Today I went with Elly to do some errands and get coffee (my main motivation for going). One of the errands was stopping at the thrift store, which, she promised, had tons of cool stuff. I spent about ten minutes browsing through some old clothes, but didn't really find anything that moved me until I got to the books. It is amazing how many mystery and romance books people buy and then throw away. What's more amazing is what I found among all those old Danielle Steele and Patricia Cornwell paperbacks:
Pretty sweet, eh? This thing has to be about 30 or 40 years old, and it's signed by the author, Chuck Jonkel, a famous bear researcher and founder of the Great Bear Foundation.
The best part: it was only $0.10.
But now I've discovered a way to read my ebooks that makes the experience tolerable.
My friend Jeff has been preaching the gospel of paperless books to me for almost a decade, but I've resisted for a long time. Now that I live in a place where it takes a few hours to just get to Borders and search for a tech book, I've started to cave. When I need a new tech book, I buy only the e-book. It's environmentally better, since all of the info will be outdated in six months anyway. Besides, it's not like I want to have a study full of classic web application books. Buying paperless books means I'm doing my reading mostly in Apple's Preview application.
The Bug Happy Fun Thing I found that has made reading tolerable in Preview is the Note Annotation tool.
It lets me make little notes of my thoughts as I read something. With tech books, this is great, because there are a million and one things that I read but then forget, or can't find again without searching for 20 minutes. Now, if I see something in a book I want to blog about later, or use in a project, I just add a note. When I'm ready to use whatever interesting page in the ebook that I've "Note'd", then I just view all Notes in the sidebar. No searching.
It's all about the little things.
Dave pointed me to the announcement about IE8's standards mode this morning. The short of it is that the IE team will do The Right Thing with version 8, rendering in IE8 standards mode by default, not IE7 standards mode, which can still be explicitly requested via meta tags. See the A List Apart article for how to do that.
I have two questions. First, why did anyone ever think it was a good idea to make IE7 Standards mode the default in IE8? I know all of the technical reasons and backwards compatibility blah blah blah, but when is a new version allowed to be a new damned version already? Second, why do they have Peter Boyle from Young Frankenstein at the podium on their Interoperability Page? I know I can't be the first to draw that comparison, but the resemblance seems particularly striking in this shot. Oh, and third, why is the name of that image file "hero.jpg"?