Re: Safari: Not there yet. It’s 2003 and browsers are still being upgraded (or created) without tabbed browsing? The mind boggles. Also, I have to say I really dislike the “brushed aluminum” thing taking over all the iApps. I find it bulky, flat, and unappealing. Give me the old Cocoa pinstriping any day. However, the AppleScripts available look pretty slick, and once they’ve introduced tabs I’ll be willing to give it a whirl, ugly or otherwise.

Re: William Gibson’s weblog: Very cool to see one of my favorite authors writing for the web, slightly less cool to see him using Blogger, and much less cool to see the site using ASP. But that’s just nitpicking; the posts are a rare and engaging peek into the books and their author. I recently reread Idoru; it’s not my favorite of the novels but I love his Tokyo imagery so much that I find myself returning to it more often than some of the others.

Re: WThRemix: And how.

Over the past few weeks, thanks in no small part to help from the philanthropic Crispy, I’ve picked up used copies of some of the games everyone is always shocked that I didn’t buy eons ago in the misty prehistoric dawn of last year, or whatever.

Soul Calibur and Shenmue were two of the most glaring absences - dating as they do back to well before I had a Dreamcast, and I’ve had one now for something like two years, although that’s not entirely my fault. I ordered a used copy of Soul Calibur maybe a year ago. When it arrived and I gleefully settled in to get down and dirty with Sophitia, the god damned CD wouldn’t play and I was too irritated to bother returning it and bitching the seller out to get my eight dollars back. Shenmue I’d played at the homes of wiser Dreamcast owners than I, and there’s really no excuse for it taking until 2003 for me to have a copy. I’ve played a little of each since I got back to Brooklyn last week and I think I’m a better person for the experience, although it’s always funny to me how cheesy Dreamcast graphics look now, when it wasn’t so long ago that they were just about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

On the advice of Simon and everyone else in the world, I also grabbed a $17 copy of Silent Hill 2 when I spotted it while Christmas shopping. I didn’t get a chance to touch it until this week, and I have to say I agree with the general consensus that it might just be the creepiest game in the entire world. The camera is a little irritating and the graphics a bit dated but that doesn’t stop it from being deliciously eerie, and now I’m positively lusting after SH3.

Although not an embarrassingly old game, I’m also glad to have my very own Vice City, which might be the best Christmas present ever. There really is nothing better than giving the gift of organized crime and eighties music. Most of my New Year’s Eve was spent in the depths of Vice City, and it hasn’t been easy to tear myself away from it since, although SH2 is now competing for my PS2 time.

All in all, I think I’ve got enough to keep me busy for the remaining two weeks of winter break - and oh yeah, I have work to do, too. But I mean really, mid-semester vacations were made for sprawling around in your pajamas playing video games half the day. (Or all day.)

At one point over the summer, my wrists (which are rather notoriously badly-behaved) were bothering me enough that it made typing painful - but curiously enough, it was only my right hand. I suppose it was something to do with being right-handed, but the end result was that I spent a sticky afternoon in August trying to hold coherent conversations on IRC using only my left hand to type while I iced the right. I came up with many terse non sequiturs, but my efforts are put completely to shame by the entries in last Sunday’s Weekend Edition Puzzle. The challenge was to come up with the longest, most interesting sentences possible using only the left or right hand and ignoring capitalization and punctuation. I was more impressed by the runners up than by the winning sentence itself (football references are lost on me). One of my favorites: You imply I’ll look kooky in only my pink kimono, you killjoy, you.

I loves me some book shopping, and the whole affair is made ever so much more delightful when one sets out armed with a couple of gift cards from a big brother who really knows his little sis.

My snazzy new Orwell collection has a spot of honor atop my snazzy new bookshelves. Normally, I prefer paperbacks because they’re lighter and easier to lug around in my bag. However, for things like whopping great collected works or dictionaries or reference books that I want to look pretty and last a long time, I’m all about the hardcovers. The Everyman’s Library editions are particularly swell, I think, and Amazon’s not too stingy with the discounts as far as they’re concerned, either (the list price on that Orwell is $35; A Common Reader has it for $30 and Amazon has it for $24.50).

Speaking of discounts, I’ve also noticed that both Borders and Barnes & Noble stores (although perhaps not the sites) are having a buy-two-get-one-free fiesta on the new editions of some Penguin Classics. It doesn’t look like they’re much changed except for de-uglification of the covers and slightly nicer paper, but it’s probably a good time to pick up ones you don’t already have. I’m ashamed to say I don’t actually own a copy of Madame Bovary or Moby Dick so I suppose now’s the time.

I also picked up the new version of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. You may remember I fell in love with the first edition, and it’s been recently updated to cover Jaguar. According to the introduction: You won’t a single page that hasn’t been changed since the first edition. Not only are the new Jaguar features covered in depth, but you’ll also find a great deal of refinement in the discussions of original Mac OS X features: more tips and tricks, clever uses for old ideas, and greater context borne of the passage of time. I can’t verify that there isn’t a single unchanged page, but it is substantially heftier and, incidentally, it’s currently 20% off at both Borders and Barnes & Noble stores, 30% off at Amazon.

Finally, I grabbed this Lovecraft collection, which happens to be selected and introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, who is pretty swank in her own right. I’ve read a lot of bits and pieces of Lovecraft over the years, morbid little youngun that I was am, but it was all from the library, so it’s nice to finally have a little Lovecraft of my very own.

What did I ever do to you? What forgotten misdeed from my reckless youth could have merited such retaliation? Why is it that when I asked you for the address of the UPS pickup center to which I wished to travel this morning, you produced this map, indicating a location approximately forty blocks away from the actual location of the UPS pickup center in question?

Of course, I didn’t realize your deception immediately. Oh no, I trusted you, Mapquest. I dutifully determined the nearest train station (Avenue I on the F) after much comparison with the MTA maps, and woke up about an hour before UPS was scheduled to open, thinking I’d get it out of the way and be back home well before noon. It wasn’t until I arrived at the point beneath that cheery little red star that I began to realize the numbers were all wrong, but still I had faith. Mapquest would never let me down, I told myself. I wandered up and down Foster Avenue until at last I stumbled upon a real live UPS driver, who explained the error. He seemed dismayed that I hoped to accomplish my mission without a car, and after much thought suggested that I try the L to 105th St.

So back to the F I walked, dismayed at your betrayal, Mapquest. Perhaps I’d merely typed the address incorrectly, I told myself, and headed to Manhattan to run a couple of miscellaneous errands and stop by an NYU computer lab to try getting another map. When you gave me the same (wrong) map again, I gave up, and turned in dejection to Yahoo Maps.

And now, my treacherous Mapquest, now we come to the heart of the matter: I’m leaving you for Yahoo, which happily produced the correct map. Its maps are more detailed than yours, and are available in a larger, printer-friendly format. And the real clincher is that it was, in fact, a map displaying the actual location in question.

And so I bid farewell to you, cruel Mapquest. I haven’t been happy with our relationship for some time, in all honesty, and this whole affair has been the last straw. I’m sure you’ll find your entertainment in leading other trusting young ladies into the bowels of Brooklyn, but I for one won’t stand for it.

Sincerely,
Emma

PS: Thanks very much to the readers who sent Dress to Kill and In the Beginning Was The Command Line, respectively, either one of which would have made this morning’s excursion worthwhile (but both together have improved my mood immensely).

1. I didn’t spend yesterday evening in Times Square. This makes four New Year’s Eves I’ve spent here and not a single one wasted getting squashed into the gaudiest, ugliest part of the city with half a million of its gaudiest, ugliest tourists - and they aren’t allowed to bring alcoholic beverages.

2. I did spend last night with my copy of Vice City, a bottle of Skyy, and maybe the occasional C monkey. There are worse ways to ring in the new year than by taking a break from beating up hookers to switch to ABC and laugh at everyone getting rained on in Times Square.

3. Today has included not even the tiniest of hangovers.

4. Today has inclued a lot more Vice City, and Harvard Man. The latter turns out to be not fantastic but not unwatchable (Buffy the Mafia Daughter aside); all the location footage made me slightly homesick and parts were highly entertaining.

5. I’m still on winter break.