So I tried to watch a YouTube video fullscreen while eating lunch today. BAM. Firefox (2) crashed. Okay, this happens sometimes. So I rerun it — and it bitches about not being able to upgrade because some files are in use. They aren’t! I ps and kill processes just to make sure, but to no avail. So I use IE to download Firefox3 beta4. Oh, 6 out of 7 of my plugins are not compatible? Fuck you! Progress is bad! Anything I build should last until I die, and the futility of having what you build be torn down is what makes most people stay computer novices.

Anyway, fine, NoSquint wont work, so I’ll have to manually set my zoom for every page I visit every time, and it wont remember. It wont remember that I like gmail at 170%; I’ll just have to hit the zoom button 7 times everytime I open gmail. Beats not being able to browse at all, right?

WRONG! Just increasing my font size to 120% in google reader resulted in google reader NOT BEING USABLE. The items you are reading do not appear on the screen. Anywhere!

Um, I’d just like to point out that the reason HTML was invented was to separate content from presentation. But human beings are such an INREDIBLY SUPERFICIAL species, that we have to work against the whole concept, trying to bring presentation and content back together again (PDF, Flash, fixed-pixel CSS and table sizes, fixed font sizes that can’t be resized on some websitse). The shallow people who care about superficiality tend to work in marketing and other departments that get the final say over the I.T. people who implement what they say, and actually understand why a basic HTML might be better than a PDF for a lot of people — disabled people, people on PDAs, people with “weird” display devices like a 1920×1080 52-inch screen (i.e. me).

So, Firefox 3 is utterly unusable for me. I can’t read RSS in a font large enough to see from my couch. Fuck you progress, once again.

I should have kept my dos box. I bet I would have TCP/IP on it by now, as a TSR utility, and it would be more stable (but less functional) than my wi ndows box. And I think I will keep a Win2K or WinXP for the rest of my life, even though I see myself ultimately going the unix route in 5-15 yrs, once XP is no longer “useful for normal stuff” due to Microsoft’s forced “progress”. Guess I’ll have to keep Firefox2 around for awhile too! At least until Firefox 3 comes out of beta, and if and only if they or Google fix the reader issue.

Progress bad. When I’ve built my cathedral, I just want to chill out and read the news. I don’t want to have to keep rebuilding it over and over.

So, I finally rebooted, and Firefox2 worked again.

Of course, since Firefox3 remembered my tabs, and opened them all up, it basically invalidated all my login cookies. I had to re-log in to google and flickr, and probably everything else in the future. Sigh.

Mood: annoyed as hell
Music: Ministry - Fear Is Big Business (Weapons Of Mass Deception Mix)