From the “Weed” Dept.

Like I mentioned before, I actually wrote up a nice blog about the some of the prior events…

Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoon I was pulling weeds from my interlocked driveway.

It’s really bad…

Almost done though. One more day and I’m finished.

My brothers are lazy bastards.

This type of menial work really makes you humble.

From the “What am I getting myself into” Dept.

Jen messaged me on Wednesday and told me that her mom had purchased a condo. It’s at a plot of land near the Scarborough Town Centre. It’s a one-bedroom condo. Jen messaged me, because her mom wanted to know if we wanted a Den/Living area with the condo, for an extra $15 000 CDN. The condo isn’t ready for posession until late 2005/2006.

‘Umm, that’s a little presumptious,’ I thought.

Talk like that makes me uncomfortable. I kid you not.

I was talking to Jen—apparently the bedroom is 10-feet by 11-feet in area.

I’m like, “But my bedroom at home is 16 feet by 13 feet.”

Then the “paranoid delusional” side of me kicked in:

“You’re trying to trap me,” I accused.

And then that dry sense of humour came up:

“So I guess I have to marry by 2006, eh?”

LOL.

Ah.. life is too funny.

I’m a bit uncomfortable about this. Then again, I already know a handfull of people who have already bought houses and they’re no older than I (25-years old). I’m also glad that Jen’s mom can see Jen and I together in the future. So that is a vote of confidence from her.

So all in all, it’s a positive thing.

While it’s not hard to believe that this will be our first place together, I think Jen’s mom has other plans. She probably plans to sell the condo for profit. Condo living here in TO is a hot realty sector to be in at the moment.

By the way, Jen and I decided to go with the den.

From the “Life in the GUI Lane” Dept.

That’s G.U.I. for Graphical User Interface.

I found some interesting blogs on-line written by two of the main UI coders from the Mozilla Project, the opensource browser that is the basis for Netscape 6.x/7.x and others (Chimera, Galeon, K-meleon, etc.).

Mozilla is probably the fastest browser on the OS X market (although that prize is highly questionable), but it definitely is a lot better than IE 5.1.2 for Mac OS X. However, it suffers from poor GUI design and “feature creep” (they made a browser that did too much).

It’s far from elegant in my opinion.

I have always wondered who were the people who designed the UI for Mozilla ( I had suspected that it was just a developer with no UI experience ). I think these guys know they’re stuff, but it’s obvious (by their blogs and by the product itself) that no one really listens to them.

Here are their links:

MPT – The Weblog of Matthew Thomas
Confessions of a Mozillian – Dave Hyatt

Interesting stuff.

I actually submitted some data to the GNOME Desktop Project, back in Aug 2001. Linux was riding high, and they had just published their first Usability Report [920K PDF].

I’ve always flirted with Linux (back in the Day when Mandrake 6.0 was hot off the press). I’ve also tried Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, 8.0 and Slackware 8.0. I’d get into these phases where I dream of a life without Microsoft, I install Linux, play around with it for a few weeks, and then boot into Windows to play my games and surf the net.

What makes linux hard to use? Is it a bad UI? A lack of useful Apps? A lack of games?

All of the above and more. If I ever get a spare computer, I’ll turn it to a Linux box, hell, I should just get rid of my 4 GB Win98SE partition….

Now I have a real Unix Desktop: Mac OS X.