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Surfin’ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion.

There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The setting doesn’t exist anymore in current versions of Safari (1.3 or later), so changing it has no effect.

The author of the shareware tool in question responded, saying that he honestly had no idea that the setting had been removed, and offering a refund to anyone who wanted their money back. And there are a couple of other optimizations it can make.

There are some things that the human mind just isn’t good at measuring objectively, and perception of time depends very much on circumstance. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “A watched pot never boils” have been known for ages.

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Continue reading →

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[Flash Logo]In 1991, DC released The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told, part of a series of hardcovers collecting classic stories about their signature characters. It was reprinted in softcover a few years later, but both editions have been long out of print. When DC started releasing new “Greatest Stories…” books last year, I figured it was only a matter of time before they released a new edition. Yesterday, DC announced that Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told will appear in July of this year:

THE FLASH: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD TP
Writers: Robert Kanigher, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Cary Bates and Mark Waid.
Artists: Lee Elias, Carmine Infantino, Ross Andru, Irv Novick, José Luís Garcia-López, Kurt Schaffenberger, Alex Saviuk, Mike Wieringo, Joe Giella, Wallace Wood, Joe Kubert, Frank Giacoia, Mike Esposito, Murphy Anderson and José Marzan Jr.

Collects stories from FLASH COMICS #86 and 104, THE FLASH #123, 155, 165 and 179, DC SPECIAL SERIES #11 and THE FLASH (Second Series) #91.
$19.99 US, 208 pages

I pulled out my copy of the 1991 edition, and it’s fair to say this is an entirely different book. There are only two stories in common: “Stone Age Menace,” and “The Flash—Fact or Fiction?” The new book is also about eighty pages shorter than the old one.

Here’s the character breakdown:

Flash  1991 book  2007 book 
Jay Garrick 4 2 / 4
Barry Allen 12 5
Wally West 1 1 / 2

Both books are very heavily focused on Barry Allen, and each includes just one story with Wally West as the Flash. Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told includes two crossover stories: “Flash of Two Words” features both Barry and Jay, and “Beyond the Super-Speed Barrier” features all three during Wally’s days as Kid Flash.

So, assuming the contents are final, do they hold up to the title’s promise? Continue reading →

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The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Dreamworks and Aardman are going their separate ways after the disappointing performance of Flushed Away and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Wait… Wallace and Gromit? Wasn’t it #1 on opening weekend? Didn’t it stay in the top 5 for at least a month?

Aardman’s dry British wit went over well with critics on such films as “Chicken Run” in 2000 and 2005’s “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which won an Oscar for best animated feature.

But both “Wallace & Gromit” and “Flushed Away” were costly misfires, failing to resonate with American audiences. DreamWorks reported a $25-million loss on “Wallace & Gromit.”

Hmm, according to IMDB, W&G had an estimated budget of $30 million. It grossed $16 million its opening weekend and went on to gross $56 million by January, 2006. Domestically. That’s not even counting foreign distribution or DVD sales.

If they spent $30 million and made more than $56 million, how exactly did they “lose” $25 million? Where did that missing $50 million go?

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Here’s a surprise: web standardista extraordinaire Molly Holzschlag is now working with Microsoft to promote web standards within the organization.

Improving interoperability, especially at high-profile services like many of Microsoft’s, is critical to the future of the web. I can only hope that the emphasis on standards will feed into the design goals for Internet Explorer 8—and that IE8 will be released before Windows XP drops from mainstream to extended support in 2009.