuck the seed out and wait”), but I think that since I’m just putting in a small bed for now, if I just cut away the sod to get down to bare ground, that will get rid of the turf and at least most potential weeds, then I can put on a layer of topsoil, mixed with a bit of sheep manure. Once that’s prepared and it’s warm enough, I’ll mix the seeds with some damp sand, rake the soil, broadcast the seed, rake again, roll it (for better seed-to-soil contact), and cover it with straw or lawn clippings or maybe even peat to help hold in moisture and prevent birds from seeing it as their personal all-you-can-eat buffet. I have to check again to make sure I’ve got enough annuals to look decent the first year, since perennials won’t do much until at least the second year, but I think that this time, I might actually have that much needed “round tuit”. :)  The worst of it will be removing the grass, but we ran into B. today, and he said that although D. has already moved to TX, he’s planning on staying there, and (much to P.’s relief), he’ll still be doing our lawn this year. If he’ll mow grass for cash when the heat index is 40C-plus, then I’m sure he’ll be willing to help me remove sod in less sauna-ish temperatures if it should turn out to be a bigger job than I want to do on my own (I’m pretty sure hell would freeze solid before P. would haul arse out there and do it with me). B. is dumb as a fucking post, and attempting conversation with him is nothing short of painful, but he’s young and strong, a hard worker, and not too expensive. 😉

See? I have one!

No joy yet in getting Safari to run under Wine on Ubuntu, but I think I’m getting somewhere because it does at least try to start, which it didn’t with a default install. I’ll have to poke around a bit and maybe copy some of the folders from my Windows install to the .wine folder; maybe I can get it to work after all. In the meantime, I did finally get around to fixing another minor annoyance. If I’m at my desk, I prefer to use Thunderbird for email, and I’d had POP access to my Gmail Inbox for a long time, but since I got the iPhone, I’ve discovered that it would be convenient for everything to sync automatically, so I’d have copies of all messages, everywhere. If I sent it from the Thunderbird client on my desktop, I wanted to be able to access it on my laptop and iPhone, too (and never have to use the web interface, since it’s just short of horrible and pisses me off when I use the laptop, since it auto-refreshes and the small keyboard means I hit key combinations I don’t mean and Christ knows where the cursor ends up), and now I can. I removed my old Gmail POP account so I wouldn’t end up with duplicate messages in my Inboxes, and I don’t think there’s a way to use Global Inbox with both POP and IMAP accounts, but I don’t mind having it separate, and now everything is synced automatically with no need to forward a sent message to myself so I can access it somewhere besides my desktop client. I still need to set up Thunderbird for Gmail IMAP on the laptop so I can use that instead of the web interface, but that won’t take long at all. So…half a “yay”, I guess. Not full yay until I figure out Safari, but it’s Friday, and it’s sunny, and I just told B. how to text via email so he won’t worry about using his work phone for expensive messages just because he feels like saying “Hi!”, and I think the Great Deep Freeze is over because it’s going to be much warmer tomorrow (and 19C by next Tuesday!), so half a yay will do for now. 🙂

Well, I think it will be, at least. I was wrong about my day–it did get better. Last night, I fell asleep watching Mythbusters. Woke up at 0100h with a headache so bad I couldn’t even lift my head, let alone get up. Fell back to sleep until 0200h, woke up again and my head still hurt, but it wasn’t quite as bad, so I got up, got in the shower (a hot shower will sometimes help a tension headache), then got into bed. Around 0300h, I fell asleep again, but woke up at 0645h still hurting. By the time I’d installed Safari, I had an even worse headache and a hate-on for a web browser that I haven’t felt since the last time I was forced to use IE6 (IE7 is slightly less horrible) for more than the time it took to download Firefox. I wanted to like it, but in its default state, I just couldn’t. It’s hard to search for ways to disable something when you have no idea what the thing is called, but when you have a whole lot of help from an Apple fan geek with tons of Windows experience, too, it’s really pretty easy. 😉 Not only did L. send me links with the names of the “features” (annoyances) that I might want to disable, but he gave me the most important information of all in telling me the thing I needed to edit (it’s something like about:config in FF) was called a…plist. Hell, he went all the way and then some, and even sent me a link to a plist editor for Windows!

Turns out that Apple doesn’t really want users disabling their shiny new features, but after I read the stuff that L. had sent, I got 99% of what I wanted from Safari (still have to mess with hosts for ads, and I’m not sure how I’ll manage Flash/scripts, but we’ll see). Apparently, a plist is just an XML file, so all I needed to do was add a few entries for the features I didn’t want, then set their values to “false”, and that’s exactly what I did. The only thing I didn’t get that I wanted was to have no history at all saved, but I did set it for only one day, and since I won’t use Safari more than one session a day (sometimes not even that–depends upon whether I boot to XP to use MSN or not), that works out just fine for me! I turned off practically everything in the lists that L. gave me, except for the “tabs on top” thing because I actually quite like that. I did turn it off, just to see which way I liked better, but turned it back on because it’s easier to see the individual tabs that way, plus it looks kind of cool. I got rid of Google Suggest, and deleted the bookmarks that Safari had imported from IE and FF (without asking me whether I wanted to do that, BTW), and turned off Cover Flow view, Top Sites and Fancy URL Completion (whatever the hell that is–I do know I don’t need “fancy”!) In a perfect world, I’d just start Safari in “porn browsing” (okay, so it’s really called “Private Browsing”) mode, but I don’t know how to do that, or whether it’s even possible. According to everything I had time to read in between ironing shirts and talking to B., you can turn off the prompt asking whether you’re sure you want to switch to private browsing, but you can’t make it start in private mode by default. If it were Linux, I’d use a script, and I think I could do the same in OSX, but I don’t know how I might go about doing that in XP, so for the time being, I’ll just remember to switch to porn mode–sorry…private mode–when I first start it. Even if I forget, it’s going to keep only a single day’s history, and I can live with that. Bless L.’s thoughtful heart; being able to start typing without a list popping up in my face, and having some extra control over the way my browser works was like….like when B3 and I were little, and he’d annoy me for hours on end (little brothers tend to do that), and I couldn’t give him hell because he was just a bored little kid even though I kind of wanted to kick him, but then something would catch his attention and he’d go somewhere else. I’d think, “YES! Thank GOD!” Yeah…like that. Thank $deity for L.; he knocked it right out of the park again, and I didn’t even have to ask.

Plist editor, and anything that begins with “Debug”, I added myself.

Look, ma–no stuff in my face! I can type in a URL without a bunch of crap jumping out! Yaaaaayyyy! 🙂

I never use the Google search box (FF has it, too, and I always remove it), but just to make sure that Google Suggest is really gone, I checked. Yep–bye bye, yet another annoyance!

Yay for iPhone gurus and Mac fanboys who also happen to be Windows power users (he’s a sysadmin) and know BSD, too. Okay, so just yay for the funny one who knows the tune of “Laundry Night” and took the time to help me today. Awwww! ♥

I really want to like the Safari 4 beta for Windows–I do! L. told me about it one time when I was bitching about FF on Windows (which, in my defence, does take forever to start on XP, especially since I use it so seldom and it’s always got four thousand updates to do), and since he’d said the magic word–fast–I finally got round to installing it. He’s dead-on right that it’s quick, and it even looks pretty good, but goddamn it to hell anyway because I cannot for the life of me find a way to turn off that idiotic menu that drops down in my face every time I start typing in the address bar (or the search bar, for that matter). Why, why, why must every fucking browser assume that I want it to “help” me find something, or that I can’t search my bookmarks if that’s what I want to do? I learned to touch-type roughly a quarter of a century ago, I’m fast, and I can still manage it just fine. If I wanted help to go to a URL, I’d ask for help, but I don’t because…I don’t fucking want help. If I’m typing a URL, I know what I want, and all the browser needs to do is just sit there patiently and wait for me to tell it where to go. Auto-whatever is always fucking turned on by default, always a pain in the arse to turn off, and I abso-fucking-lutely hate it. A browser is a piece of software, not a personal bleeding-jesus assistant, and all I want from a browser is for it to DO EXACTLY WHAT I TELL IT TO DO! Not more, not less–exactly what I tell it, and hurry up about it. I can live with deleting the default bookmarks that come with a browser (though that is a minor annoyance because they’re never anything useful to me), and I can live with changing the home page from the company’s (which it is always) to whatever I want. What I can’t live with is “presumptuous” software.

I went into Safari’s settings and turned off anything that even remotely looked like it might maintain a list of sites I’d visited. I don’t have any bookmarks in it because this was only the third or fourth time I’d run the goddamned thing (I restarted each time I changed settings) and I didn’t import anything from anywhere. I told it to clear everything as soon as I closed it, and I even turned on something I believe is called “Private browsing”. Not that I care whether anyone can see sites I’ve visited–there’s nothing incriminating in my history–but I’d hoped that might stop it from trying to “help” me. Nope–it just presented me with a useless list of sites it got from…somewhere. I don’t know; maybe sites I’d visited two minutes earlier, or old IE favourites, or something from a FF profile, or maybe they’re not even mine at all and just came with the browser. I don’t care. Whatever they are, I want them fucking gone.

Stop “helping” me! Don’t remember anything, don’t save anything unless I tell you I want it saved–that’s why I have a mind of my own. Just do exactly what I tell you to do. Is that so difficult?

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I hate Charter so much (one of many). I was frustrated and typed, “www.fuckoffsafari.com” into the address bar. By default behaviour, since Google is set as my default search engine, it should have at least taken me to Google search results (FF default behaviour for that is to take you to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” results, but dunno about Safari). It used to work, but a couple of years ago, those cocksuckers at Charter sold us out to Yahoo!, so now, if you type in an invalid URL, or try to use a keyword which you’ve not already “tied to” a bookmark, you’ll get taken to their search page. There’s no way to turn it off (all you can do is reset your default search engine to Google instead of the Yahoo! they made it, and I did that long ago), and the first results are sponsored. There aren’t many for this, but if the term is more popular, you’ll have to scroll down 2/3 of the page to even get non-sponsored results, and when you do, they’ll be crappy fucking Yahoo! results, even if your default search is set to Google. Bastards. They can all DIAF as far as I’m concerned.

I was using XP yesterday and decided I’d give in and update to the latest version of Messenger (okay, after I’d determined that there was an A-patch available for it). A 100+ MB download (I didn’t do the auto-update because I wanted to make sure I could patch the current version) and unchecking a whole lot of “install this, too!” options that were checked by default (Christ on a crutch), I have Live Messenger 2009. I don’t mind it–I’m neutral about it, at least after patching to remove crap I don’t want–but there is one thing I didn’t like, and it’s the reason that both L. and I were right about where avatars are stored, even though our opinions were opposite. I’d asked him why he had his Hello Titty (sigh) avatar when he’d only just installed Messenger, and he said it was stored on the MS server. I said it couldn’t be, since mine varies according to whether I’m using XP or Ubuntu, and upon which computer. I even booted the laptop to check for sure. We were both right. He was right because he had previously installed the 2009 version, and the option for “Use the same display picture and personal message wherever I sign in” is checked by default (and he’d probably left it that way, since he is not an anal retentive control freak like me). In order for that to happen, the image and personal message must be stored in a central location. I was right, too, because until yesterday, I’d never had 2009 installed on any computer, and I’d never had that option, so mine were all still locally stored. I still don’t have that option, since I unchecked it…because it’s presumptuous for it to be checked by default. If I want continuity over all of the computers I use, then I will check it. I don’t, so I won’t. Fuck off, MS. Then again, I’m hardly surprised when MS does shite like that; I pretty much expect it from them. 😉

I think it’s gonna be one of those days. I woke up with a tension headache, and nothing has yet happened that’s likely to make it go away. This week can’t end fast enough to suit me. Argh.

When I woke up this morning, a copy of this clipped from the newspaper was scotch-taped to my monitor. Gee, I wonder what he was trying to say?

Is it pathetic that if I look down toward the top of my desk, B. says, “Leave your iPhone alone and talk to me!”…and I feel a bit guilty because that’s exactly where I was looking? 😛

I had sent P. a link to the NYT article with instructions for making a cholesterol nightmare called the “Bacon Explosion”. Two pounds of bacon, woven around and put inside two pounds of Italian sausage, seasoned with barbecue sauce. He’s 100% carnivore and thinks that fat and meat are two of the four official food groups (the other two are, of course, caffeine and salt). Fat actually is a food group, but it’s the one waaaaay up at the top of the pyramid with the instructions “use sparingly”. Not if you’re my husband; he’d place that firmly second from the bottom, right above meat (where he’d put meat, at least). Anyway, since we’d gone to the course early today (to beat a coming storm, and I must say that I’m pretty goddamned quick, considering that I was still asleep when D. called P. and said, “Meet you there in 40 minutes!”), and since we started DST last night, so it didn’t get dark so quickly, we actually felt inclined to do something useful. Normally, we’d just order a pizza or get Taco Hell or something for Sunday night, but I told P. that I’d make the Bacon Explosion if he’d be my “assistant”. He went off to the store to buy bacon and sausage, and when he returned, we got to work.

In an effort to find “thick sliced” bacon as instructed by the recipe (he’d read it), he’d got centre-cut, and the strips were a bit shorter than usual, so my basket weave ended up with eight slices instead of ten. No big deal–hard to go wrong with anything that involves bacon! Since the slices were shorter, I decided to make two rolls instead of just one; one pound of bacon and one of sausage for each roll. You can use Italian sausage links and just sort of squeeze the meat out of the casings, but the grocery store in the strip mall not far from our house had the plastic tubes of sausage that I wanted, so I didn’t need to do that.

At first, I’d thought I’d try this with ground beef, but after having completed the rolls, I see why they used Italian sausage; it has that weird, almost “gluey” texture until it’s cooked, so it’s easier to form into a nice, neat rectangle (though mine’s more a square), and easier to handle for rolling it than ground beef. I think the beef would still work, but I’m glad I went with sausage for my first try. Oh, and I’d forgot about the “barbecue rub” (whatever the hell that is–some kind of powdered spice mix, I guess) that was supposed to be sprinkled over the bacon before the sausage went on, so I just opened up the cupboard above the sink, grabbed a bunch of stuff and started sprinkling. I forget what I used…salt, black pepper, paprika, a wee bit of sugar, a tiny bit of cayenne, and I think…uh…it was brown…nutmeg? I dunno, but the combination was quite snifferific by the time I’d finished, and it all gets cooked and topped with barbecue sauce anyway, so I probably could’ve skipped spice altogether, but I suspect it did help a bit to keep the sausage from sticking to the bacon (for easier rolling).

We’re ready to roll! 🙂 My lovely and talented assistant cooked to crispy the “rejected” bacon slices that weren’t suitable for making the woven bit, then crumbled them into bite-sized pieces. I spread them out a bit, but mostly kept them in the middle because, being pre-cooked crispy, they’d all fall there when I rolled it anyway. The instructions said to use 1/2 c. (125mL) of barbecue sauce, but I couldn’t be arsed to get a measuring cup and Baby Ray’s is pretty thick anyway, so I just dumped a bunch on until it looked right. It squished out to the edges when I rolled it up. The sauce made it a bit slippery to roll, too, so I was grateful for the gluey texture of the sausage. To roll these things up, you have to carefully lift the edge of the sausage layer away from the bacon layer and start rolling away from you. When you get to the end, you roll it back toward you; this time bringing the bacon layer along, and roll it until the seam is on the bottom. Sounds more complicated than it actually was, but I did kind of make a mess with the barbecue sauce, and I was glad I’d put a layer of Glad Press’n Seal wrap (heavier than Saran Wrap, sticks to stuff besides itself, so it didn’t slip) under the whole thing because I think it probably would’ve stuck to a countertop or cutting board and may have been a bit of a bitch to roll neatly. Also made it easier to carry back to the stove. I used Sweet Baby Ray’s hickory and brown sugar barbecue sauce because that’s what we happened to have in the fridge, but it really is very good; a distinctive sweet and spicy flavour. I think it’s manufactured in Chicago, and as I understand it, those who like it, really like it. 😛

All set to go in the oven, and neither took a long time to do nor made a great lot of mess to prepare (my kind of food). I’d thought P. would bemoan the fact that we don’t have a smoker (he’s wanted one for years), but surprisingly, he didn’t complain at all that I intended to just bake this in the oven. Much to my joy, the broiler was actually…clean! P. has a terrible habit of “forgetting” to wash greasy things like metal baking sheets/pans and the broiler, and he’ll just stuff them in the oven (and then forget about them for three days, unless I find them first), but this time, he hadn’t. Yay! Actually, my rolls came out fairly neat, in spite of a few barbecue-y fingerprints on the outside. The baking temperature seemed rather low to me–only 225F–but although my usual attitude toward cooking is “the recipe is only a suggestion”, (I never did read the recipe for this; I just skimmed it and looked at the pictures, but don’t tell P. that), I almost always follow instruction when it comes to cooking temperatures. They’re supposed to bake for 3h at that temperature, but I wasn’t sure how long mine would actually take, since I’d done two smaller rolls. I also dropped the middle oven rack down one notch, just to make sure the bacon wouldn’t brown too quickly and start to burn.

Sneaking a peek after 1.5h in the oven. So far, so good, and they’re starting to smell very, very good by now! 🙂

Bad photo because it was pretty hot with the oven door open (didn’t want to bother getting the Canon, neither did I want to fry my iPhone in the heat from the oven), but I eventually decided to go the full 3h, and although P. said the recipe instructed to do it after cooking, about 15 minutes before the time was up, I slathered a nice layer of barbecue sauce on them. I like barbecue stuff done that way rather than just dumping the sauce on afterwards because it takes some of the water out of the sauce.

Maybe half an hour before the bacon stuff was to be taken out of the oven, we made a collective effort to cook some hash browns. Not the little “french fry ends” ones; the shredded ones. I lightly browned a small amount of minced onion in a little bit of fat left from frying the bacon, then tossed the shredded potatoes in. P. supervised their cooking during commercial breaks as he watched The Sopranos (he loves that show, but I’ve never watched more than a couple of minutes of it).

Finally, all done and ready to eat–yay!

My final verdict on the Bacon Explosion? Goddamned good! If I’d been really hungry instead of only kind of, I’m sure I would’ve used the words, “OM NOM NOM!” but even so, I did go back for “just one more little bite” after I’d finished, which is unusual for me (especially for meat dishes, since I’m not much of a carnivore). Granted, this did take longer than calling for pizza delivery, and it was more work than driving over to Taco Bell, but it was well worth the time and effort. You know how cooking blogs often put stuff like nutrition information and calorie counts at the end of the post? Well….yeah…this isn’t a cooking blog, and in any case, you wouldn’t want to know the fat grams or the total calories. I sure don’t…but even if I did, I’d have eaten it anyway! 😀

I prefer dark themes because light ones are like staring into the sun, but since the vast majority of dark themes are created by guys, and guys tend not to be serious fans of pink (even when they make pink themes for their girlfriends, they’re always light), I customised my own. It completely lacks any good taste whatsoever, and I could not possibly care less because I think it’s pwritty! I don’t quite like the icon theme because it’s not the shade of screaming-jesus pink that I really wanted, but it’ll take me a long time to piss around and make one that is, so it will do for now. I did make a pink theme for my clock Screenlet, and I did do the wallpaper, and mess around a bit with the window theme (and change the colour for one of the weather Screenlets, but the other is SVG, so more work). I showed it to P. and I guess the closest word representation of his actual expression would be something like, “Euuuugh!” so…yep, I’m happy with it! 😀

P.S. My original plan had been to test-drive the latest version of Opera for the weekend by switching the target of my Panel launcher from Firefox to Opera (since I’ll go for the orange and blue icon every time no matter what), but I had to put it back to Firefox because too many pages displayed just blank white with Opera. I think it has something to do with sites playing “Russian roulette” with load times and Javascript (Opera loads too fast, so the script doesn’t get to run and the site never correctly renders), but even if it is lovely and standards-compliant, a browser isn’t useful to me if it can’t display all pages. I’ll probably give it a go again sometime, but for now, I guess I’m back to good old Firefox.

If you are trying to give computer advice and would like to seem credible, for the love of $deity(s), don’t say “virii”. That is not even a word at all, let alone the plural form of the word “virus”! You’re doing it because you think it makes you sound smarter, since you obviously know that the plural of “radius” is “radii” and/or that the plural of “cactus” is “cacti”…but that does not apply to “virus”. All of those words end in “-us”, but “-ii” is not the automatic way to form a plural for a word ending in “-us”. Although the word comes from Greek, and sort of takes a side trip through Latin, historic use means we get some wiggle room with “octopus” because although “octopuses” is more correct (in English–Greek would be “octopodes”), even The Grammar Nazi isn’t going to beat you up for “octopi” (probably give you an odd look, but it’s technically acceptable). Same for hippopotamuses/hippopotami, though I think it likely that I’d have to stifle a grin over hippopotami! “Virus” comes from a Latin word that meant poison or venom. Poison/venom cannot be counted (if you measured it, you’d be counting the units of poison, not the poison itself, and if you sorted different types, you’d be counting the types), therefore the word had no plural. “Radius” did (and does still!) have a plural form in Latin, so English follows the Latin rule to make the plural, and we get “radii”. The singular “virus” is an English word with a Latin root that had no plural, so use the English rule to form the plural, which will give you….viruses, and the bonus of not coming across as an ignorant, yet pompous idiot. Yay, you!

P.S. Data is plural. “The data show…”, not “the data shows…” The singular is datum, and since we’re on the topic, the same goes for bacteria. No matter how sick one’s fish, one never encounteres “a bacteria”; it’s “a bacterium”. .