Structured Thought . ORG

I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser for about 30 minutes now, and I just wanted to give people a few points of interest that I’ve found so far.

Rendering: This thing is unbelievably fast. I was impressed with the recode of Gecko that was released with FireFox 3, but the Webkit backend of Chrome is nothing short of insane. Gecko managed to expose what I call download lag (the time it takes for the first renderable chunk of HTML to come down from a server), but Chrome has managed to hang it out for all to see. Even historically fast pages now show some download lag because the rendering engine in Chrome literally snaps pages into place when they’re loaded.

Features: The ability to pop a browser window out and use it as a discreet application on your computer is phenomenal. Using GMail as an example, it really makes the web application feel as though you’re using something you actually installed. Couple that with the increased rendering speed of Chrome, and you have something that approaches or, in some cases, exceeds the performance of desktop applications.

Compatibility: This is something ongoing, and will improve over time, but even now, I’m having trouble finding a site that won’t render properly. I have been hearing scattered reports about plugins not working, but that’s about it so far.

Extensibility: It’s OpenSource. Don’t like it? Fix it. Want a new feature? Create it.

Security and Stability: Every tab has its own discreet process on the system. This keeps web pages from bringing down the entire browser when something goes wrong. It also appears to make memory management easier, as freed memory is flushed better than when the browser is re-using memory segments. This should show great benefits as power users that open tabs continuously don’t lose performance as quickly (or at all, as is the possibility)

I plan on playing with this a lot over the next few days, so keep checking back here for more details.

Google scores huge with this one.

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Lemony (Aug 23 09:54 AST)

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Music (Aug 19 20:57 AST)

Either that, or the smarter ones have moved on and decided to attempt to make a life for themselves.

On my LockerGnome tech-centric blog, I received the following comment (link removed for obvious reasons):

Author : e-marketing (IP: 125.164.222.118 , 118.subnet125-164-222.speedy.telkom.net.id)
E-mail : mbahgugel@gmail.com
URL : [removed]
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=125.164.222.118
Comment: halowwwwwwwwwwwwww

hmm nice articel bropooo

i have exitingarticel in my site

[url removed]

That’s all. A horrendously spelled, mostly nonsensical attempt to get me to hit what is most likely just a link farm page (with probably more than a couple of malicious links).

Seriously, if you really want someone to look at your crappy spam site, you need to do a lot better than that.

I invite any reader of this site to sign the e-mail address above up for whatever mailing lists you feel are appropriate. Let them learn the ‘power’ of spam.

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stormy (Aug 05 20:57 AST)

Well, not as bad as I thought, or as bad as it could have been.

In the initial test, I managed 6 good-form (no cheating) pushups w/o a break. That puts me into the level 2 area of the program, which I can deal with.

I’ll start week 1 on Wednesday or Thursday, so check back, and see how we’re doing.

Today, I saw a tweet by @kevinrose that he was getting ready to start the hundred pushups challenge.

This is a 6 week program that guides you through building the strength and endurance it takes in order to accomplish the goal: 100 consecutive pushups, without a break.

In my (much) younger days, I used to be rather fit. I was on the track team in High School, and did pretty well. Since then, I haven’t exactly been working to maintain my previous level of fitness, so I think that doing this will really give me a push to get back into better shape (better than ’round’, at least).

So, I’ll be posting my progress here if anyone’s interested in following it.

Wish me luck.

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The Boy eats (Aug 04 17:46 AST)

So, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining two tech-related blogs is an exercize in insanity. I have decided to shift the focus of this site to more personal matters and opinion posts, while focusing my tech direction on my lockergnome site.

What does this mean to you? Not much. You can still come here to see the same kind of scathing commentary on the state of our world today (yup, because there’s so much of that here, you know?), and insightful analysis of topics relevant to my surrounding world. But, if you want the tech goodies, you’ll need to head over there.

Not so bad, really, and it helps me to keep things separated so I can better keep track of them. There will be occasional cross-posting when the situation dictates, but I will try to keep those to a minimum, as to not clutter things up.

First, a little history: As a young lad, I was not always the most responsible person when it came to issues of finance, particularly credit. To those of you that know me: I know, totally hard to believe, right? Stay with me, there is more important information here than your feelings of shock and disbelief.

Anyway, since I married my lovely wife, my credit has been on the repair. As of last August, my record is actually clean, and my mythical ‘score‘ is higher than I thought possible just 5 years ago. In November of 2006, we were able to purchase a house with pretty good terms, and minimal difficulty. I am even now able to obtain instant credit decisions online, which were not possible just 1 year ago.

Fast forward to yesterday. I checked the mail, and there was an envelope from WaMu (Washington Mutual), through which I had an account that I haven’t used in about 4 years. The letter stated simply that they were canceling my account due to non-use, as having unused credit lines is (apparently) a risk (for them or me, they didn’t specify). “No big deal”, I say, as I had no plans to use the account at all, anyway.

Then I looked slightly farther down the page. There, included lovingly, is the standard denial notice (with which I am intimately familiar, mind you), stating that their decision was influenced by previous history, which may include delinquency (which, as you read above, no longer exist), and other factors.

Now, I understand that, in order to save money, companies will use generic templates for letters and notices, as customizing every communication for every customer would be a monumentally expensive task. But, come on. These are two completely different situations that would actually warrant the creation of a separate template. But no, they would rather save the $.000003 in template customization time.

So, thank you, WaMu, for making me realize that I simply just don’t want to do business with you anymore. Had you sent me a letter stating that you were considering closing the account due to non-use, I might have actually used it to buy something small just to keep the account going (and give you a little bit of cash in the process). But alas, you have decided to send me a letter worded as such that I simply tore it up, and tossed it in the trash with a “Oh, well, good riddance”.