No specific topic so why limit myself?

So I got a new phone, a Sprint PPC-6700 (HTC Apache). It's very cool, with Windows Mobile 5.0 and most importantly to a technological addict to me, EV-DO. I don't live in a urban area so I don't have that at home but when I go to an urban area, broadband speeds will be realized. Plus, it has Wi-Fi which I hooked up already so it has broadband connectivity. I haven't got a chance to download Opera for it yet but surprisingly, Pocket Internet Explorer isn't that bad. Sure, there are some bugs (the most annoying is not being able to move focus from a text box with the thumb toggle) but it actually rendered my "google.com/ig" page without crashing so I was surprised. I also transfered a HE-AAC file to it and Windows Media Player 10 Mobile actually played it so that was even more surprising. My 2 gigabyte miniSD card should come tomorrow so I can load a lot of songs on there, as well as hopefully movies but I don't know what sort of video my phone supports. Hopefully h.264 but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Service out in my parts isn't that great but I still have 2/4 bars and when I test called my own house, and the voice quality sounded just fine so good deal. I'm happy...at least until my credit card statement comes this month.

So I've found out that I don't work well under extreme pressure. My brother ordered ~$3,000 worth of computer parts and I was supposed to put it together. Easy right? Not so much. When you have a $550 dollar video card in your hands and it's not going in easy, you sort of have to worry. Things worked out after a couple of serious hiccups. The main one was the computer shorting out a couple of electrical sockets...that was quite worrisome but the power supply did its job and protected the internals from harm. I don't know how it happened but after taking it apart and then putting it back together, it's been working fine. Pretty much the only thing I have left to do is install the drivers for the sound. During the whole build, I was having psychological problems. At the start of the build, I was thinking "what if it doesn't work and my brother is out 3000 bucks?". Then roughly 5 minutes in, the power supply wouldn't fit in the case. That sent me over the metaphorical edge. I got so worked up trying to get the PSU in for 45 minutes, I just had to stop and go away from it for about 2 hours. If everything went smoothly, I would guess that I would have been fine but things didn't go smoothly and that's what made me keep on second guessing myself. The build wasn't fun, esprecially when I plugged it in for the first time and instead of a start-up screen, I get a spark and the lights going out. That let down was quite depressing. Oh well, it worked out in the end. Anyway, if you're geeky, here are the major specs on it.

• Thermaltake Armor Case


• 2 dual-core AMD Opteron 265 (1.8 GHz)


• 512MBx4 Corsair ECC PC3200


• 2 eVGA 7900GTXs in SLI


• Western Digital SATA 250GB hard drive with 16MB of cache


• BenQ 16x DVD+RW drive

I already tested 3dmark03 and it got 30,027 so it's a fast machine. And the monitor my brother is going to use this computer with? A 37" 1080p Westinghouse LCD. I'll probably post pictures of the computer onto my flickr or my.opera later on when I'm not lazy.

EDIT:

So I've found out that I don't update nearly as much as I should. It's not that I'm that busy (I'm not) but because I seriously don't have that much to say. I think it's because I'm actually too connected into the news and such. Because nearly everything I read, I read on Digg/Slashdot/Opera Watch/whatever so I automatically assume everybody has already heard it by now. I guess what it boils down to is that I have a lot of second hand knowledge with a severe lack of first hand knowledge. Oh well.

On a slightly unrelated topic, breakfast burritos from McDonalds are really good. I've come to that conclusion after having 2 about an hour ago. Particularally with the sauce that is provided with them. And they only cost a dollar! That's a cheap breakfast if I ever seen one.

Moving on...I've been listening to the audio book "Don't Know Much About History" by Kenneth C. Davis a lot as of late. I'm currently about half way through chapter 2 so I've listened to ~3 hours. It has made me think a lot more about history. Mainly how the Indians got the shaft hardcore. Oh yeah, sorry England for protecting us for 200 years and then us declaring independence. If it's any consolation, not everybody was for independence. Speaking of which, this is one quote from a message board (fark.com) that has completely changed the way I view history.

The Navigation Acts were the most incredible thing that ever happened to the colonies, at least economically. When the British government declared that the American colonies could only trade with Britain, it opened the door to a very profitable smuggling industry. Other countries were willing to pay triple, even quadruple, for tobacco and rum from America. And coming into America, tea was a highly profitable smuggled good. One of the biggest tea smugglers was John Hancock, by the way.

Let't talk about tea, shall we? The British passed a law saying the colonies could only buy tea from the East India company. It was very good tea but very expensive, especially since it shipped from India to Britain to America. John Hancock smuggles inferior French tea into America and can severely undercut East India while turning an obscene profit. The tax laws certainly work in his favor, so we don't hear much from Hancock about how evil they are. Well, then the Brits decide to repeal the Navigation Acts and pass the Tea Act. The tax on tea is cut in half, East India tea is shipped directly to America from India, and sold at a bargain price. The colonists are getting a higher quality tea for less than Hancock can smuggle the cheap stuff for. Suddenly, John Hancock is outraged at the absolute gall of the crown to pass laws concerning taxation.

Simple amazing. That makes a lot more sense than the founding fathers spliting from England for ideological reasons, which was the line we were fed in public schools. "No taxation without representation"...wow. England defended us from the France as well as the natives, they spent a lot of money to do that and they wanted to get a little of it back from the colonies...and we declare independence. Sorry England, thanks for playing. If it's any consolation, my ancestors were still in northern Europe at the time so I feel I am innocent.

This post makes my first post ever with the blockquote element. Yea for me!

I just downloaded Opera 9 about 3 hours ago and I'm absolutely amazed. I just tried out the "block content" feature and I was actually in shock at how transparent and easy to use it was. Absolutely beautiful. Opera:config is neat as well. The Ctrl-Tab feature with the thumbnails enabled is very slick. I'm not convinced yet about the usefulness of the widget dealy yet but I'll hold off until some other ones come out. I personally want to attempt to try a "sudoku" widget or a widget that displays either "digg" stories or "flickr" photos. All of those widgets have already been done for other programs but I want them for Opera. My javascript is quite rusty and I have no idea how to create a sudoku game generator but I might as well try it. After all, it's just javascript and even better, it's already been done. Multiple times. Anyway, in short, Opera 9 was well worth the wait and I believe that Opera 9 will put Opera on the map around the world.

While I was watching the video for IE on hive.net (I'm not a member, infact, today was the first time I've ever been there), I was struck by the sudden stress on security. I disagree with this because I believe that in general, people do not care about security. They just want the product to work and security is an after thought. Security should be transparent to the user. A user shouldn't have to worry about a site installing a virus onto his computer. And while I think that Microsoft making security a concern is a very good thing, making a big deal about a proprietary phishing filter is sort of dumb. Personally, I would be sort of leary about it due to privacy concerns. But I don't have to worry about it because I'd be very surprised if Microsoft allowed Opera to use it and I'd be even more surprised if Opera would use it.

In the video, they claim that the thumbnail tab feature was "total innovation" or something to that effect. First off, it looks like a ripoff of Omniwebs thumbnail tab feature. But that browser isn't widely known but that is besides the fact that the IE feature looks just like the years old mac os x feature, exposé. More importantly, there is an extension for Firefox, "foxpose", that mimics IE's yet unleashed "feature". Foxpose is out now, is free, works reasonably well (I was hoping for smooth animations but there is a sore lack), and does not claim that it is "innovation" when very similar features have been around for years.

That, and I don't think that IE7 is going to increase it's standards compliance to a great degree. If there was one thing I wish that it could do, it'd probably be to support SVG natively. Opera is doing it. Firefox is doing it. And rounding out the top 4, Safari also has it, enabled in it's nightly builds. IE will hold back SVG from taking off if they do not support it. My second thing I'd wish IE7 could do is better standards support but they are supposedly already doing that, as well as getting rid of some IE legacy quirks. I'll be sure to test it out next year sometime. I won't switch back to IE but I want to see how much it's come in the past 4 1/2 years.