I’ve reached the point where I won’t use more than one web browser on a regular basis, and that has led to some switching in the last year or so.
why? because i find the idea of running more than one app that does the same thing, due to one having some feature/support the other one doesn’t have, to be deeply offensive. given OS X’s profound appetite for memory[5], even moreso.
I’m assuming each step of this switch is driven in part by JavaScript being great/marginal/incomplete on various platforms, but it’s not in my nature to know precisely why I’m making the move, just whether I’ve stopped moving, or not.
In the age of del.icio.us and outsourcing all of my mail and calender functions to Google, moving around between browsers isn’t such a big deal… except for the fact that I need to keep doing it.
What I’d ideally like to be using: Safari
Because: Integrated RSS, fast, the shiny Apple logo on it, et al.
But it doesn’t: Work with Gcal
I also wouldn’t mind: Camino
Because: It puts Safari’s speed/crack-gnomes to shame, imo. It’s very fast and very basic.
But it doesn’t: Support job’s web portal.
What I am using: Firefox
Because: It works with g*, my bank, my preferred pr0n sites, and now my company’s web/collab/community portal
But it doesn’t: Respond very fast. Feels as bloated as I am.
Forces me to: Use Google Lab’s G-reader or whatever it’s called for news, which isn’t a bad thing. g-readermachino’s sharing functions need some work.
We’ll see how many more shifts I make before 10.5.
[5] Ok… all applications, on all OSes, are hungry for memory.
The motivation behind the potential-but-snubbed question about needing the agent (rhetorical) was said agent’s (actual; horrible) behavior in our home, which called in question his legitimacy, and the method by which we knew him (via our wedding planner, P–, a conduit I know in hindsight to be highly alarming). But more pressing was the conversation at hand, which was in preparation of our cruise and not going well. I’ll paraphrase:
Forgetting about society’s good, instead focusing on my own (and my own awareness that I was not sure of the precise borderline between “annoyance” and “assault”) and that of my wife and holding onto hope of any participation in cruising the Alaskian wildes, I instead followed the nearest child around, twisting my upper body and head down towards the ground but then back up at the floor in a very Vincent d’Onofrio-in-Law-and-Order-Criminal-Intent sort of move that said, “You know, I’m trying to make eye contact with you, and I’m willing to sort of look like a jerk doing it. But then again, you father never gave you much attention, did he? Hm? And his attention was really all you ever wanted, right? The basketball team, the football team, scholarships, you did it all for him, and he wouldn’t even look at you. Am I right?” After five minutes of such badgering one orphan, particularly small and noisome, with a goggly eye, got the message, but she was unfortunately on the other side of the giant luggage carousel room watching me do this to one of her cohorts who was not getting it. Finally googleye finished up with whoever she was doing, came over, relieved her clearly-in-training colleague, and told us to grab our bags and exit via Door 0 aaaaaaallllllllllllllll the way down at the other end of the building. There would be signs for Eurasian Cruises and busses and more instructions and it would all be completely obvious. [
On the death march to Door 0 we passed car rental stands and exits into the misty Seattle morning air and also a man sitting at what appeared to be some sort of legitimate airport pamphlet/materials kiosk that he had erected a large !!!IMPEACH CHENEY!!! sign atop. The woman and I passed and we were asked, “Excuse me, but are you interested,” and I was only slightly upset with myself that I allowed him to get that far before muttering “f**k off” his way. Kelley knew where we were going, because Door 0 was the exact same door she had taken a week or two earlier to engage a charter bus she’d arranged for a work trip out here. Her confidence bolstered mine, as otherwise I would be convinced that Door 0 was some real-world manifestation of a portal from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a one-dimensional gateway that had one side here in SEATAC airport, the other on a beach covered with lobstrosities, or a wood filled with warewolves, or the hard granite at the middle of some Mid-World mountain (had the door been already wound down). We found Door 0 and went through it, and what awaited us was only 20-30% copied from the diary of a madman. [
First, we were now outside, walking along a curb that ran for perhaps the length of a football field, with a sporadic bus or two to the left, and many airline check-in-ish counters to the right. There must have been some relationship between the busses and the counters, but it was not apparent at a glance, and it wasn’t exactly clear what we should do, anyway, leading to: Second, there were more Les Miserables “working” for the cruise industry, squalid and having received few dental checkups recently, except now numbered in what seemed like dozens, in waves, holding up signs indicating what outside. I had to assume they had been kidnapped from all over the world and impressed into indentured servitude doing… whatever they were supposed to be doing. I’m reluctant to be too hard on these child-slaves, since they were, I’m sure, in fact slaves, which means their wages were draconian, the levels of training they received were undoubtedly sub-standard, and were malnourished to boot. It could be the only explanation why here, as inside, many of them seemed to be propping themselves up by the signs they should have been holding high for all to see, acting as rallying points and offering guidance to weary and confused travelers. The whole system would have worked better if the kids had been outfitted with sandwich boards, so that way they could just sort of set down and take a nap whenever and wherever they wanted, and some sort of internal sandwich board-to-slave kid cantilevered harness would support their weight, but at least the go***mn board would still be propped upright, supporting itself, and nominally functioning. Best of all, perhaps make robots to do this job, and grind up the kids for robot fuel.
After a brief respite back by Door 0, where there were chairs to sit on instead of curbs and the edges of planters, we moved back out around launch-time to find “bus 4″. It’s hopefully not too late to point out that the mean age of the non-identured labor portion of the crowd (our fellow guests) is somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand years old. This is not a surprise to people who have cruised, I’m sure; nor should be a surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of “cruise”. The problem was that it was a group of people that had no idea what the hell was going on around them, and seemed (perhaps due to their advanced age, and a certain sort of jadedness that descends later on in life) largely unconcerned, at that moment, with the location of bus 4. Maybe they figured that whenever a bus pulled up, they would swarm on it like fireants screaming BUS 4! BUS 4? MAAAAT-LOOOCCK!, until they seized their bloody satisfaction. Many of their ranks would be crushed in the process, but they were legion. Ultimately, I realized, everything must be put in its proper perspective: most of these passengers had probably survived cancer(s), or the loss of their spouse or everyone else around them, or lost all their retirement savings in the DotCom crash or Enron, or were beaten by their children/nurses/postmen, so practically speaking not knowing precisely where bus 4 was, or would be when it got here, was not a high priority issue. It would more than likely take care of itself. 
When the next bus pulled up, the apple-mummy was not there to intercept and engage it; she was still busy with bus 1-2-3. The kindly busdriver man, even he was seventy-ish, waddled down the steps, and I tried my luck. “Are you, uh, bus 4? To pier 66?” “I don’t know. I’m whatever bus the line tells me.” Several others right next to me by the bus door tried the exact same set of passwords (bus. 4. 66.) and were similarly denied access. Looking at apple-woman, doing a little jump like a kid who needs to pee. Eventually she senses it and comes over, declaring the bus “4″. One little victory. Kelley and I are the first on, pushing aside several oldies to secure access. We could finally sit, and relax, escape velocity from airport at last achieved. It’s a shame I wasn’t there to free indentured children-guide slaves that day, because I suspect (and I know this is crazy) that I am in some ways the savior they imagine in their stories told around the fires in the airport parking lot at night when they settle in. They will be set free… on the great day that a page is added to our cruise tour book describing, in few words, to get one’s baggage at the carousel, go to Door 0, walk down the line until you see your cruise desk, check in, give them your bags, and get a ticket to wait for the bus. Damn straight. [
Emotional detachment from the subject matter would have served Singer well in this case, for we are left with a bloaty, sentimental Superman-as-the Baby Jebus passion play begging the obvious question but failing to answer it: “Why wasn’t Christopher Reeves brought back in to play the man of steel?”
