Bacon blogjam

A job search can sometimes lead to a bit of a paranoid blogjam -- could this post be too controversial for potential employers?

Well, who could object to these links? The first, found via Chow combines two of my passions (cooking and typesetting) to pose the question of the ages: Cheese or Font?

The second also combines two passions, this time cooking and bacon. It's Homesick Texan's Bacon Jam! Enjoy!

Feature feature

This is my Andy Rooney post for the year, where I complain about some newfangled technology.

Lots of folks have been chattering about the new iPod Shuffle, pointing out the great strides they've made applying Moore's law to DRM authentication chips.  What they haven't mentioned, at least not loudly enough for me to notice, was Apple's brilliant decision to leverage cooler-than-cool voice menu technology, apparently licensed at a discount from Visa Fraud Prevention Services.  “I believe you said Barry Manilow.  Is that correct?  Hold on, I'll connect you.”  Cutting edge stuff, there.  I'm not saying it's not useful, just that it's not an innovation (1st generation iPods had it) and, more to the point, it's kinda boring.

In other lame lock-in technology news, Opera, my favorite browser, is really losing my confidence.  Their two biggest recent features, Opera Link and Opera Turbo fall kinda short of the groundbreaking standard they set with mouse gestures, speed dial, the intellegent address bar, etc.  The former is a bright idea — a way to synchronize your browser preferences all over the web — that I'd probably like better as flexible, open format rather than as a razor for a My Opera account.  The latter idea was short-sighted when Google, AOL, and Netscape introduced it back in '04 or '05: a proxy server that will pre-fetch, compress, and prioritize web traffic to your browser.  It was a smart technology for Opera to apply to mobile devices, but adapting it for the desktop, where broadband speeds are (reluctantly but steadily) increasing, seems like a waste of resources that could be focused on real innovation.  Maybe useful for cellular broadband users?

They're making cool strides on the back end; Opera 10 will support web fonts, SVG fonts, cool opacity stuff... they already have a tech preview release of their next, next rendering engine.  Also, they've brought Jon Hicks in to work on the UI, which suggests it'll be more than just a re-skin.  The latest alpha preview just didn't whelm me, I guess.

It's like that scene in William Gibson's Count Zero, where they quantify the research output of a scientist, and extrapolate the graph of his future breakthroughs.  I'm projecting a plateau. 

More blahg than blog

Very conveniently, our apartment move-out date, Annie's orientation, and the drop dead date for a very big (2 years in the making) project at work all fall within a roughly one week period. One rough, weak period. I asked Annie why I'm so tired tonight, and she told me it's because I was at work 12 hours yesterday. Oh, right.

The rewarding part is that this thing at the office is going uncharacteristically smoothly. Provided I ignore the first year and a half of slamming our heads into the wall over and over again. The brain damage helps me ignore it.

The really rewarding part is that Annie baked a chocolate cake for for us to take to my folks for Mother's Day dinner tomorrow. And she's a heavy sleeper. Sleep... sleep, my pet. Dream of unsliced cakes and crumbless smiles... pay no attention to the NOM NOM NOM....