Browsergasm

I understand from my comments that people actually want to hear more about my trip to Japan. If I’ve learned one thing from my business courses, it’s that if a couple people give you feedback, there are… er… a couple people out there that feel the same way. Yeah. I haven’t forgotten, but when you have something you actually want to do justice, it takes more effort to do it—unlike my normal posts—because a half-assed late-night rant just won’t cut muster.

Continuing this half-assed late-night rant: I absolutely love saved state web browsing. (If you have a blank look on your face right now: imagine that your web browser remembers what page(s) you had open when you quit, and automatically reopens that page/those pages to the same places the next time you open that browser. That’s “saved state.”)

The reason behind this random proclamation? I was browsing the web this evening, and had a handful of tabs open to various pages. My body then, rather suddenly, demanded that I go to bed right that instant—so I shut down my computer and headed upstairs. (I’m still not smart enough to follow what my body says exactly, which is why you have this bed-based post.) No need to worry about bookmarking where I was, no need to remember how far down I had read an article—they’ll be waiting for me, in the same place, when I get back. (Also: no worrying about what pages were lost the next time my browser crashes!)

My browser of choice, which of course saves state, is a niche one: OmniWeb is slow and uses a behind-the-times rendering engine, but, by gum, it lets me use the internet on my terms. I’ve also become accustomed to its vertical, picture-based “tab drawer” (imagine pictures of each page along the left or right edge of your browser, instead of a row of text near the top)—I don’t feel so constrained to limit the number of tabs I use at once.

[If you’re using Firefox (and I would, if I were on a PC), you might try SessionSaver, which apparently allows Firefox to pull similar saved-state tricks. Assuming it works, it’ll change the way you browse. Seriously.]

I’m also in the process of falling in love with NetNewsWire, an RSS newsreader for the Mac. It’s so much easier to have a program check when websites are updated than to do so yourself, which is the habit I had fallen into. I’ve noticed that, with NetNewsWire, I take far less time reading about the goings-on of my various web haunts—and, as I’ve lamented in the past, there’s just not enough time in my day anymore.

Not that I do anything useful with that time that y’all would be able to see, though. I have, however, just today finished the complete initial implementation of the work program that I’ve been slaving away on: initial tests (with live data—a first!) indicate that I’ve sped this one bottleneck process up by 770% (being extremely conservative, believe it or not). The step before that process also appears to have improved, though so far by a much less spectacular (but still substantial) 41%. I’m happy with those results.

Someday I might even be able to talk about what I did.

 

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