Tag: Imported Post

Originally posted somewhere else (ex. a blog I don’t use anymore, or a social networking site) and moved here sometime later. Usually keeping the original posting date.

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After a couple of weeks on Opera 9.20, I’ve come to the following conclusions about Speed Dial:

  1. I can’t stand the portal-like page that loads when I open a new tab. It’s slower than a blank page, it’s slower than opening my bare-bones home page, and it makes it tricky to open a new page and middle-click on an empty area to paste in a URL from another app because it’s too easy to click on one of the thumbnails and open one of the speed dial pages instead. (It’s a Unix thing — middle-click usually pastes the current selection, and if you paste to a web page area, most browsers will try to load it as a URL.)
  2. I love being able to hit Ctrl+1, etc. to quickly load those pages.

Once upon a time, wasn’t there an option to choose what would load in a new tab/page?

*This post originally appeared on Confessions of a Web Developer, my blog at the My Opera community.

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Someone walked into the restroom talking on a cell phone, explaining, “it’s going to sound really bad now, because I’m in the executive washroom.”

Executive washroom?

Sure, if by “executive washroom” you mean first-floor lobby restroom that’s available to anyone who walks into the building.

I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, or trying to impress the person on the other end of the call.

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Note to self: Stick with morning voting next time.

“Oh, it’s only a midterm election! How crowded could it be?” (Yes, that was me.)

Feh.

Katie and I arrived at the polling place at 6:30 PM. The people who got in line behind us decided to leave, have dinner, and come back. Of the two of us, she voted first. I walked out of the voting booth at 7:58 PM.

It wasn’t as bad as the last time we voted in the evening, which was either the 2003 recall election or the 2004 presidential election. That time we were still in line at 8:00, and they made the cut-off anyone who was in line by 8 PM. IIRC the local Starbucks had actually sent over free coffee for people waiting in line.

But it was a far cry from last November, when we arrived and only one person was in line ahead of us.

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Last week NPR ran a story on “Applebee’s America”, a book on the way politicians brand and sell themselves to the voting public. One thing they brought up was “microtargeting” or “lifetargeting.” The idea is that you can take a person’s lifestyle and determine which way they’re more likely to vote, then send targeted advertising to people who are most likely to be persuaded.

There’s a link to a quiz on the website. It decided I was solidly Republican. (Hey, I might vote for a Republican someday if they ever run a less reprehensible candidate for something. [Update 2024: they’ve gotten so much worse.]) It took flipping four of the twelve answers before it decided I might be a swing voter.

Either the scoring system is reversed, or they need a new quiz.