Coffee, Rugby, Autumn

Interesting weekend. Got to see the newly astroturfed Macholtz Stadium christened with a bit of a disappointing performance by the ol' home team (the field itself looked great though, and the announcing was top-shelf) that resulted in the Ravens losing possession of the Wagon Wheel.

Later on that night I inadvertently attempted to break into somebody's car, which prompted the individuals inside to punch the gas and almost rip my arm off.

Sunday was my father's birthday. I was able to procure the brand of coffee that I was unable to locate for him on father's day. It's a fairly manly coffee for a fairly manly man.

Anderson University gave me a brand new HP Compaq 6510b. Pretty nice machine, except it came loaded with a Novell Client already on it. What a drag. Needless to say, I absolutely had to get that off of there. My attempts to reformat my computer were confounded by the strangely out of date edition of XP that Ball State has available for students to download. To make a long story short, I wound up reformatting my computer six times over the weekend. I wouldn't recommend that.

Setting up my new computer has been fun. I installed a Linux partition and am currently running SUSE 10.3 with KDE. I took a week-long Linux class last May and now I am trying to relearn it all.

I installed a bunch of stuff on the Windows partition today. Including four different Internet browsers. The XP distribution came with a packaged version of IE6, which has reminded me how lousy This Blog and You looks in IE6. I may fix that someday. On the other hand, I am very lazy.

Anyway, in installing all of those browsers, I learned that every single browser offers a "faster" web experience. Faster than what, I'm not sure, but apparently that's all people care about.

Opera: the fastest and most powerful Web browser available.
Mozilla Firefox: the faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web.
Safari: the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world.
Google Chrome: the browser to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Google Chrome is the new browser from Google Labs that was supposedly designed to further loosen Microsoft's hold on the desktop. In my opinion, it will probably have a bigger initial impact on Firefox usage than anything else.

The setup utility that Chrome has you use is actually kind of slow, which surprised me, but after having endured the drawn-out installation, Google's conspicuously magnanimous dialogue boxes are kind of entertaining.

After importing your settings from your default browser, Chrome informs you that your default search engine is currently set to Google, and then selflessly asks if you would like to switch to another search engine. The browser itself looks a little Fisher-Price, and will probably clash with whatever desktop theme you have running. Not that that's important.

It's a Beta release, and there's some functionality that isn't available yet, which makes a comparison to a more mature browser kind of unfair. Overall though, I think that I like it.

I'm on an Ask a Ninja kick. If you like Strongbad Emails, you'll probably like Ask a Ninja. It seems like the same sort of humor.

The Falcons lost to the Sharks on Sunday, 9-14. Jonny Wilkinson wound up not playing after all. Steve Bates may saving Wilkinson for the Premiership.

I am so glad that AU Rugby has started again. Coaching is fun, but I miss playing.

It's easier to be spiritual in early Autumn than it is mid-winter.

-Ryan