Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Chances are you nurture some degree of dorkiness, the gradation of which is a badge of honor around these parts. It’s not a requirement, don’t get me wrong, but let’s be honest: you aren’t here because you were the homecoming king or queen for three years straight. If you were, then I stand corrected. If you were both, I should give you this space tonight. Your story is fascinating, I imagine.

Something happened in the last 48 hours, and its arrival is pronounced in the online world. Firefox 1.5 is here. In the Church of Dork, this is a scant 0.5 less momentous than the Second Coming, a spectacle that urges nerdlings everywhere to vibrate fervently in prone position. I gushed about the browser a while ago, but my opinion has since been tempered.

The software is important. Everyone needs a browser, after all–it’s the glove through which we gingerly poke and sample the delights of the Intertron. This glove happens to be customizable and allegedly sleeker, which would be awesome if–let’s add some personification now–it didn’t shit its pants from time to time. For a program that boasts a smaller footprint than IE, there’s an awful lot of thrashing when I’m doing the multitasking thing, and heaven knows some websites don’t display correctly.

I logged into my bank statement today and beheld a balance of 0.00. That dog don’t get interest, let me tell you. After refreshing a few times the page displayed correctly, only to segue into an ugly rendition of my credit card website. Firefox is like the scrappy mechanic who does the job mostly right before leaving his wrench under your hood. So, like, the Duxler Tire of browsers.

But it’s free, so who am I to complain? Click on the icon to get it, if you’d like. Firefox is still a compelling browser, the poster child of a community that’s vaguely iconoclastic and, more than anything, is cheap.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Cardinal directions are the type of learnin’ appreciated universally, or so I thought until I stepped into my American Taxi yesterday evening. Certainly the cab number matched the one described by the operator, right down to the eight followed by the four followed by the nine. Dyslexia, you did not win that night. Eight-four-nine, I was sure of it. But it wasn’t the incorrect cab. It was the wrong cab.

Within five minutes my turbaned companion managed to disparage blacks twice, making sure to emphasize each salvo with an imperious wave of his hand, and within seven minutes it was clear he hadn’t the freshest clue how to set sail for “northeast of Chicago.” Had I known this fellow would later insist on rhyming Wilmette with “manatee,” well, I hear one of the underpasses at Midway Airport offers the most accommodating jets of warm air this time of year.

See, there’s a danger to starting off a journey by scoffing at a cop because she’s black. You kind of overextend yourself, especially if you can’t pronounce that honeyed subset of letters known as those goddamn vowels. Somewhere between my second and fifth time outlining the secret contours of Lake Shore Drive, but well before we drove in a southwesterly direction, I gathered my driver came to the States in 1991. Fourteen years. Where’s the due diligence in the communications department?

After two tollways and a call to a harried dispatcher–who, ultimately, gave up and spoke to me–I rolled into town. You thought those days of grunting and pointing at prodigious bodies of water were over, huh? Call me sometime and we’ll talk.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, November 29.