Notepad2

Notepad2 is the best text editor I've found. It is fast. It looks and works like a real app, not like some VisualBasic junk that was written by someone who never saw the UI standards. It has effortless syntax highlighting. It uses tabs (the keyboard kind) properly and at only 4 spaces wide! It handles Unix and Windows linefeeds without thinking.

Out of the box, it works perfectly for my purposes. And it's completely free and open source.

1 Pkg(s) from Space

Amazon packaging

It is amazing how bad Amazon can be at actually shipping books. They are a bookstore first and foremost, and they've had years to perfect book packaging. But nearly every time I order a trade paperback, it gets screwed up somehow. Either a corner is bent over, or an edge is bashed and frayed, or there's a random cover crease. I understand how the edge issues could happen, since if theres a quarter inch of slack in the box it will bounce around. But the latest thing I bought looks like someone put a heavy weight on the book and bent it. How does this happen?

And don't get me started on hardcovers. They manage to bend over the edge of every single dustjacket I buy. Sometimes they even put a hard crease in it when they shrink-wrap it.

The whole thing is kind of depressing. You assume Amazon starts with pristine books, and screw them up entirely in shipping them to you. If I really cared, I could go down to the bookstore and pick out a mint copy off the shelves any day.

Random trivia... I finally ripped that Section Quartet CD I bought below, and it was the first CD in years that wasn't listed in CDDB or freeDB. Even stuff like 5-song sampler CD's and magazine throw-ins have always been listed. So I actually had to type in the track listing. How retro.