Webthoughts

As you already know, Tiger is out and everyone seems to be giving initial impressions. I decided I'd write a post or two about my initial experiences with the new Mac OS.

I just finished watching the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise. It's a little weird to know that that episode is the last of first run Star Trek that will be seen for quite a while, if not forever.

I will agree that the Trek franchise was getting a little tired. Star Trek: Voyager, for example, never lived up to its potential. The second season of Enterprise was awful.

But Enterprise improved a lot during the third season and the fourth season (the one that just concluded) was the best of any of them.

But the world is tired of Trek. So, Trek needs to go away, at least for a while.

Instead, we will get to watch riveting fare on television like Britney and Kevin: Chaotic and Stacked. Okay, that's not entirely fair. There are good shows on TV besides Star Trek. 24 and Arrested Development are both great television. Battlestar Galactica is probably one of the best shows out there today.

But television definitely lost something earlier this evening with the end of Enterprise. That optimistic view that humanity will achieve great things in the future is a good message. All the Trek series stubbornly stuck to that message.

I suppose the title of this post is a bit wrong. The world is not without Trek. It's just without first-run Trek. All the series are still airing and will for a long time. And, who knows, maybe Paramount will eventually produce another Star Trek series (supposedly, another movie is in early pre-production, but has not yet really been given the green light by Paramount).

I'll live, of course, without my weekly Star Trek fix. But, television will become an even more barren place to me without its nearly 18-year presence.

Well, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about what I thought about the last new television episode of Star Trek for quite some time, if not forever. "These are the Voyages..." was the series-finale for Star Trek: Enterprise, the fifth show in the series.

This was not the episode it should have been. There were several problems that really detracted from the ending of this series.

Yes, I have been silent for a while--mostly because of work issues. But, hopefully a lot of that is behind me now.

The new manager to my shop started last week and he has some really good ideas. Although he still is learning a lot of what it means to work for this company, I have a lot of hope that he's going to turn out a lot better than the last manager did. Besides, I'm excited to not have to play full-time manager anymore. Hopefully the days of 60-hour work-weeks are behind me for a while.

I spent last weekend with my wife and parents at the family lake-house. Memorial Day weekend is traditionally a work weekend, getting the place ready for frequent summer visits. This includes putting the dock in the water, getting the boat ready, opening up the cottages and the like.

It was abnormally cool at the lake last weekend, however. This, of course, didn't stop us from putting the dock in. However, I can tell you, buy the time we were finished with that particular chore, I was very cold. The water was definitely too cold to spend to much time unprotected in.

The family acquired a new (to us) boat last fall, so this weekend was our first chance to really put it to use. Despite the test drives we took it on last fall, we still had a lot to learn about its capabilities and handling. I have to say, we're pretty impressed with it. Looking forward to getting the opportunity to ski behind it this summer.

I had to come back before everyone else because I had to work on Memorial Day, but I'll be back out there again in a week-and-a-half, so it's all good. It's the first Memorial Day I've had to work in five or six years, but the normal guy who supervises on that day deserved to have Memorial Day off this year, so I was happy to work for him.

We had a tremendous rain-storm last night. It poured 4.5" inches on us in about five hours. Although not the worst that I've ever been in, that's still a pretty good amount of rain in a relatively short period of time. For a while it was raining so hard, I really couldn't see the houses across the street from my house. That's the last of the rain for a while, though. It's supposed to be dry now for at least the next week.

Work continues apace on a new version of Print Window and, yes, the next version of iHam on iRye is still planned. Various issues have kept me from releasing it when I've said I will, so I've decided to stop guessing on that part. It'll be released when it's ready.

Well, Safari 2.0 in Mac OS X 10.4 has made me switch back to using Safari as my full-time browser. (Some of you may recall that I had switched to FireFox when it first came out.)

It's not that I dislike FireFox--by no means. However, some little things about FireFox had been becoming more and more noticeable (most especially some interface issues that were simply very un-Mac-like). FireFox is a very competent browser and will remain installed (and used) on my computer(s).

However, when I discovered how much faster Safari 2.0 is that previous versions of Safari, I was hooked. The who application seems...well...smoother. From scrolling to rendering to launching, Safari 2.0 seems to have its act together.

For example, scrolling with Safari 1.2 in Panther on my Pismo G3 400 Powerbook was a choppy stop-and-start affair. However, with Safari 2.0 in Tiger, scrolling is very smooth and quick. That is a huge plus for me. Rendering pages seems to be that much better too.

I've also managed to get rid of the metal interface. I used Interface Builder to change Safari's main window from a metal window to the new unified-look window. This actually looks very good and, I think, should be Safari's new standard look. I'll post a screen-shot when I get a chance (not currently at a computer with a modified Safari on it).

Safari's new RSS capabilities are nice, but no replacement for NetNewsWire. But, it's a good start.

Although this is a rather superficial look at Safari 2.0, it's a great improvement to the browser and it's made me switch back from FireFox. Now, let's see it stay out in front.