random bits

[cellio]

I'm pretty disgusted with Congress right now. There's a reason we have consitutional guarantees of pesky little things like due process. I hope the pre-election ploy backfires.

This map provides a pretty nifty visualization of 5000 years' worth of conquest of the middle east. (Link from goldsquare.)

On lighter notes...

I was delighted today to learn about TweakUI from a coworker. (Google for it with your version of Windows to get to the right page.) This tool supports a bunch of UI modifications that I haven't explored yet; the one that got me to download and install it is "focus follows mouse", which users of X-Windows may remember. Sometimes there's not enough screen real-estate and I just want to type a command into that mostly-buried shell; why should I have to bring it to the top first? The surprising thing is that this was published by Microsoft (though they say very clearly that it is not supported). I guess there are developers at Microsoft who don't agree with the standard-issue UI. :-)

Some things are Deeply Wrong. As evidence, I offer the can of cat food labelled thus: "white meat chicken Florentine in a delicate sauce with garden veggies". I don't know what's more disturbing: that someone brought that to market, or that Erik loved it. (No, I didn't buy this; it was a free sample.)

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

I offer the can of cat food labelled thus: "white meat chicken Florentine in a delicate sauce with garden veggies".

That sounds delicious. I knew cats had it too good.

[cellio]

They seem to be playing on the idea that what sounds attractive to the buyer is good for the cat. That's not automatically true, but I imagine they tweak the recipe to not be too unhealthy, 'cause they want the repeat business.

And to be fair, most cat food doesn't exactly look or smell appealing to the human servants. :-)

[schulman.livejournal.com]

I adore TweakUI. Among the many glorious options it offers is the ability to customize the default directories that show up along the left side in the standard "Open File" dialog.

It's also a quick way to clear "My Computer", "My Documents", and similar icons off the desktop.

[cellio]

I also got a giggle out of the fact that the options to clear things like recently-viewed documents and browser history are grouped under the category "paranoia". It might be paranoia on your home desktop machine, but it's good sense on any shared machine.