Perspective

I'm afraid this one is going to hurt. If you're looking for something to cheer you up, look elsewhere.

I don't really talk about my life that much. Well, it's not much of a life anyway - I mean, a guy with a Ph.D. in math who delivers newspapers for a living. Or did anyway ...

I actually lost that job almost a year ago. I've still been helping some other people deliver papers from time to time, but - well, things have been real quiet of late.

I really loved that job, even though part of me knew all along that it wouldn't last. In my case you could take that literally ... I've used the term before but it doesn't come up very often, I'm what's called schizoid. People talk about "professional detachment", in my case I'm so detached that usually I don't even know how I feel. There are exceptions of course - and losing that job was one of them.

When I say "part of me knew ... it wouldn't last" you may be wondering why. No, not magic, also not part of me working to sabotage my chances (or at least, not that I know of) - in this case it was simple mathematics. It is a very demanding job, especially the schedule. I'd been let go once before for having a couple of accidents in company vehicles, fatigue and inattention will do that to you, so I knew that as long as my responsibilities remained the same it was bound to happen again. They accommodated me as best they could, but it was only a matter of time ...

But really I'm getting away from my story. Another part of my personality is that I really need to feel needed - and that's why I loved that job so much, they regularly told me how much they needed me. And when it finally happened they really went to bat for me - but the problem there is the insurance company, not my actual employer.

So anyway ... well, I just couldn't deal with it. I just shut down. The only thing that kept me going was my online friends and my responsibilities here, even though I never discussed it.

Believe me, it isn't easy being unemployed and depressed. It helped that I was living in my parents' basement, but I provided all my own food all that time - and helping people out on their paper routes doesn't pay much let me tell you. So what's changed? Well ... obviously Dad thinks of me as a freeloader, I was supposed to be paying rent and such, so now he's planning to kick me out.

Don't take this wrong, he really is a great guy and all. But we never really talk. Not that I'm very good at talking anyway, I can handle "small talk" in any crowd but when we're done you really won't know anything more about me as a person. But you know, taking to Dad is about like talking to a brick wall. And sometimes he says the stupidest things - things you know aren't true but he sounds like he believes them. And even if I were one to try to argue with him, it wouldn't do any good. Add to that the fact that when I was working we never saw each other just due to the scheduling.

Dad says that I really need to get a job, which is true of course but it's not that easy. I need to talk with someone, to get some understanding and emotional support so that I don't have to face everything by myself ... if things were different maybe he could have done that, but I wonder if it's a hopeless cause at this point.

The other day he asked me if I'd made any plans for what I was going to do. I'm sure he doesn't realize that I answered his question when I made a comment about needing to feel useful ... the fact of the matter is I can't plan. If he kicks me out, then I have no emotional support at all because I won't be able to keep in touch with you guys or my other online friends. For someone like me - unemployed, depressed, homeless and with no emotional support ... I'll probably just curl up under a bridge somewhere and die.

I cried that night realizing he didn't understand my answer, something which doesn't happen very often when you're as detached as I am. And of course I'm going to cry again having to discuss it just now.

Sorry to end on such a down note, but that's what I'm dealing with. If I disappear from the forums in a couple of weeks, you know what happened. And yeah, I'm crying as much for him as for me. I do have a conscience, even in this state, and I know if he actually does follow through on his plan it'll just kill him.

I've been observing somewhat more than the usual number of articles saying that 2008 will be the year of Linux. I say it that way because ... well, I've seen articles with that topic since 2000 at least. And obviously all the previous predictions have been wrong. What's so different about 2008?

Well, there are some differences. An article on Information Week brings up a couple of them. No, actually, Wal-mart selling a Linux PC is not new, they've sold PCs by Everex with Mandriva on them, with Linspire, ... and now with gOS. What is gOS anyway? Answer - it's actually an alpha version of a system based on Ubuntu, using Enlightenment as a desktop manager, and including a large selection of Google-based apps. Let's face it, Enlightnemment is neat though DR17 is still in heavy development, and Google and Ubuntu both have a high buzz factor. But do you think anyone actually bought the Everex gPC from Walmart because it had gOS on it? Yet before Christmas, Wal-mart was having trouble keeping them in stock.

You could say that Linux had arived last year, when Dell started to sell computers with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled. Not that Mr. John Q. Public was going to pick one of those Dell Linux PCs over a comparably priced Windows system ... Windows is familar and hence safe (in spite of the frequent security issues and stuff), as long as you're getting two comparably equipped systems - one with Linux and one Windows - for about the same price, most people will take Windows.

So what happened with that Linux PC that they couldn't keep in stock at Wal-mart? Actually, it's pretty simple. You can run Linux quite decently on a system with a 1.5 MHz Celeron-class processor and 512 MB RAM and it'll look as good as Vista running on a quad-core system at twice the speed and with twice as much RAM. In fact, Vista will only barely run on a system with 512 MB RAM. That's the real story here, the Everex gPC was only half the computer (theoretically) of even a low-end Vista PC, but even with an alpha version of a Linux distro would put that same low-end Vista PC to shame on performance, and at half the price.

Okay, it's not going to be able to play the latest fully-rendered video game. Neither would that low-end Vista PC, so that's really besides the point. But it will browse the internet in Firefox (or Opera of course) as well as that Vista PC, it'll balance your checkbook as well as that Vista PC, it'll let you write your great American novel (or maybe that's great Croat novel) as well as that Vista PC would - in short, it'll do everything that your typical household would want to use a computer for just as well as the Vista PC. And without worrying about computer viruses and so on ...

That's the real story here. Not that Vista is such a poor OS - in a few senses at least it is not - but that it is so demanding you really need a high-end computer to use it.

Last year was a great year for Apple. If someone is looking for an established computer OS which is safer than Windows and without the performance issues, you know where they'll go, so I expect Apple to continue to do well. But somewhere along the line Apple Macintosh stopped being "The computer for the rest of us" (that was their advertising slogan at one time). I mean, sure you'd like to be able to afford a $1000 computer for you kids to do their homework on - but if you had that sort of money I'm sure you could think of 100 other things that you need even more.

Okay, the OLPC XO didn't turn out to be the $100 laptop it was originally planned to be. That doesn't make it a failure. Lots of people can use a $200 computer - just ask Wal-mart.

The year of Linux? Let's hear it for the year of the bargain computer!

When I first joined MyOpera - 5 years ago - the forums would let you enter anything at all for your location. When they initially went to the new "community", you could still enter anything at all - and if you left it blank then they listed "Atlantis" as your location. At some point though, they changed it to a dropdown box that says "Country" and you choose from the list ...

Other than myself anyway, if you see someone on the forums with an unusual location, that means they haven't changed it in the last year or so. Thus ... well, like bluesman2333 where his location says "in a pot of thick marinara", for example. (That was a joke about his avatar, if you must know.)

But besides that, maybe you just live in a location that didn't make their list. I don't see Easter Island, I'm sure there must be other places which aren't on the list. Maybe you're posting from Antarctica or Betelgeuse ...

Or maybe you just want to fix your time zone. While I'll only describe location, this technique can probably be used on time zone, forum posts per page or other such settings. I've managed to help some people to revert to the old blog designs too.

Anyway, say that bluesman2333 is tired of that pot of thick marinara and wants to change his location to Easter Island. (Not that he really lives there, but it would go with his rabbit avatar. ) He would click on "My account" at the top of the page, then on Edit my profile, and finally on View > Source. Okay, that looks like a complete mess, but not unintelligible.

If you scroll down a bit (or use Ctrl-F Find) you can find the following:

<p><label for="location">Country:</label>
<select name="location" id="location">
 <option value="">---</option>
 <option value="Afghanistan">Afghanistan</option>
 <option value="Albania">Albania</option>
 <option value="Algeria">Algeria</option>
 ...

(Yes, I have tidied that up.)

Pick somewhere that you can find it - either right below the top or else where it would be listed alphabetically - to add your option. Taking the first choice as easiest, he'd add the code for his desired option Easter Island as follows:

<p><label for="location">Country:</label>
<select name="location" id="location">
 <option value="">---</option>
 <option value="Easter Island">Easter Island</option>
 <option value="Afghanistan">Afghanistan</option>
 <option value="Albania">Albania</option>
 <option value="Algeria">Algeria</option>
 ...

(No, he doesn't have to tidy it up. Just so long as it's a complete option tag and doesn't appear in the middle of another tag.)

Then he clicks on "Apply changes" (up in the toolbar) and switches back to the actual page. The "Country" dropdown now looks like this:

He just selects his option from the dropdown, then scrolls to the bottom and clicks on Save profile, and there it is.

For people who are wondering how this stuff works - the website cares about the value="Easter Island" part of the tag, the rest of it is to make sure it looks correct when you are choosing it.

I've been tagged by Tamil, let me see if I can get together a list. If I can remember them all, these will be things I've posted before in the forums ...

1. Remove attachments from email messages
2. A button editor
3. The ability to perform gestures over images, as we could in Opera 7.0
4. PGP/GPG and similar features for mail
5. Compressed web archives, and compressed mail storage.

As you can see, a couple of these go way back ...

Yes, in Opera 7.0 you could assigna gesture to Save image and it would act on the image you started the gesture over. For some reason, this feature simply disappeared in 7.10.

Back before most email providers had virus filters, I wanted the ability to remove an infected attachment from a message without actually removing the message. But I can also see that you might want to save an attachment to disk so you can view it - but if you've saved it, why do you still need it in the message?

I'd like a simple dialog that you could get when you right-click on a UI button so that you could edit that button. Obviously, it would be nice if you could graphically choose the button icon, but even something that's strictly text would be okay. Of course, the same button could be used to create a new button.

I don't think that PGP/GPG support really needs any explanation, but I'll say the obvious anyway: If someone sends you a message with a detached PGP signature, you should be able to verify the signature without having to copy the raw message and paste it into a file.

And finally ... HTML and email both take lots of memory. Many web servers will transmit web pages compressed (seems like UNIX z compression is the default) for just this reason. When you save a page - especially as a web archive - you should be able to save it compressed. And of course, Opera should read the file without some third-party unarchiver. Same applies to email storage, but more so since most people have lots more stored email then stored web pages.


I'm supposed to tag "up to 5" people ... I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'll find someone (and say who in a comment so you can see what they post).


Addendum: they tell me - now - that rules for this game require I list the people in my blog post.

Okay, I tagged philry4n, fammcdon, Sanguinemoon, and sebt.