OTHER PLANS

It's so easy to switch templates here. Most of them are beautiful, too. I wish there were more, but the ones that they've got are great looking. This is my third one in what, about a week? I probably switch around so much because I don't have a favorite color. All colors can be gorgeous given the right context. What happens with me is that I'm initially attracted to brighter or bolder color schemes, but if I end up looking at something a lot, I get to preferring "easy on the eyes" after a bit. And blues, especially soft blues, are very easy on the eyes. Greens, too according to an Infoplease article on color psychology.

A few decades ago I conducted my own color psychology test. I was the only subject and it wasn't exactly a test. Just something I noticed, really. It was at the obstetrician's office during both of my pregnancies. After doing a fair amount of time in the waiting room, you were allowed into the examining room, where you'd get changed and then wait some more. And then some more. You got to know those rooms pretty well in the course of nine months. They had three examining rooms, all identical except for their color schemes. All were generic and boring. One was done mostly in beige, one in washed out orange and one in blue. After a number of turns in each of the rooms, I noticed that the waiting time was much less irritating in the blue room. It wasn't that it was particularly attractive. It was just that it was blue. You'd think that I would have learned from that and done my whole house in soothing cool colors. I didn't. I wonder if the kids' teen years and other family crises would have gone easier on all of us if I had.

It's been just a few days since "moving in" here and already people have stopped by to say a friendly "Hello" or something to that effect. I guess it's a relatively small community, compared to some. Even with over 900,000 users. I like that. Sometimes small is nice. I find that as I get older, I like smaller more and more.

I prefer shopping in stores that aren't so big that if you forget something on one end, it's going to take you ten minutes to get back to the other side. I've preferred music venues on the small side for many years. Even if it's an outdoor festival, I'll go to one that gets about 10,000 attendees over the 80,000 person monsters any day. I like small cities. I often wish I lived in one instead of in a kind of big suburb of a very big city.

I like small petting zoos, amusement parks, beaches and even roadside attraction. The Opera community is growing, I know, but it still has that small town feel, in a global sort of way.

I won't be around much to enjoy the atmosphere this weekend. Between a funeral and a wedding shower, things are busy here. In both good and bad ways, obviously. Even the shower, a happy occasion, has a downside. It's in (on?) Staten Island. That's a pain to get to from...anywhere, I think.

Enjoy the weekend and Happy Friday to all those for whom it is, in fact, Friday.

I'm a new Opera fan once again, so I figured I'd start a shiny new blog here to celebrate the fact. It's not my first time around with Opera, but each time lasts longer. I think it's for real this time. I not only have Opera as my default browser, but I even downloaded Opera desktop wallpaper. It's gorgeous. Even my husband, Mr. Never-once-changed-from-IE loves it. I won't tell him where to find it, though. If he won't even try another browser, why should he get to enjoy the gorgeous wallpaper that promotes it, is what I say.

My first time with Opera was one of the last 2x releases, I think. The much beloved Netscape had started on a downhill spiral of bloat and bugginess, leaving its users to hunt for alternatives. Opera was snappy and fast and you had to love the MDI, but it was so standards compliant that it seemed like hardly anything worked with it. And it wasn't free. Neither was Netscape, but that was distributed on every other disk you got for almost any purpose, or so it seemed. Plus that was the Old Internet. "Not free" didn't exactly mean...er..."not free". Things are different now.

I checked on Opera 3 and 4, but it was the same story, plus those releases weren't particularly stable on my creaky old Win95, upgraded to 98 machine. There was a dark period in my life when IE4 was my browser of choice. I don't like to talk about it much.

Eventually the Mozilla project breathed new life into Netscape, making it usable again. It was sluggish, but stable and it added tabbed browsing. Eventually, of course, Mozilla and then Firefox replaced Netscape in the hearts of most Gecko fans, including yours truly. But Opera was still snappier, better looking, and it continued to develop.

Once Opera released its free, ad supported, browser there was no reason not to have a current copy and switch back and forth at will. It was stable and worked with a lot more sites. I used it as exclusively as possible for a time but the animated ads gave me a headache after a while. When Opera added the option to have only text ads, I made it my default browser for the first time. I clicked on, and even purchased from, quite a few of the ads, too. They seemed to return better results than searches. Opera continued to innovate even as it moved toward a completely free, ad-free browser.

But along came Gmail. Gmail was seductive. I'd always been a bit of a prude with web based e-mail clients. I preferred them for convenience's sake, but I didn't like them to be too client side-y in their functioning. The whole point of web based mail, I figured, was that it should be just the same no matter what computer, browser or platform you're using to access it. I threw that principle away in the face of Gmail's amazing interface. So deceptively simple looking. Such a lot of function lying just below the newbie-friendly surface. Mmmm....But I digress. Fact was, I loved Gmail, Gmail and Opera didn't get along that well. I chose Gmail. There's just no sugarcoating it.

All that's water under the bridge now. Gmail and Opera function just fine together. There are still a few sites of significance that force you to open another browser to view and/or use them, but not too many and there are fewer of them all the time. Meanwhile, Firefox is leaking memory like a sieve. At least it is on my machine. It's not a matter of which browser surfs faster for me. They're all pretty fast most of the time. Starting up is another matter. A year or so, they were about the same, but now Opera starts up much faster than Firefox for me. In fact, Opera starts faster than IE7, and I'm on Windows. The IE application comes up fast, but it seems to need to warm up for a while before it connects to anything. In the meantime, it just sits there, frozen in place, thinking things over.

Even start-up times are not really the issue for me, though. The problem is that Firefox slows everything up and it seems to be the one common denominator in whole system freeze-ups, not just for me, but for all the profiles on the family computer. It got so bad that we needed to reboot almost every time I used it. Everyone started looking at me funny.

So, as I said, I think it's for real this time. I've made more of a commitment. Default browser,Opera wallpaper, this blog and I downloaded Opera on my work computer as well. I know I've been fickle in the past, but I'm trying to settle down.