I’m sure at first glance the flabby, drunken ex-fratboys look like

they could be trouble, but [someone

should tell T.M.](http://www.tmcamp.com/) that it’s the “anorexic sorority wives” that will

get you every time.

I use plain old vi or Vim pretty

regularly these days and in doing so have gotten through one of most painful and

frustrating learning curves ever. I actually prefer it to things like

jEdit and Homesite for a lot of editing tasks. Trouble is, I can’t

shake the urge to learn Emacs.

Of course now that I’m actually used to

type-beep-curse-type-curse-hit-escape editing, Emacs feels horrible.

All that control-meta key contortionism and C-x letter letter M-x

letter nonsense makes me want to shout even more obscenities than when

using vi.

In spite of all that, I would really love to get used to a non-modal

editor that is infinitely customizable, free and, from what I hear, very

powerful.

So I’m going through the tutorial just to see how much pain I can

withstand. Maybe I’ll write a couple of my next posts with it. If you

don’t hear from me for a few days, you’ll know why.

Now that you’ve seen the light and converted to a fast, light, compliant and feature rich Gecko-based browser, go get this amazing collection of bookmarklets by Jesse Ruderman. Amazingly helpful when doing development/design work.

I’m going to post this again. [Reasons to switch

to Mozilla Firebird](//www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/why/).

I know I’m never going back.

So we’ve got even odds on surviving some sort of man-made or natural

disaster wiping out the entire population. At least [according

to professor Martin Rees](//www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/09/doom.predictions.reut/index.html).

This comes after reading about a group planning to create a man-made

black hole which they’re “pretty sure” won’t just suck in the entire

planet.

Sell.

Woohoo! Tracy has a new blog, and it’s not just cats.

Useit: Nielsen’s latest piece

hits very close to home. I hope we can use it to make the case for

usability on every project.

“The most important point to remember, though, is that you can do it.

No matter what your project, and no matter how big or small your

budget, usability is there to help you succeed.”

In a recent entry at [Joel on

Software](//www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20030601.html), Joel says that we finally have a browser that will work

as a drop-in replacement for IE. There’s no reason to use IE for

day-to-day browsing any more.

“All the little problems are fixed. It loads fast. It’s not ugly and

clunky. My beloved Alt+D/Ctrl+Enter work perfectly. NT

challenge/response authentication is supported. And there are new

features, too: tabbed browsing, which is better than it sounds.

Incremental search, which is brilliant and I already can’t live

without. Text size adjustments that always work. A download manager.

Excellent cookie management.”

Amen to that.

Another cool moment: I’m running a complete KDE desktop under Cygwin

on my XP box. Terminals, Konquerer and anything else that’ll compile.

Here’s a screenshot.

[Jon

Udell’s keynote](http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/misc/oscom/intro.html) at OSCOM seemed to be a hit. Lots of good advice

about doc titles, url purity, search result layout and other goodies.