trisweb.com

That title is for Google; I’m leveraging my rank just a bit so people looking for information about this dentist can find an honest account.

I just got back from a dentist in Berkeley with whom I made an appointment after searching with my insurance provider’s site. He was the first on the list, and close, so I figured, how could one go wrong with all the regulations and inspections and everything they control in this modern dental world?

Well, you could at least Google the dentist. I didn’t, so I had no idea what to expect from the office I was approaching on Parker street, but I got an idea once I came to the address. It was a house. A two story house, with a messy porch and a little plaque on the wall with the dentist’s name on it.

Oh-kaaay… well, I could at least give it a chance. Maybe it’s white and sparkly on the inside, like a Twinkie.

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It’s the little things that count, because an engineer that gets the little things right doesn’t get the big things wrong.

In my car, a 1991 Honda Accord wagon, I am able, with both hands full of groceries lock and close all doors in the car using only my feet.

Now, my girlfriend would say at this point, “If your car is so great, then why is the passenger door light switch broken?” And to that, I would say, because my dad is not a Honda engineer, and he broke it trying to wire in a little blinking light that makes it look like there’s an alarm.

But she would never argue that both our Honda vehicles (she has a Civic) are fine pieces of engineering and good cars. Whoever engineered the front door lock on my car to lock all the doors and be big enough to hit with my foot, thank you. I owe you a Sapporo or something.

Seriously, is anyone going to upgrade to Vista? I’m definitely not anytime soon. I see no added benefit from XP and just a bunch of hassle with the install, new computer, and worst of all, living with what Microsoft thinks usability is. I don’t think I’d be able to.

My options now are to get a Mac, and run XP and Ubuntu alongside OSX. Oh, wait, that’s only one option. Heh.

Just in case you’re into stocks, every technically-minded person I know is thinking the same thing. The losses from the iPhone (eh, it could still take off I suppose) will be a drop in the bucket compared to the new Apple computers purchased because Vista isn’t worth the box it’s in. I love to laugh at all the advertising dollars Microsoft’s spending that aren’t even affecting me… it’s so sad.

Are you upgrading to Vista? Have you already?

Update: Dean was so nice and modest about leaving links in comments that he gets two links to his site in the main article! Also because I agree with him wholeheartedly, of course. First, why his next laptop will be a Mac, and second, why he’s not impressed with Vista either. I too am waiting for the next OSX update (and hopefully MacBook update as well — here’s hoping they support more than 2GB of RAM) before jumping all over it.

That’s the “entity” City of Berkeley, not the place. The place is alright, in general. The place would be really great if the parking tickets didn’t cost two arms and a leg. Take Alameda, for example, where I also got a parking ticket a few months ago while taking the GRE — it was only $17! I was like “wow!” and scrounged under the couch for some change with which to pay it. I happily sent them a check (after depositing the change in my checking account, thinking better of sending it in that little envelope they give you) including a little note: “I love your city and you’re not trying to rip me off! Thank you, I’m happy to send you this check for $17. Don’t spend it all in one place!”

Someone at the City of Berkeley must have been like, “hmm, how expensive can we make parking tickets and still make people pay them? What’s that you say? They legally have to anyway? Reeeeeeaaallly…. even if they’re…. [evil music] Thirty-Five Dollars!?!?!?” Yes. Thirty-Five Dollars. It’s such an exorbitant fee that you have to spell it out: Thirty-Five Dollars. Yes. Hyphenated even.

More importantly, it’s so high that it makes me dislike the authority of the very city I live in, all the way to the point where I’m thinking of living in (dun dun duhhhhh) Oakland. Or, at least, I’ll never live in one house with four cars and a tiny driveway with two hour parking and street sweeping on the first Wednesday and Thursday of every month. That’s my own fault. It’s my penance, my punishment, our bad karma for having too many kars. Er, cars. It’s Berkeley’s way of saying “STOP driving, you’re part of the world’s problems!” while using the Thirty-Five Dollars to pay for gas and parking attendants in all the Interceptor parking enforcers that hover around the city like flies around a dump, picking off anything of value they can still find in their dirty heap of a city, even its own residents.

All I ask is for $17 tickets, not Thirty-Five Dollars… or, perhaps, tickets prorated for the city’s biggest supporters, like me! When you think of it that way, it makes me feel a little better, but shouldn’t they include that in the cost of living? I’m just thinking, if I move, and get an apartment where I have to (heaven forbid) pay for parking, even if it’s $70 a month, it’d still be cheaper than parking tickets. Wow.

Okay, I’m done. It’s just money. This probably feeds the homeless or something, right? Or at least it feeds the flies…

Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 was released quietly yesterday. Yep, there’s a .2 after that! Like you’d expect from software released without unit testing, we encountered several little bugs in the 1.0.8 version, followed by another bug in 1.0.8.1, hence, 1.0.8.2, which is now looking good.

Download Zenphoto 1.0.8.2 Here!

This is a larger release than the minor point makes it seem, with many changes to the core code and how things work under the hood. Read the changelog for more juicy info, or check Trac for constant updates. Read below for sweet details about this big point release…

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I ran across this gigantic post on what Steve Yegge calls the “Next Big Language” and I’m saving it here partly for my own reference, partly to comment on what it is exactly.

He tries to keep it a secret, but it’s obviously JavaScript 2, or ECMAScript 4, whatever you want to call it. “JS2″ will stick better. I’ve always thought JavaScript was quite an elegant language, if only because functions are first-class. Add optional static typing, and all the other features he lists, and it looks like it won’t suck. I can only hope it keeps some of the simplicity and flexibility of JavaScript in its current state…

If you’re interested, click through this slideshow on JavaScript 2 and the Future of the Web, or look at Mozilla’s Tamarin Project. It really looks like a complete and useful language, and it makes sense that if the web is the “next big thing” then the next big language will be the one and only language that runs on it.

Until it gets there, I’ll keep up with my JS1 skillz and get some Ajax going in the zenphoto backend…

1.0.8 in a few minutes.