I see the vans with the old racist name paddy wagon have finally come… to this.

Sydney has a toy monorail (still surely a Shelbyville kind of idea) and a toy tram line.

All right, one Oz photo to start with. Behold an actual Nissan S-Cargo!

First of all, if you’re some kind of Firefox fanboy of either or any gender, where were you when Mozilla was at a similar stage of development? Why weren’t you using it then? Why are you pretending that history never happened?

Why are you acting like Moz isn’t at version 1.7, while your little baby is merely a little baby at 1.0 “preview” level?

Why do you think your piddling little arriviste browser, which does nothing but browse, is really better than a mature product that browses, slices, and dices? Why, exactly? Because Moz takes up more disc space and RAM? Disc space is inconsequential, and at this moment, under OS X, Moz and its many windows and tabs use 6% of my system resources and 12.9% of my RAM. I have a gig of RAM; double that usage wouldn’t matter. If you want a system hog, look at Microsoft Word.

Mozilla has simply been thought out and tested more. It is, in short, better.

1. Moz handles multiple logins (as at Gmail) with no problem. It drops down a sheet and lists the most-recently-used ID at top. It fills in the userID and password and I can simply tab and press Return to log in. The Firefox dialogue box that handles the initial choice to save or ignore login details is primitive (it looks like a bad Soviet clone), and I can’t use the keyboard. Apparently the only way to select a login if you have multiple userIDs is to begin typing one, down-arrow onto its autocompletion, and watch as Firefox then finally fills in your password.
2. I haven’t maxed out tabs in a single window in Moz, but I’ve done it lots of times in Firefox, which, incidentally, doesn’t even bother to tell you there are tabs to the right of the last one visible. (Moz just piles them up until they become illegible; that’s less bad, but it’s sub-optimal; we need stacks of tabs or at least Safari’s » indicator.)
3. I can use Command-I to find information about a document, like the URL of a popup window. You may have wondered how I can directly link you to such documents; it’s a piece of cake.
4. I can File Bookmarks easily. I only ever skip the step in the case of a bookmark I expect to locate solely by searching. Every other bookmark I categorize and sort into a folder. There’s no reason not to.
5. I can Google from the address field. Why should I have to select another field? I get this wrong every time in Firefox (and Safari).
6. link elements are supported. As I am one of the few authors to use them, I’m hardly keen on using a browser that ignores them completely.
7. The downloads window lets me launch the resulting file easier than in Firefox.
8. Firefox for Macintosh ignores 20-year-old Macintosh conventions regarding up- and down-arrow keys in text fields (to move to the beginning and end, respectively). It also ignores Home and End. In short, you’re stuck doing a lot of backspacing.
9. I can select any style defined in a document. Firefox users cannot.
10. Mozilla is a marginally-less-absurd name than Firefox.
11. Mozilla accessibility compliance is noticeably better than Firefox’s, though still not great. Among many other things, if you really need to read a long description, you can (right-click on the image).

Futher, I resent the fact that useful plug-ins are now developed exclusively for Firefox instead of being written for both the parent and the child of the Mozilla Project. Quit pretending that whatever came before your preferred program has simply ceased to exist – and has ceased to be used.

I started coughing before I climbed onto the upper deck of the 747 to ride turbulence home. (I says to my neighbour, I says “So I guess the secret to sleeping through turbulence is four glasses of shiraz, huh?”) For the first three days back in the northern hemisphere, I was too sick to do anything but sleep, finish Oryx & Crake, ignore snatchmail, and go out for a double espresso once a day.

Hence I’m behind in recounting the latter days of my trip. Based on experience, there’s a chance they will go unrecounted. However, some documentation is up.

Dry stuff first

Notes from my presentations

‘Damp’ stuff next

CART transcripts (to be corrected shortly) from my second session and the now-infamous Web Standards Smackdown. You think I swear a lot when I’m onstage? Wait till you see me when I’m sick

Other people’s photos

• Me on stage, second day
• Proof of my swearing on stage
• Just exactly how much alertness and poise I can connote merely through the act of sitting

Interestingly, I face the typical dilemma of the standardista in dealing with a gallery of 250 of my own photos: Apart from installing PhotoStack, how does one upload and present them in a compliant manner?

Will pick away at racontage.

Compared to nondisabled swimmers, video shows that 1½-legged swimmers:

1. are skinny, pigeon-chested, pasty, scoop-shouldered
2. are so much hairier they look thistled
3. have too little uncarpeted surface area on the chest for requisite maple-leaf tattoo (viva Victor Davis!)
4. fail at being blond, and also undergo male-pattern baldness
5. do not wear earrings, let alone on both sides
6. fit into the category of “painfully skinny” rather than achieving the canonical “swimmer’s build”
7. wear longer swim trunks, as though that stump needs a bit of holding in or it’ll pop right out

We don’t expect the Canadian Paralympic Committee to get too many things right. Trying something as dicey as comparing a disabled and nondisabled athlete within the same commercial was a recipe for disaster. How was poor Andrew Haley supposed to end up looking at least as good as Morgan Knabe?

Gawker now runs an advice column.

I hereby raise my hand.

Q. I’ve got these two homosexualists whom I especially cherish, though I admit I’ve met only one of them and I’ve been kind of swayed by swarthy Italianate looks in the other case. Anyway, these guys edit, or used to edit, a couple of delightful Weblogs. It’s all good, as the kids recently stopped saying.

But their also-homosexualist boss lets the team down by reusing other people’s site design and producing invalid and inaccessible Web sites. He claimed to be too poor to rectify any of those problems – but this boss just recently found the money for three new sites, all of them just as badly put together as the others! I know the reusing-other-people’s-work problem was amicably resolved (I was at the bar where they did the smackdown), but really, how the hell do I get my esteemed homosexualist colleagues out of this guy’s clutches?

P.S. He’s even stupid enough to use Network Solutions for domain registrations. Sort of a precursor to not knowing how to make a Web site – not knowing how to register a name safely.

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