If you enjoy layout and design of any type, you're bound to have wished for a quick way to preview text in several different fonts. Most graphics programs allow you to view only one at a time. Changing fonts over and over can be very tedious and often by the time you've gone through the list you can't remember the ones you liked. Enter FontLister.
I've searched high and low and among both free and non-free software, FontLister is the best I've found. Even better is the fact that there's an older version for free and the new version is non-limited shareware with a $5 registration fee.
Features include viewing both installed and non-installed fonts, installing fonts, viewing custom text and best of all, you can view many fonts as you want at a time. The user interface is great and it runs very, very fast. I highly recommend it. (Windows only).
For some reason, when you hold the mouse button down in OS X Panther (and Jaguar), the processor usage goes up to 100%. It doesn't matter if you're clicking nothing on the desktop or the most complex of widgets, holding down the mouse takes up all your processor power.
So what? Well, here's one example of when it might affect you. If you're listening to online radio (or an mp3 in iTunes) and reading a website or document that requires scrolling and you decide to hold the mouse button down on your scroll bar, often your internet radio will cut out or your mp3 will skip. Especially using Safari for whatever reason. I'm sure there are other instances where this could be problematic, especially when rendering video or 3d.
I'm on a 1.6gh G5, so it's not that I'm using antiquated hardware. This is, as far as I can tell, a fault in OS X.
I had the chance to read a couple short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "The Rich Boy" and "Head and Shoulders." Of the two, I enjoyed Head and Shoulders the most. It's a rather humorous story of a child raised to be a prodigy and how he's pulled out of prodigy-hood by a beautiful (but not-so-smart) blonde girl. Fitzgerald does a a really good job of developing real characters quickly and effectively.
"The Rich Boy" was also enjoyable, but it's look at a young man and the effect of being rich with 'old money' was slightly depressing; it was one of those stories where you really feel bad for the protagonist most of the time through. Again, however, the characters in the story are very well developed and easy to sympathize with. I recommend both of the stories.
Today I added a quick links section on the left hand side of this site. It's a separate blog that I can post quick, interesting links to as I find them without creating a whole new entry in the main blog. Inspired by WhatDoIKnow.
I need to sleep more and play less...
Here's a link to the news sites I read... it's on bloglines, a very good online aggregator.
http://www.bloglines.com/public/zzzmarcus
Enjoy.
Tonight I've spent several hours trying to back domains up in Plesk and restore them on another Plesk install on another server. Let me just say that it is not trivial. I'm not sure how good Ensim, cPanel or other similar web server software is at the process but if you're going to use Plesk and potentially could have to move domains, prepare yourself for an adventure. Note: this only applies to Plesk 6. Plesk 7 is out and I haven't tested it to see if the process is any easier in the new version.
I really wish Bush had managed to keep his popularity level up to where it was before the war and in the beginning phases of the war; at least to a level where I could feel fairly confident he would win. Since he hasn't though, anything that will pull votes from John F. Kerry is welcome.
I don't think it's even worth the time it might take to formulate an opinion of Nader, other than knowing that he's much more likely to pull votes from Kerry than Bush (as he probably did from Gore) and from the looks of things now, Bush is going to need every vote he can get.
It's valid to point out that Bush really has not even started campaigning yet so his even match up with Kerry will probably change for the better once he begins. It's also to Bush's advantage that most, if not all, of the dirt that can be pulled out on him has already come to light in the last election (no, I don't think these deserter charges will ever amount to anything). Kerry, I believe has not seen the last skeleton to come out of his closet. Even if the intern scandal turns out to be nothing, I have a feeling we'll hear more from his past.... and not about how nice of a guy he is.
So, Ralph Nader, welcome to the race. I hope you get your 3 million votes and go back to wherever you're from again.