Irvington neighborhood.
Posted 3 months ago
google theme
I really don’t like the new google themes on their various apps because they take up too much room. With Reader and Groups, the content I actually want to see consists of about 25% of the screen in the lower, right-hand part of my browser.
Reader is a giant list of articles. Let me see the giant list. I don’t need to see controls and search widgets surrounded my massive amounts of white space and all that stuff. Maybe sometimes, but almost never. At least with reader, you can get rid of the side bar.
Groups is even worse. Can’t get rid of the side bar. Can’t change the font size (which matters to me depending on if I’m reading via laptop or big-ass screen, or fresh in the morning, or burnt-out at night, or need to keep the text small so I can follow instructions in some other app, or large so I can browse comfortably from a distance while sipping coffee).
Argh!
My plans are this:
- Get rid of gmail (done, replaced with hosted IMAP).
- Use a desktop/ios feed reader (done, using Reeder).
- Advocate that my feed reader stops syncing with google (planned, Reeder dev agrees).
- Get the groups mail I like emailed to me, at least for the low-flow groups (ongoing).
I guess I’ll just have to suffer reading Google Groups for high volume lists until someone makes a desktop client for it, or Google tunes its theme.
If there’s one thing Microsoft and Google should learn from Apple, it’s that they should minimize the self-promoting chrome around their applications and let people focus on the actual content.
Update: You can hit the “f” key in both Groups and Reader to remove a lot of the chrome. I can quibble on how discoverable that option is, but at least it’s there!
Posted 4 months ago
Posted 4 months ago
west (hollywood) side story
My prediction for the West Side Story plot on Glee is that Blaine will play Tony and Kurt will play Maria. Works best if they minimize (or understate) the social justice aspects of it.
Could be that Kurt finds a way to forgive Blaine (and himself) without compromising his theater arts college chances and then gives up the part to Rachel, though I’m not sure where that leaves Mercedes.
Edit: Bzzzzzt.
Posted 4 months ago
Posted 5 months ago
kill me now
Just finished season one of Glee. If I wrote down everything I would normally hate about a TV show, you’d think Glee would fit it perfectly. And it does. But I love it anyway.
I’ve intensely disliked a lot of the pop songs they sing when they first came out, or when they were first overplayed and over exposed — Journey, I’m talking about you — but the songs totally work within the narrative context. The characters draw me in, damn it. There’s not much else to say, or that needs be said.
But this is a blog, invisible subtitled “prolix”.
In idle moments, the show does make me think that people who really like what I think of as totally manufactured music are not so much interested in the music itself (as if it were a statement that should last the ages) as the moment in which it occurs. I guess that’s obvious. For me, though, if I don’t actually like the song in the abstract, the moment as I experience it doesn’t redeem it, and even if it did, nostalgia kills it. But that’s just me. Super picky. But I understand people with broader tastes a little bit now. Someone else’s nostalgia or sentiment, even a fictional someone else, now that I can abide.
But that’s just a side-thought. Really, I’m just thoroughly entertained. Kudos.
Keith Irwin
Plenty of tropes, not much Zen.
