Crisp

As our hemisphere slowly tilts away from the sun, night reclaims its territory from day, and the crispness of early mornings and late evenings stretches to meet at midday. Today was the product of this merry converging of cold: a perfectly crisp day. The whole day was perky and gleeful and alive. A day for running, working, eating apples, taking snuggly naps.

The undergrads felt it, too -- today was their celebration of their summer-camp-like initation of incoming students via t-shirt-wearing, loud music, and silly activities.

Their spirits will be plenty damped by classes, beginning on Monday.


This post's theme word: jitney, "bus." I saw a flock of hard-hat-clad purple undergrads debark from a jitney.
This post written like Stephen King.

Internet usability

I have become recently frustrated at the unusability of teh internet [sic]. No, I don't want your cookies or to run Flash... and as a consequence, many pages simply don't load, or they load forever, taking up memory and bandwidth without ever deciding to display some frakking content. I don't understand why the internet has trended this way. There must be other users like me out there, who are increasingly shut out of miscellaneous internet browsing.

Do most users not notice? Is this because, in my reluctance to buy any new hardware, I have finally fallen behind the lagging event horizon of "supported"? Are my computers' software/hardware combinations now actually too old to browse the latest, grooviest incarnation of teh internets [sic]? Maybe most users:

1. Regularly destroy and cannot rescuscitate computers, and thus purchase new computers every... 2?... years. (I remember hearing a statistic like that once: the average laptop lives for 1.5 years. My last store-bought new computer is from 2005.)
2. Accept cookies.
3. Accept and install whatever plugins claim to be required.
4. Don't block ads. (<-- N.B. this must be the case, since otherwise the advertisers would figure out a different way to attack our eyeballs.)
   

It's frustrating, and I feel like a whiny old dinosaur. I long for the "good old days" that are so old I never witnessed them: text-only browsing, with pure content right at one's fingertips.


This post's theme word: anomie, "social instability and alienation caused by the erosion of norms and values." Modern anomie is based upon flash cookies and banner ads.
This post written like Cory Doctorow.