Tag: Imported Post

Originally posted somewhere else (ex. a blog I don’t use anymore, or a social networking site) and moved here sometime later. Usually keeping the original posting date.

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Spent a good chunk of last night looking at travel websites. Accomplished 2 things:

  • Arranged for a hotel to stay in San Francisco next month.
  • Arranged for a back-up hotel for San Diego Comic Con, just in case we can’t get a room through the convention desk.

Hotel rooms during Comic-Con have become a scarce commodity over the last few years, as attendance has shot up by thousands (it actually sold out before the doors opened last year!) but only a few hundred new hotel rooms have been added to Downtown San Diego. Rooms in the convention blocks have been selling out in a matter of hours. The con website has crumbled under the stress, and the phone lines have caved. Last year it took me over an hour just to get through. This year, they haven’t even published a list of which hotels are involved, and it looks like they’ve dropped fax from their options. And booking downtown hotels directly isn’t an option: either they’re sold out, or they want $350/night-plus.

So, just in case I can’t get a room downtown when they go on sale next week, we can at least stay someplace near a trolley station. And if I can get a closer room, even if they charge me $25 to cancel the first reservation, it’s worth the peace of mind.

(Originally posted at LiveJournal. Brought over here to fit with the rest of my convention posts, and as a snapshot of the days when you could get a backup hotel. Not downtown, but in…it might’ve been Old Town? In any case, I cancelled the room once we got our confirmation from the convention block hotel sale.)

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SafariFollowing up on my previous post, Apple just dropped a bombshell: the Safari web browser is now available for Windows. I’ve posted some general reactions at K-Squared Ramblings as to how it will benefit web developers and users overall. The most obvious is that Windows-only web designers will no longer have an excuse for not testing in Safari, which might help break the two-browser mindset.

But what about Opera, specifically?

I remember when Apple first announced Safari for the Mac, Opera was very upset that Apple had decided to go their own way instead of licensing Opera as the new default browser. In retrospect, both sides were right: Apple was right to choose something that they could maintain themselves, without being dependent on an outside provider. (I guess they’d learned their lesson from Internet Explorer.) Opera was right that they lost a golden opportunity: as the default browser on MacOS, Safari has since become the most-used browser on that platform and the third-most-used browser overall, surpassing Opera’s marketshare.

So there’s certainly a risk that Safari on Windows could surpass Opera’s users. However, there is one significant difference: Safari is not the default browser on Windows. It’s hard to tell how much of Safari’s uptake on MacOS is due to it being the default, and how much is due to people actively liking it. Personally, I have Opera, Firefox, and a half-dozen other browsers on my PowerBook, but when I fire that box up, I generally use Safari.

If you look at the functionality available in a base install, from simplest to most complex, it probably starts with Safari, runs through Firefox and IE, then finishes with Opera. Firefox has a wide array of extensions available — in fact, it’s pretty much known for them. Safari isn’t nearly as extensible. You can’t install something that will add mouse gestures, for instance.

I suspect that, at least at first, the audience for Safari on Windows will consist mainly of the following groups:

  • Web Developers
  • Dual-platform users who are used to Safari on Mac
  • People who just want a basic browser and don’t want bells and whistles, but don’t want IE for some reason

If anything, I think Firefox has more to worry about than Opera. For every Firefox user who tricks out his browser with every 1337 extension he can find, there are probably many who just wanted something more stable than IE, or faster than IE. There’s a vocal faction of Firefox users who are frustrated with its performance. I don’t know why they haven’t jumped ship to Opera, but depending on how much memory Safari uses when it gets out of beta, it might prove a threat on that front.

This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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Someone walked into the restroom talking on a cell phone, explaining, “it’s going to sound really bad now, because I’m in the executive washroom.”

Executive washroom?

Sure, if by “executive washroom” you mean first-floor lobby restroom that’s available to anyone who walks into the building.

I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, or trying to impress the person on the other end of the call.

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Me: Oh, that’s too many syllables for this character!
Katie: What are you trying to replace?
Me: Sanctimonious.

By writing like a madman over the Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve managed to get ahead of the goal, and complete a 47,000-word novel. Unfortunately I need a 50,000-word novel, so I’m going back and looking for things that I glossed over the first time through. There are a couple of spots where I knew I needed more scenes to show character changes, so that’s where I’m going to be focusing.

Still, I’ve got three evenings to write 3,000 words and be done by the 28th, with Thursday as a safety valve. But given the occasional outages at the Nanowrimo website this weekend, I don’t want to take any chances.

Word Count: 47037

Current Mood: accomplished

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Last week my goal for Nanowrimo was to stay right on track. Hit 20K on the 12th, 25K on the 15th, 30K on the 18th. But I realized that the last few days of the month aren’t going to give me much time to write. We’re going to a concert on the 29th, leaving me only the evening of the 30th to finish the last ~3000 words. Add to that the fact that Nano’s official word counter seems to run a little shorter than OpenOffice’s, and I really need to be aiming for something like 50,500 words.

So my new goal is to finish by the 28th.

For now, that means aiming for 2,000 words a day instead of just 1,700. In some ways it’s easier, since I’ve gotten used to it. But it’s getting a lot harder to sit down and start. I’ll spend all day wanting to get home and start writing, and then I’ll sit down, check my email, read some webcomics, read a couple of blogs… And once I do start writing, I’m letting myself get distracted by web surfing that starts as, say, research on medieval surgery and veers off on a tangent that sucks up an hour reading about the overseas territories of the U.S. (Sometimes, hypertext is not your friend.)

The next few days are going to be tough. Tuesday evening’s out, and I’ve got a project at work due Wednesday that may have me staying late if I can’t figure out the solution earlier. And of course, Thursday afternoon and evening are taken.

I made 32K tonight, though. For the first time, Nano expects me to finish on deadline.

Word Count: 32,101

Current Mood: 😴tired

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I didn’t get much written yesterday, but I made up for it today, and passed the 25,000 word mark right on schedule. I am now just over the half-way mark.

A subplot jumped out at me on Monday, and while it’s slowing the A plot down, it seems to be working into things that need to happen for both the A and B plots.

Word Count: 25,032

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