Set My Firefox

FirefoxIn spite of my continued enthusiasm for OmniWeb, I’ve found myself using the 1.0 Preview release of Firefox more and more often. I spend about half my day in each browser, and it makes me wish that I had a system-level utility that would intercept every link I click on to let me decide whether to send it to OmniWeb or Firefox. Surely, somebody has already whipped up something like that, and I’m missing it, right?

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Live Leo

Ted Leo/PharmacistsIt was a year and a week ago that I wrote about Ted Leo/Pharmacists to little notice, but I’m still listening to these records, “The Tyranny of Distance” and “Hearts of Oak,” at least once a week. If anything, I think that what I once saw as Leo’s self-imposed and short-sighted limitations — his obsessive desire to re-create a sound and an energy often deemed lost to the 20th century — now seem more like a very selectively chosen milieu, a platform for an oeuvre. It was always that, of course, but I was reluctant to see it. Now, having watched the rise of a horde of bands who have worked out the science behind a way-back machine down to a decimal point, it’s more apparent to me than ever that Leo’s work is, first, classier and more thrilling than anything else in thrift store clothes, and second, actually forward-looking.

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Just Did It

Joy’s TriathlonI’m freakin’ exhausted after a weekend spent driving up and down the Jersey shoreline, and waking up at 04:00a this morning to slog all the way to Gateway National Park — but I shouldn᾿t be complaining. After all, it wasn’t me who swam, biked and ran the 2004 New York Metro Area edition of the Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series on the coldest day since spring broke. That was my girlfriend, who saw the culmination of 2+ months of early morning training come to a very satisfying end when she finished her first of this kind of event in a very respectable 1 hour and 31 minutes, ranking 124th out of all 701 competitors. She did great, and I’m very, very proud of her. I’m also happy that I get to go to sleep very soon.

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Hit in the Temple

Media TempleThe folks at Media Temple have always been responsive and courteous when I’ve had problems, but I᾿m at the end of my tether with them right now. In case you haven’t noticed, access to Subtraction.com has been markedly unreliable since Tuesday, owing to a series of vaguely explained technical issues they’re having with my shared server — whatever the problems are, they refuse to subside. You’re probably reading this now thanks to a spell in which everything᾿s running fine, but if my experience this week has been any guide, you’ll be lucky to find the server responding in, say, forty-five minutes from now. It’s very, very frustrating. I’m pretty sure this is going to put me in the market for a new host provider next week.

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