I don't use this blog anymore. I use this LiveJournal instead.

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.

We live in the future

Walmart impressed me again this weekend. I know they're evil and all, but I'm a sucker for good prices. In particular, I buy all my shampoo and such there, because their prices are always as good as or better than the sale prices at the local Stop & Shop. Also their film is about half the price of the grocery store. So it's usually worth the extra trip.

Anyways, I wanted to buy a cheap set of earbud headphones. I have an old Nike PSA MP3 player that is very pocketable, and wanted to get something cheap to go with it. All my other headphones (and I have many) would complain if I just stuffed them in my pocket.

Walmart has headphones for $0.97. That's just incredible. If you're old-school, they'll remind you of the original Gameboy headphones, back when they still gave you headphones for free. They don't come with a case, and obviously they have no bass at all. But you can't expect bass from earbuds so that's ok. And at that price, they're almost disposable. What a wonderful world.

This is what the weather's like here today. (This isn't here of course, it's a photo of chateau in France I took a couple of years ago.)