More information on the police attack on peaceful protesters in Oregon (link from dglenn). I wonder if the owners of that site could be convinced to provide an RSS feed for their "new McCarthyism" reports.

Marry an American is a web site aimed at Canadians who'd like to rescue folks from a second Bush term if it occurs. "We envision a movement where everyone wins: Freedom of expression and a politically convenient marriage with love and igloos for all." (Link from ladymondegreen.)

Top ten ways the Iraq war is not like World War II.

Someone was selling, on eBay, invitations to a wedding he didn't want to go to. The running commentary is kind of funny. Thanks to patrissimo for the link.

Gee, Enterprise did not actually hit the reset button that I thought they would. I'm impressed. (Spoiler alert:) The seven million people killed in the first Xindi attack are still dead after all the mucking with the timeline.

Speaking of Enterprise (sort of)... Having finally had a successful encounter with the insurance company of the person who hit my car last month, I took my car in to be repaired today. It takes two days to do paint, so I have a rental. It'a s Dodge Neon -- much better than the last rental car I had in most ways. I was surprised, on climbing into it, how low to the ground it is; I hadn't realized that my Golf is so much higher. (I think the Neon is comparable to my old Mazda in that respect. How quickly we acclimate to new cars. :-) ) And in the small-worlds department, the person at Enterprise who handled my rental goes to my synagogue. He recognized me first.

Last week one of my coworkers showed me that Firefox has a mouse gesture for "magnify". This does text and images, and you don't have to go to the menus to tweak settings. It also overrides hard-coded fonts, because it's magnifying the whole window. So I downloaded Firefox, but there was no magnification joy to be had. I checked the list of extensions they offer, and I didn't find it there (though I did find, separately, text zoom and image zoom). Someone else told me this works for him with the scroll wheel on his mouse, which I don't have. I couldn't find an answer via Google. My current theory is that on the original coworker's laptop, diagonal click-drag simulates a scroll wheel. Bummer. (So I've gone back to Mozilla 1.7, because on first glance I don't like the Firefox UI as much.)

There were cascading effects. In order to accommodate the new resolution, I had to change the system from "small fonts" to "large fonts". (For some reason, this required consulting the Windows CD.) Then I had to change some application font settings, particularly (for now) SSH client and web browser. In the process of playing with Mozilla, I discovered some suboptimal things that LJ was doing that had previously been masked, so I had to fix them. (Who knew that my friends page had a style sheet with hard-coded font sizes that just happened to work ok at the lower resolution? You don't even see the style sheet unless you edit in "raw" mode, so I spent a while forcing size="+0" in various places only to have no apparent effect...)

But I've found color, brightness, and contrast settings that don't hurt my eyes, and there's no flicker, and the viewing angle is acceptable. I think this will be a keeper. And after sale price, rebate, discount for buying the floor model, and store frequent-customer credit, my final cost will be under $400, which doesn't suck. :-)

The installation guide is a thicker-than-expected book, but it turns out there are two pages of relevant text. Those two pages are then repeated in 14 (!) other languages, most of which I recognize. (There are four kanji-based ones, and there's a version in Arabic -- don't usually see that.) I also note that for all their apparent efforts to provide thorough documentation, they left out the location of the non-obvious power switch.

When they redesigned US paper money a few years back, a lot of people thought the results were much prettier than before. But usability for me went way down, because I found the font they used for the numbers on the front to be illegible, and I could no longer tell whether I was holding a 10 or a 20 without looking at the back. This is a nuisance when digging through a wallet. And I can't believe that it wasn't at least a little harder even for people with good vision. So to me the new peach 20s are a major improvement, at least for now. We'll see what happens when they do the 10s.

I've heard some people critique the new peach bills in various ways, liking the treatment of the background or disliking some aspect of the portrait or the like. And I'm sure the government spent an amount several times my annual income on the artistic aspects of the bill (as opposed to the anti-counterfeiting aspects). But c'mon, it's just money! I'd rather have pretty money than ugly money all other things being equal, but I really don't care. Its job is to live in my wallet until I want to exchange it for goods or services. And as soon as the art gets in the way of that function, I get annoyed.

Take, for example, the new quarters. There are now 51 different versions of the quarter. If I pull a quarter out of my pocket and I'm looking at the back, I can't tell what coin I'm holding. It's probably a US quarter, but for all I know it's an SBA or a Canadian coin or something else wonky that showed up in the change from the store. I have to flip it over and look at the front to know -- all in the name of art, because having one design instead of 51 was boring or something. I want the old quarters back because the new ones introduced a bug without a corresponding feature. Some think the new art is a feature, of course, but my vision isn't good enough to appreciate that -- and even if it were, it still interferes with function.

So now they're redesinging the nickel. Fortunately there will only be two or three versions in circulation, rather than 51, but I still have to ask why. Was the old one broken? I haven't heard anyone make that argument. The old one wasn't even ugly! (At least the nickel starts out less ambiguous than the quarter does.)

Lots of software chooses art over usability, whether it's graphics, fonts, weird command sequences, inconsistent behavior, or the like. (You also see this in a lot of web sites, of course.) I've pretty much given up there; the software world seems to prefer the notion that art is allowed to prevent function. But I'm frustrated when I see that approach migrate into my world at large.

Again, I'm all for art -- in appropriate venues. But basic functionality has to come first. If I'm standing at the parking meter and can't tell effortlessly what coin I'm holding, I don't give a damn if it's pretty.