Browser Bullshit

Sometimes its best to just leave well enough alone. I’ve been running Mozilla 1.2a for a while now and enjoying it just fine. Then for reasons alien to me, I decide to upgrade to 1.2b. b is more than a, right? And more is always better.

Well bollocks to that. After upgrading, I find I can no longer download anything through the browser. I can right-click on an image and say save, set a target, but no download manager appears, file doesn’t get saved. WTF? I downgrade back to 1.2a, and now Mozilla won’t even start. I get the image of the little fire-breathing dragon guy, but that’s it. There’s some nonsense with the quick-loader in the system tray going on as well, but all-in-all, no browsing joy. I begin to get horrifying visions of having to go back to IE with tail tucked between my legs…

Let’s try Opera again. Well that’s a non-starter. It installs alright (including a massive Java plugin that makes me nervous, I think I have like 3 or 4 Java plugins installed on my machine already) but crashes everytime I try to load chromewaves. Nuts to that, uninstall.

An endless sequence of install 1.2a, uninstall, install 1.2b, uninstall, lather, rinse, repeat (with a few reboots thrown in for good measure) I go back to the source – 1.0.1. Purportedly the most stable version. Well it seems to be running fine now, got my little XUL Planet toolbar installed again, all seems well. And I can download again! I don’t know what the differences between 1.0.1 and 1.2 are supposed to be, but I’ll happily stick with the one that works for now. The build is only a few months old anyway so it’s not like I’m living in the dark ages using Mosaic or anything.

While I was in a browser frenzy, I also grabbed the install download for Netscape 7.0 though after the bullshit of this monrning I don’t know if I’m in any rush to put more crappy software on my system.

Moral of the story? Ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Addendum – Installed Netscape 7.0 after all. It looks and operates exactly like Mozilla. Even ported over all my settings. I haven’t checked if it’s as fully compliant as Mozilla, but at first glance it looks good (excepting all the tacked on AOL nonsense). The next version of IE better kick ass or I see the pendulum swinging back the other way…

np – Matthew Sweet / Altered Beast

Falling

Getting my ass kicked in the hockey pool tonight. Damn you Rishi!

np – The Delgados / Hate

Technical Difficulaties

Thanks to a rogue quotation mark, I have a messed up entry that I can’t get rid of. I’ve already erased a couple of todays posts trying to corner it, but it won’t be beat. I’ll repost the one I managed to save here and hopefully this thing won’t cause anymore problems…

Addendum – looks like that the edit mode in IE works better with Blogger than Mozilla. All fixed now, only one lost post overall.

>> 30 Gallon Tank (originally posted 12:40pm)

Breakfast has turned into lunch. I am all full of Timbits

The massive Columbia House order I placed on behalf of Kyle (with the Velvet Underground box set for me) last week never went through, as I suspected. Online ordering my ass. I re-ordered over the phone, so all should be good.

Speaking of Kyle, he’s gone to pick up the two Elf Power discs and the one Tobin Sprout disc I’d ordered from Beat Goes On. Of course, I have no idea when he’ll be in Toronto next or I’ll be in Oakville.

np – Spoon / A Series Of Sneaks

Girls Can Tell

In case you didn’t believe me about Derek’s life being one comic adventure after another, check out his blog entry for today. I won’t go into specific details, just to say it involves a college co-ed making some extra cash through the internet…

np – Elvis Costello & The Imposters / Cruel Smile

She Bangs The Drums

Band practice was sort of a drawn-out, do-nothing evening. Brad had been down in the practice space all day doing some recording. Five Seventeen brought some mixes he’d done of ‘Awake Too Long’ that for the most part, sounded really good. My guitar sounded like explosives detonating in the left channel, I liked! Reminded me of Albini guitar sounds. The whole mix was a little heavy on the reverb though, and sounded washed out at points. Brad is going to do a little more remixing with a lighter touch on the effects, hopefully we’ll nail this one down soon.

Otherwise, we just sat around for the most part. I dare say my drumming improves everytime I get behind the kit. I still can’t play to save my life, but I’m exponentially better than I was, say, six months ago. After Seventeen left Brad and I tried to put together another Wonder What That Light Is. We set up the room the same way, with a single condenser mic hanging in the middle of the room, me on guitar and Brad behind the drums… Well, you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice, I guess. I got some cool sounds down with the ebow and tremolo, but it didn’t really go anywhere. We got two tracks down and it was starting to sound like a bad Mogwai outtake when the recorder decided it didn’t want to record anymore and essentially shut us down for the night. Probably for the best. There might be some bits that was can salvage and splice in as bridging tracks, but for the most part utterly disposable. I guess I didn’t have the same inspiration tonight as I did when we recorded “…Light”, which suits me fine cause I don’t necessarily want to get back into that headspace again anytime soon. Nuff said.

So after that we headed to the B-Side to catch the Electric Shoes, whose drummer we hope to enlist into Lake Holiday. Her name is Pheobe and while not a flashy drummer, she’s got excellent time and a great touch on the kick drum. It’d be very interesting to see how her stripped-down punkish-style of playing would gel with what we’re doing, though we’ve always rearranged our sound around the drummer. With Azra it was a lighter pop feel, with Craig a more rock/emo sort of approach. And whenever we’ve used the drum machine, it’s nutty dance-y music. We’re nothing if not versitile.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get Pheobe out to a rehearsal to jam a bit and see how that goes. Cause dammit we need a drummer…

Lost the eBay auction for the Longwave CD. I do hope they bring merch with them to their show at the Horseshoe cause their stuff is proving pretty tough to locate up here.