I’m amused, the FAA airport facility directory for the Empire, NV airport (1A8) has a remark “displaced threshold marked by 8 white tires.” There’s also a one-foot berm around the runway, presumably to keep all the dust clear.
I’m headed to Amsterdam either the week before or the week of Christmas. A colleague decided against going, so it’s now on me. I can only image the amount of hell the airports will be during this time. I’m hoping my frequent flier status will get me past a lot of lines or the company decides to send me business class.
Another colleage was browsing over his Continental miles today and realized he’s 170 miles short being elgible for silver elite status next year. I always thought the stories of people flying somewhere and back in a day for mile bonuses was silly, but now I understand. Spending the $108 to fly to Houston and back is worth it in his case. He also discovered that with the amount of miles he has, he can redeem them all + $61 for a trip to Amsterdam. I’m not that vested yet, but poking around today I figured out I can go anywhere in the US for my miles + $10. It’s odd, because the last time we checked into upgrading an international flight would cost X miles and a $430 service charge; here they just want $61?
My IKEA halogen lights burned out a transformer the other night. The lights were getting dim, and then I started smelling smoke. There was a little tuft of smoke coming out of the transformer on the wall. After killing power, I had to cut the wires leading to the light strand, as the terminals on the transformer were charred and melted to the point I couldn’t get the screws out. So of course, I went out and bought the same fire hazzard light set again. I need light in my apartment in order to search for a safer replacement!
I stayed up until 3 AM Saturday morning, then spent the rest of Saturday watching Heroes season one. I couldn’t stop watching! The fact there was so much Ali Larter, and later Missy Peregrym (ok, Hayden Panettiere too, but she’s like nine years younger than me), in high-def goodness certainly helped.
I ventured into the steam room at the gym the other day for the first time instead of the sauna. It was all nice and chokingly humid, then WSHHHHHHHHHT, the steam generator kicks in and this jet of steam shoots into the room. All of a sudden it got much hotter, and I couldn’t see the door nor the far wall. Quite frankly I thought this must be what it’s like at first being in a gas chamber.
And now the result of the Safari trial. The past two weeks I temporarily switched from Firefox to Safari at home (OS X Tiger) and work (Windows XP) to try out the Apple way. So far, I’m pretty disappointed and have already abandonded it at work after it screwed me on a ticket entry today causing me to lose a lot of typing. Safari is pretty basic and a lot of the little things I took for granted in Firefox just aren’t there. Pretty much all of my gripes exist in both Windows and Mac versions.
Here’s the gripe list so I can remember a year from now why I hated it:
- Safari either doesn’t cache submitted forms or I’m abusing some bug/different functionality in Firefox. In our ticketing system I frequently use the back button after viewing details of a ticket (the previous step to get here is even a GET request); Firefox will happily take me back to the previous page, untouched, whereas Safari complains the previous page has expired and wants to post the form again. IE7 does this too, which leads me to believe it’s a functionality of Firefox I’m relying on. This killed me in doing ticketing work as I frequently flip back and forth to look at information and don’t want to wait on resubmitting an action to our slow ticketing system. To make sure I was sane, I went back and duplicated the same action in both browsers and Safari did the same thing.
- Safari doesn’t handle plain text pages very well. If I try select-all on a plain-text page, copy, then paste into pine or a textarea form, it drops almost all carriage returns and linefeeds and turns it into a huge blob. This happened on both the OS X and Windows versions.
- By default, Safari also uses a proportional-width font in textarea boxes. This makes lining up command output and other plaintext things a pain in the ass.
- I don’t have a quick sub-menu drop down on the back button in Safari. In Firefox if I wanted to go back X pages, I could click on this and just go there. Safari requires me to go to the History menu, and then it mixes all tab history together.
- Safari doesn’t work well with some of our self-signed SSL websites. On one of our internal web development sites, it flat out refuses to work with HTTPS. Other pages it may work and one mouse-click later it doesn’t (says it can’t open a connection). This is what caused me to lose a considerable amount of work today.
- Safari doesn’t have a convienient flashblock application. The only plugin I’ve seen will disable all flash content until you go to a drop-down menu and re-enable it. Flashblocker in Firefox blocks all flash and then allows me to click on individual elements to play the file.
- Safari does maximize properly on my 2nd LCD, whereas Firefox will crop off the menu and title bar at the top of the screen when maximized.
- Safari doesn’t like the Remedy forms I use on a vendor’s website. It throws some parse error and I’m unable to submit the form.
- Safari doesn’t seem to save me in memory consumption either. After several days, Safari and Firefox used similar amounts of memory.
- Rendering speed, both seem similar.
