10/30/00

Yes, it's me. It really is.

Anne's Journal of Minutiae

October, 2000

10/30/00

Now that I've had a chance to use a Mac on a semi-regular basis, I've discovered something. I've been using a font that is not generally installed on Macs: "Tahoma." "Tahoma" is a sans-serif font closely related to "Verdana," which is loaded on most Macs and PCs. I've been using Tahoma mostly because it's more condensed than Verdana. Bad idea. On a Mac without Tahoma, the default font on IE appears to be "Charcoal" and in Navigator it's "Times." And neither font makes my pages look particularly readable on a Mac because everything looks a bit smaller than on a PC. So. I've changed the fonts to Verdana for the September and October entries. I might set up a style sheet later in Dreamweaver to correct the older entries. In the meantime, on a Mac, those pages will look especially...yucky. My apologies to Mac readers. This is what happens when you get to see your pages in only one operating system. So, henceforth, I shall be using Verdana. If you don't have Verdana on your 'puter, Arial or Helvetica should do just nicely.

You know, when cable is working well, it's very good. But when it's not, it's hideously bad. Ugly. @Home has probably one of the flakiest mail servers I've ever encountered. They've supposedly "upgraded" the servers, but it sure doesn't seem like it. Both POP and SMTP now go through San Francisco first (my node is in Chula Vista which is just south of San Diego). And it can take forever. Christ, this is supposed to be a "high speed" Internet connection -- but last night, everything was bottlenecking big time. I couldn't even get to the news server and FTP wasn't working. I was dead in the water. It was really late so I went to bed fuming, cursing the name @Home. I realize that DSL users have periodic outages and such, but sometimes I wonder... Oh well. I'll bet those of you with dial-up connections are just enjoying this -- "Heh, heh. Oh, is your fasterthanlight broadband high-speed connection chugging to a standstill? Oh, that's just toooo bad. I really feel for you. But hey -- at least when the service is down nobody can hack into your system. Heh, heh, heh."

Then, I get almost no sleep because some f**king car alarm across the street kept going off every other minute, all night long and interrupting several interesting dreams which were unresolved. I finally got up at 3:00 am to look out the kitchen window to see if anyone was dealing with it. I saw two guys frantically trying to disable the stoopid alarm in their old Nissan Maxima. I've ranted about car alarms in a previous entry -- go ahead, read it.

It just sucks going to bed pissed off.