katallison

God bless Roadrunner, honestly. For the past week I've been having recurrent internet problems, with the connection dropping every hour or so, requiring me to reboot the cable modem and snarl. This is very unusual--my connection's usually rock-solid--and I was dreading doing anything about it because calling tech support is such a renowned, time-honored exercise in total frustration. But this morning, after four reboots in an hour, I finally gathered up my fortitude and phoned in to Time Warner, and after going through a brief automated-menu thing, I got an extremely affable and competent support guy, who, while chitchatting amiably about the weather, also swiftly determined the source of my problem (low power supply, probably due to aging cable modem unable to cope with extra demands of wireless router), and advised me to just bring the modem in and swap it for a newer one. Yay!

In between bouts of kicking the modem back to life, I've been spending a low-pressure morning going through and tagging old entries. The project tweaks my perpetual interest in taxonomies and how people categorize and sort things--I'm wishing now I could view others' overall tag lists and see what kinds of general schema they're using. Me, I'm more a lumper than a splitter, which is to say I try to avoid making entry-specific tags but rather use larger categories like "fandom" and "job." Questions that have arisen thus far:
--Hm, should I just use "cons" or make separate "Escapade" and "Connexions" and "Vividcon" tags?
--Are "TV" and "movies" essentially subsets of "fandom" or do they need their own tags?
--Leave "computer" as one big category, or separate out "internet," "hardware," "software"?
--Is that "kerfuffle" tag just gonna make trouble for me at some point?

Anyway, it's amusing to think about how I organize this stuff, and to get a big-picture overview of what I tend to post about most often. (For the record, "fandom" and "weather" are tied for the lead at this point, which I guess is no surprise.)

Am currently undergoing prayer, fasting and meditation (I typed "medication" at first, which might be more apropos), in preparation for moving everything over to the new computer I bought last month. Some people, when applying retail therapy to life stress, buy shoes, or chocolate, or CDs; I apparently indulge in electronics. If one adds this to the current machine, the old POS desktop I still have lying around, and the laptops, I have ... um, way too many computers for one person. (*is embarrassed*)

(This is the new baby, and yeah, I know, eMachines, but I've seen a lot of tech press to the effect that their quality has greatly improved since they were acquired by Gateway. This particular model's gotten very good reviews; though it's pretty basic, I am enamored of the front-side built-in flash media reader, and you can't beat the price with a stick. Plus, DVD burner! Wheeeee!)

Anyway, I am staring at my C:\ drive in dismay. Good lord, it's appalling how much *stuff* has accumulated on here in the past three years. (sighing, rolling up sleeves)

OK, you know how it goes -- you see a rec for a story that sounds cool, you hit the link, the page loads -- and you stagger back from the monitor, blinded by some hellish combo of acid-green-on-black type, or lurid pink on purple. Or you struggle through a paragraph or so of dim grey print on darker grey, before giving up the whole thing, rubbing your eyes and muttering anathema. Perhaps you are so annoyed you post a nasty rant to your LJ about the godawaful design taste of some people.

Well, cringe no more, nor mutter and rant. All you need to do is:

1. Use Firefox. (Don't have it? Just go here and get it. Go on, I'll wait, it's a quick download, and you'll thank me later.)

2. Then go here and download the Web Developer extension. Once it's downloaded, all you have to do to make it active is to quit the browser and relaunch.

3. Now, when you hit one of those blindingly illegible pages, just right-click anywhere in the page, and from the context menu thus summoned, choose Web Developer --> Disable -- Disable Page Colors. And -- voila, like magic, the page will reload as plain black-on-white text. (To return to the original state, just go through the steps again and deselect Disable Page Colors.) (Only make sure you don't change from one to the other while you're in the middle of composing an LJ entry or your text will be lost [Voice of Experience].)

There are a jillion other very cool things you can do with Web Developer (view and edit CSS, use your own stylesheet for pages, get rid of images, etc. etc.)--but this one function alone has already saved me a world of aggravation. And it's only one aspect of one of a jillion other cool extensions (Image Zoom, Nuke Anything, Mouse Gestures [without which I can no longer function]). I snuggle Firefox to my bosom, and cover it with smooches.