It took me 10 years! 520 weeks to finally snap out of a glazed stupor that had me convinced Internet Explorer was the ne plus ultra of browsers. Micro$oft does such a great job at controlling the market that they had me controlled too. But no longer.

I am now happily - and safely - and freely - surfing at the wheel of my freshly updated Firefox 1.0. The new Mozilla little browser, I mean brother, has managed to conquer my trust in just a few days. Granted, I’d had it installed for a long time, using it to test for compatibility. But I had not yet given it a real test drive.

My attention was tickled by the growing number of posts, blogs and pages relating to Firefox. Opinions seemed unanimously favorable, so I went along. No regrets!

One of the main claims of Firefox defenders is its considerable level of security compared to that of Internet Explorer. That remains, in my case, to be proven; but I must admit that the rate at which Micro$oft publishes security patches for IE in a never ending effort to fill gaping holes tends to make the newcomer’s case.

However it’s the feel and looks that got me hooked. Firefox is fast. It’s slick. It’s highly configurable. It’s skinable. It blocks popups. It allows tabbed browsing. It incorporates a multi-search engine toolbar. It features a very impressive bookmark system that can be exported into an HTML file (and even uploaded to a server) in a breeze. It has an extremely convenient

For chess enthusiasts, here’s a totally cool link. I’ll let the authors describe it:

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

Colorful and fascinating. Check it out!

Are we there yet?

Earlier thoughts of mercury generated this new little toy: I’ve created a slideshow with the best images throughout the site, in a morphing sequence. No new content, it’s basically an experimental tool I might eventually incorporate into each gallery. The whole thing is based on TwinHelix’s Photo Morpher script. I also use their great menu script. Awesome stuff.

Up at dawn this morning, with a serious hang over and an even more serious mug of coffee, I set out to clean up the mess I left behind me yesterday.

I had forgotten Banana Wind at the dock, ran the scooter out of gas half way down the airfield and faxed a set of key boat dimensions to have a canopy built with a very important measurement missing.

Now it’s all taken care of. Sort of. The coffee still tastes like liquid mercury.

A quien madruga, Dios le ayuda.

They are hybrids. Born from a combination of photography and digital painting, the newcomers of the Digital Art section keep defying my attempts at categorization. I guess that’s why I called it that way.

I’ve selected a few photographs that don’t appear in the photo galleries and subjected them to a highly sophisticated process called « super - re - color - enhancing - filter - painting - retouch - metering »...

Ok, maybe not. But I do use a very cool photoshop plugin that converts a photo into a painting by applying brush strokes to the image. Of course, the result is a little too automatic looking, so I then hand-retouch the whole image with different custom brushes using a tablet and stylus.

May my aunt Marie (who is a real painter, and an awesome one too) forgive me for choosing the screen instead of a canvas, but I am an incorrigible child of the 21st century. Check out the results in the second half of the Digital Art gallery.

Here is the result of a wine induced slight delirium attack, months ago ; I was dreaming of visiting my dear France soon, and ended up trying to summarize the essence of “la langue de Molière”. The following are my own updated translations – and explanations - of a few typical expressions…

•     La France est le nombril de l’univers. France is the center (« belly button ») of our universe. (I know, it’s obvious to you, but you’d be shocked if I told you how many Americans ignore that .)

•     Pouvez-vous me dire si les éclairs ont gagné la partie? Could you tell me if the Lightning won the game? (Note : maybe using the English name of the team would be better, since translated into “éclairs”, it means a French pastry and might cause some confusion…)

•     On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (From “The Little Prince”, by Antoine de St-Exupéry. Immortal.)

•     Ne ramène pas ta fraise! Oh, shut up! (Word for word, “Don’t bring back your strawberry”. The French like food.)

•     Sans mentir, si votre ramage se rapporte à votre plumage, vous êtes le phœnix des hôtes de ces bois. No lies, if your singing is as pretty as your looks, you are the Vin Diesel of this place. Also equivalent to the shorter : “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" But the first is actually part of a French La Fontaine poem, so intellectuals will dig it…)

•     Putain de bordel de merde! Sorry, no translation available. Let’s just say you might use that when you just stepped into yet another dog sh… on Les Champs Elysées in Paris.

•     Il pleut à boire debout!It’s raining cats and dogs. If you’re still in Paris, it will wash the sh… off your shoes. (Word for word, « One could drink the rain standing up »)

•     Il vente à décorner les taureaux de Camargue! The wind is so strong it could pull the horns off the heads of bulls in Camargue! Camargue is a beautiful reserve in the south where pink flamingos, horses and bulls live in the wild. The people of the south always exaggerate their expressions a bit, o peuchere...

•     Vos chiottes sont dégueulasses! Your toilets are disgusting, you French pigs! (Well, no one’s perfect… Anyway, it’s like ze hypo’, he always wanted to be a zebra...)

•     Ça pue ici! It really stinks in here! (Rarely useful since it is considered acceptable to smoke and smell like perspiration almost everywhere in public places.)

Did I mention I unconditionally love France and its inhabitants?

It’s a fact: these present 2 weeks will rank among the most unbearable of the year. Having been « laid-off » for lack of work and of a better word (tourism is dormant since the passage of hurricane Ivan; or at least such is the most common excuse for this defeat), I suddenly find myself with a whole lot of time to flirt with my camera.

So I get up before dawn and haunt the shores of Little Cayman until the light is turned on by a mighty hand and another day explodes around me.







Parallel Gallery

A few excerpts from Hugh Macleod’s Gapingvoid marketing and advertising blog...

Quality isn’t job number one;
Being totally fucking amazing is job number one.
[From a cartoon on the Hughtrain]

The market for something to believe in is infinite.
[From the Hughtrain]

A business is either growing, or it’s dying.
[From the Hughtrain]

I’ve been working hard to improve compatibility with the fast-rising free browser Firefox (and all other Gecko based browsers, not to mention Mozilla, Netscape and K-Meleon, among others).

It’s a tedious process, but today’s suffering was lessened by the discovery of the « CSS hacks » principle. It allows me to solve discrepancies between browsers locally, at the CSS style level. It’s a cheap fix, but it works!

If you’re interested in alternative browsers and security issues, read this.