Weblog and Playground of Gord Fynes

A’ight.

If you’ve got yourself one of the new Intel Core Macs and are having no luck with the Flash plug-in, go get the latest version, complete with a how-to for the install.

Odeo users can now receive voice messages. Too cool for school! (hint, hint: shift your eyes just a little bit to the right)

Early this morning, in a grumpy haze over a bowl of apple-cinnamon Cheerios, I decided to fire off a snarky pre-Juno show question to the Globe and Mail’s music critic, Robert Everett-Green. I didn’t expect him to actually answer it, let alone on their site. Some other snarkiness I put to him:

Q: How many singer/songwriters does it take to cover Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”?

A: Apparently all of ’em.

Lastly, Jose Saramago’s new book, Seeing, is due out April 10. I understand that it’s supposed to be a sort-of sequel to Blindness. If you haven’t yet read it, I strongly advise you to do so. Never mind the DaVinci Code in paperback (although I’m yet to read it in any format); this’ll knock you on your ass.

Don McKellar, if you ever happen to read this, can I be in your movie adaptation? I could audition for the part of “blind man #163”, or something.

As you were.

Thanks to the excellent back-end work of Neil Lee, the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers mail list is up and running again.

Muchos gracias, Mr. Lee.

Muchos gracias.

Having recently added a new Intel Core Mac mini to the family, I had to go about (re)installing all those cool/must-have applications. The ever-growing list:

VLC: The media player. ‘Nuff said.

Quicksilver: I’m still fairly new to this one, but so far, it rocks.

NewsFire: Great, straight-forward RSS reader; simple to use and easy on the eyes.

Acquisition: Awesome P2P software from Cocoa whiz Dave Watanabe, who also is responsible for…

Inquisitor: Soup up your search window in Safari with this fast return plug-in.

Style Master: The best application out there for bossing around your CSS sheets to perfection. Buy two!

BitTorrent: Need I say more?

Flickr Uploader: Drag ‘n’ drop your photos on this app to have them sent to your Flickr space; also lets you edit tags and titles.

Backpack: The online version of the Hipster PDA™. Free or $5 a month for extra capabilities. While not a local application, there is a Dashboard widget available for it. Yessh.

High Priority: Cool little toolbar widget that is an even lower-fi version of Backpack.

Firefox: I’ve been giving both this and Camino some use, you know, just to break away from Safari now and again.

Internet Cleanup: Self-explanatory.

And, last but not least…

TextMate: Still fairly new to this all-purpose text editor, but, so far, I’m very impressed with just how versatile it is when it comes to the type of document you’re editing.

Anything else I should be considering?

From Steve Hagen’s Buddhism Plain and Simple, page 38:

bq. We live in a culture where we’re taught to see freedom as the maximization of choice. But this is not true freedom at all. In fact, it’s a form of bondage. True freedom doesn’t lie in the maximization of choice, but, ironically, is most easily found in a life where there is little choice.

Doesn’t that just make you feel great about yourself?

Well, it should.

Check out this shot by shot live reenactment of the intro to the Simpsons television show. Just brilliant.

Anyone up to taking on Futurama or Family Guy?

(thanks to Neil Lee over at the BeatnikPad for finding this one.)