Taking exams

Smart and sensitive but still packing a punch, you’d do well in law enforcement. Your sincerely chivalric approach to life and your fetish for uniforms are the stuff from which heroes are made.

Fetish for uniforms? Either way, the Watchmen Profile Inventory (WPI) thinks that the Nite-Owl character fits me best.

As I just found out, in little less than a year, the original Watchmen comic series will appear in movie theaters. Click here for the boring official site and here for a much better fansite.

I read the Watchmen while I was in high school. As it turned out later in retrospective, we had an excellent librarian who picked the best comics for us, but at that age we’d read any comic crossing our paths anyway. That’s how the Watchmen and Akira became the two epic comics I read along the “standard literature” like Spiderman etc.

The thing that makes the superheroes in Watchmen so unique is their lack of any superpower. Because of this lack they are very credible in the reader’s eyes, they are just a bunch of people who try to make the most out of their potential rather than just sit and watch. Except for that they’re not different from anybody else. The only exception is Dr. Manhattan, but he has problems of his own as you’ll find out.

If you’re in for a must read epic comic portraying the fear and hopes of the 1980s, then Watchmen is it. Various editions can still be had, but Absolute Edition (hardcover) the most luxurious though adequate for such a masterpiece. (with its “Search Inside” function, Amazon lets you read the first couple pages taking you directly into the story)

The Terminal 5 Song

Via Vowe.net

Was it the right war?

For quite a while now, the New York Times feature a blog called Baghdad Bureau featuring intimate background stories/reviews of its local correspondents. As the NY Times has quite a few locals in its salary books by now, one can an interesting insight into Iraq as it’s being seen by Iraqis. Today’s article is an interesting summary of the last three decades leaving the question unanswered what’s worse, be it systematic and organized or random terror.

Browser wars

I have quite a list of browsers installed on OS X simply out of curiosity when new announcements arrive. I am a browser hopper using a browser for a couple weeks/months until it gets on my nerves and I switch to something new/old. However, Firefox definitely gets most of the browsing time and this morning I just switched back to it again. Here’s my entirely subjectively speaking rating:

The winner
Firefox - the most innovative and versatile browser. Blocks ads and handles tabs the way I want it. Usually I ground it when it starts to get slow on an older computer, but I keep returning. Currently I am running Firefox 3 Beta 5 absolutely smoothly with no hick-ups at all.

The competitor
Where Firefox is slowing down, Camino comes to save the day. It’s lightweight and has adblock included by default. The price tag for speed, however, is a limited set of functions (e.g. no tab rearrangements). The last time it got grounded for not interacting well with Google Documents, but apparently this has been fixed with the latest release.

The social oldie
Flock is great at handling your accounts on Web 2.0 sites as they are literally one click away. However, as the Flock project is still rather new, they lack the most recent updates and functions. Furthermore, I don’t need to stay connected with all my social sites all the time as webmail is permanently open in a tab of its own and I’m rather selectively visiting other sites. Flock got grounded this morning for not rendering my Webmail.

The boring fundament
There’s nothing really wrong with Safari, but it’s not really exciting either. You get what Apple thinks is best for you which covers most what the average user needs, but nothing more. Annoys me because you can’t force it to open all links as tabs.

The northern competitor
There was a time after the depart of Netscape and before the advent of Firefox when we used Opera on Windows for added security. Every once in a while I still download Opera for the Mac to see how it’s doing, but it always gets quickly boring.

Internet Explorer
Oh yeah, this one exists, too. I once had the completely outdated version for the Mac because the brilliant developers of some router I owned had the router administration render correctly only in IE but not in Mozilla derivates. Well, the router is gone and so is the browser.

Du Levande

Marroni found the first half of this movie absolutely hilarious, the second half still okay.