January 2003

Obviously, I appreciate that he’s wearing his trademark bright purple pants, but otherwise, I think The Hulk looks lame. (And by “The Hulk”, I mean the character, not necessarily the whole film.) You can see for yourself in the Super Bowl spot. He looks alright close up, but from afar, he doesn’t impress. He looks like a cartoon when he’s spinning that tank around. There’s still plenty of time until the film’s release, so maybe Ang Lee & co. get it together before June.

The Super Bowl spot for The Matrix Reloaded & The Matrix Revolutions is good, though. Who knows where the story will go, but visually, I doubt it will disappoint.

So, on the file server at work is a folder called “audit images”. When I see it in the Finder out of the corner of my eye, I always read it as “adult images”.

While using Photoshop, when I see the Character palette out of the corner of my other eye, I always read the current typeface as “Anal”, not “Arial”.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The Onion A.V. Club has a great interview with The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, & Mo Rocca.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been seeing much of The Daily Show lately, as this new on-site freelance gig has my TV watching schedule all screwed up.

A shame, I know.

Besides all of the Apple stuff today, another significant announcement was from Nintendo, who are releasing a new version of the GameBoy Advance, called the GameBoy Advance SP, SP obviously standing for… uhm… I have no idea. Smashing Pumpkins? Whatever it means, it’s out March 23, making it a day late for my birthday. The GBASP has a clamshell design and is roughly 3” x 3” x 1” when closed. Most importantly, although it has the same screen as the original GBA, it is front lit (not back lit, which is kind of weird, but according to Gamespot’s hands-on report, it works, so whatever). It also has a rechargeable battery, unlike the previous GBA, which used AA’s. Not bad for $99.

I had an original GBA, but sold it after a few months because it was impossible to see the screen (the place I got the best light was in the bathroom, which sucked because that’s where I read). So since they’ve seemingly fixed that issue, I may have to look into getting one. Especially considering all the great games.

Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo Keynote ended a short while ago, and I’m here writing about it. Yeah, I’m a fucking nerd. Fuck you.

There are two new PowerBooks, which are pretty cool (a huge 17” model and a small 12” model, which is slightly smaller than the 12.1” iBook) (check out the awesome “Big and Small” commercial); updated iApps, now dubbed iLife (most folks are upset that you now have to pay for iTunes 3, iMovie 3, iPhoto 2, and iDVD 3, but that’s not true. The first three have always been and will continue to be freely downloadable, but iDVD has always been a pay upgrade, due to its size. Apple is now just bundling the other three apps with it); Keynote, Apple’s impressive answer to PowerPoint; Final Cut Express, which is to Final Cut Pro as Photoshop Elements is to Photoshop; “Airport Extreme”, which, besides being based on the 802.11g protocol, happens to be one of the worst product names ever; and lastly, Safari, a beta of Apple’s long-rumored web browser.

(“Safari” & “Keynote”, those are decent names. But fucking “Airport Extreme”? Ugh. All they forgot were the exclamation marks at the end.)

I’ve used Safari for about an hour now, and although I like the Snapback feature, I think I’m going to stop using it and stick with Chimera. A couple reasons:

Safari is based on the KHTML engine, which is good, but I prefer Chimera & Mozilla’s Gecko engine. That’s not a deal-breaker, but it is worth noting.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to import bookmarks into Safari. When you first run it, it auto-imports IE bookmarks, which is okay, but I accidentally deleted that folder, and I can’t undo anymore. So what do I do now? I have no idea. And what about my Chimera or Mozilla bookmarks? I’m not going to manually add each link. For all Safari’s bells and whistles, it seems like they forgot one basic fucking feature.

During the keynote, Jobs claimed Safari had a great new way to deal with bookmarks. I don’t know about that. It looks like your iTunes library, which, at least, is familiar, but it loads into the main browser window, so if you happen to be playing an MP3 when you want to look at your bookmarks, like I was, the MP3 is going to stop. Chimera, on the other hand, loads its bookmarks into a slide-out drawer (like in Apple Mail, for example). You can still browse while managing your bookmarks. Also, when you add a page to your bookmarks, like Safari, Chimera will ask you if you want to rename it when it’s created, so Safari isn’t breaking any new ground there.

A couple other key features missing from Safari are tabbed browsing (which I don’t use, but most people I know that do can’t live without it) and remembering site passwords. Safari didn’t ask to remember anything when I logged into Mac OS X Hints. Meanwhile, Chimera stores all of your passwords in the system Keychain (something that even IE doesn’t do).

Most importantly, Chimera is way more customizable than Safari. Safari can block pop ups, but that’s about it. Chimera can block pop ups; prevent windows from being moved and resized (which I can’t stand, because I have the window where I want it, thank you very much); and it can prevent new windows from being opened by sites (aka target=_blank, which I fucking hate). And those are just the features I use. There are more on the Mozilla site.

Safari is interesting, but I’d argue that Chimera (especially the nightly builds, with the new download manager) is the most Mac-like—and the best—browser available now. I’d been hearing that Apple was just going to release Chimera as their own browser. I wonder why they didn’t just do that.

For your reading and listening pleasure, my top ten albums, other favorites, and disappointments, all in my 2002 Music Review.

The 2002 Movie Review and a Yearly List will be posted sometime relatively soon.