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…and remind me that it’s never a good idea to leave my computer unlocked when I go off to do Other Things. I came back to find someone had changed my wallpaper (click to embiggen):

Suffice to say, I am… purturbed.

I caved and upgraded - that Quick Find glitch was really starting to piss me off. I’m surprised to note that the glitch is still there, although since upgrading it’s only happened to me once. As opposed to, say, every seven bloody minutes.

I’m seriously considering switching to Opera at this point. Hmm.

I like Firefox. I don’t get quite as “Holier-Than-Thou” about the browser as others do, largely because it’s just a web browser*, but I can read web pages the way nature intended (i.e. without a bunch of Internet Explorer proprietary shit getting in the way) and so all is right with the world. Firefox 2 is not without its bugs, however, and one bug in particular is beginning to… well, to bug me. It’s this one:

Quick find bar opens when typing in text fields

The / (slash) and ‘ (apostrophe)keys are shortcuts to open the Quick Find bar. You can also configure Firefox to automatically search for text when you type any characters outside of a text field. When typing in a text field these characters should show up in the text field and not trigger the Quick Find bar.

I don’t know if this bug has been fixed in Firefox 3 as I haven’t downloaded it yet (I’ll get into that in a bit) but from what I can recall while researching the bug a year or two ago it was one that Mozilla were aware of but weren’t fixing. I remember reading that when people reported the bug the Firefox devteam would get quite arsey about it, saying that they had no intention of fixing it and stupidly telling people to fix it themselves because it’s Firefox and it’s Open Source and they have Better Things To Do than to fix one teeny tiny bug. Indeed, a simple Google search for firefox Quick Find bug reveals a number of fixes available. Mozilla never fixed this bug themselves, though. Note that down because I’ll be referring to it later.

The bug is annoying, but as it only happened sporadically (maybe once a week, if that) and it can be “fixed” by opening and closing a dialogue box such as the Options window or the “About…” blurb, I saw no real pressing urge to repair the glitch.

Spin on to this past two weeks - this glitch is now popping up every time I run Firefox. Not just on my desktop PC at home, but on my laptop and my work computer as well. I’ve come to anticipate the glitch by first opening and closing the “About…” dialogue, which is easy enough, but then there are some other small glitches which occur as a side-effect of this - opening a new tab with Ctrl+T doesn’t automatically place the focus on the address bar, for instance, so I can open a new tab and type in an address only for nothing to happen at all.

I yesterday I was about to do what I always do when a program is glitching on me - look for an updated version. Then I remembered that, oh yes, Firefox 3 was released this week. And, oh, weren’t Mozilla trying to go for a download world record on June 18th? The little cogs began a-turnin’ in my head and I began to wonder: What if Mozilla deliberately “timed” this bug to become more annoying around the time Firefox 3 launched? What if the very reason they decided not to fix this glitch and become arrogant cocks at the mere mention of it were because they had planned to use it to encourage annoyed people to update when FF3 became available on the 18th?

I’d deliberately avoided upgrading to FF3 before I came to this realization because the browser is incompatible with pretty much every plug-in and add-on available for FF2, but now I’m even less inclined to want to update. I don’t like the idea that Mozilla may be forcing people to update their browser just because they want to break some kind of non-existent, unimportant, trivial record. I don’t like the idea of being forced to update at all, to be honest. And now, as if by magic, Firefox is refusing to acknowledge input from the arrow keys, so in order to me to go back and fix a typo I had to click on it rather than use the arrow keys to get back to that point. Harrumph. Harrumph, I say.

Anyway, that’s my Unnecessarily Paranoid Conspiracy Theory for the year. Tune in again next June.

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* I have a great deal of difficulty comprehending why it is exactly that people get so militant about their choice of browser. Firefox users tend to consider themselves the Cats Meow because they happen to have a standards-compliant browser, which is also Open Source (and we all know what a bunch of elitist wankers most Open Source advocates are). Opera users tend to rank themselves higher than the Firefox users because their browser is somehow more compliant and passes some obscure test that only people who work in web design for a living will have any idea about.

Why does anyone actually give a shit? Why does anyone give any bodily fluid about which browser they’re using? As long as nobody’s using Internet Explorer aren’t we basically alright? Get a little perspective, people.

I love videogames, and I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t (unless we’re including Jack Thompson, but whether or not he qualifies as a person is another matter entirely). That said, I can’t help but spot glaring problems with the way the games industry works at the moment. I can’t imagine why people haven’t spotted these flaws and corrected them already, so here they are in all their splendour. There’s some unsavory language ahead, mind. You have been warned.

Let the good times roll.

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Is anyone else playing that new map pack for Portal based on the 2D Flash version? Because I’m stuck here (click to embiggen)…

I’m fairly confident that this particular room is impossible. Impossible, I say.

This evening my Dad, Stepmom and I drove over to Ikea (by way of a British pub in Burbank named the Buchanan Arms, which was quite nice despite the fish not quite meeting the standards set by the Robin Hood) where I bought myself a shelving unit for my ever-growing collection of DVDs, books and vidjagames. I was fast running out of space on my current shelving unit, which is more or less the size of a termite’s intestinal tract, so I decided I shell out the dosh on a fairly non-crap sized thing to put my shit on.

I could talk to you about how much of a pain in the arse it was to put the unit together (in short: surprisingly easy, although I had to move it out of my room and into the kitchen to slide the back on… hang on, that wasn’t quite as short as I was aiming for) but instead I’m going to talk to you about Bob Marley. “My,” I hear you say, “That’s quite a tangent even for you, Ben.” But stay with me, because it is loosely connected to our excursion to Ikea.

Whilst in Ikea looking at lighting (because the desk in the office isn’t quite as well-lit as it could be, and in the interest of not causing our retinas to dissolve into a fine paste we were on the look-out for some nice desk lamps) I spotted a guy with dreadlocks. I was ill and my brain wasn’t quite functioning properly and so mentally I made a rather childish observation - “Hey, that guy looks like Bob Marley.” I spent the rest of the walk through Ikea with “No Woman No Cry” stuck in my head, and rather oddly it was (I think) playing on the in-store PA system as I was going through the Check Out. So, not twelve minutes ago, I bought “Legend” on iTunes. I also looked up the guy on Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit) and discovered he died of Toe Cancer.

I’m not kidding. The guy had melanoma on the big toe on his right foot, and chose not to have the thing amputated because it was against his religious beliefs as a Rasta. The cancer spread throughout his body until it reached the terminal stage, and even then he refused to draw up a will because to do so would bely the Rastafari belief that death is not an inevitability*. I’d spent a long time believing that Bob Marley had been shot at a concert for being too much of a hippie or some such thing. But refusal to let someone lop his toe off? Seems a little silly to me. The guy could still be knocking out cracking tunes today if he was willing to part ways with the big spud on his right meatslab.

Oh well. Not much that can be done about it now, is there?

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*a belief no doubt concocted to ease the process of tax evasion. Actually that was a joke.

Here is a list of computer and videogames that I will be passing on as May rolls onwards:

1. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

My laptop hates me.

Every few days, for no real reason whatsoever, it decides it no longer wants any part of the wireless network at work. It detects the network but decides that it doesn’t want to be able to use the internet. This is a decision the laptop is making on its own and it’s something that the laptop is doing, not the network. Rolling the laptop back to a system config from a few days ago usually fixes the problem, but it stops working again about four or five days later.

The laptop is using Windows Vista Home Premium, I have McAfee SecurityCenter installed, and those are really the only programs which could be causing the problem. If anyone has any insights, I’d love to hear ‘em.

5155-3281-6701. Drop me a message if you’re adding me.

I know I promised you a story about a Fetish Ball (and I also owe you accounts of seeing Wicked last Wednesday, and seeing the Foo Fighters at the Forum this Wednesday just gone) but instead I’m going to let you know that I now have Super Smash Bros Brawl, and I’m also playing online. My Brawl Friend Code is:

4811-6594-0070

Feel free to add me to your Friends List, but let me know your code too otherwise it’s a bit pointless.

It’s long been established that I work on the same floor as a bunch of geeks, which is probably why I fit in so well. One minute I’m having a conversation with someone about Indiana Jones Mr Potato-Heads, the next I’m talking about Red Dwarf and Worms Armageddon. My boss and I have had lengthy conversations about The Orange Box, and another department head and I have been meaning to go head-to-head on Team Fortress 2 for a while now (as an aside, since picking up the 360 version of The Orange Box I have a revitalized appreciation for the PC version, which I’ve been neglecting lately).

However one of my co-workers did what is perhaps the geekiest thing ever at CES  the Microsoft Keynote speech this year. I tip my hat to you, good sir. You have out-geeked us all.

From a promotion email Sony sent me this morning:

Don’t delay; be the first to experience what PSP has to offer

Aww, don’t feel despondent, Sony.  Someone will buy your handheld console eventually.