Opinion

Over the last few months, I have run through the entire list of episodes for Star Treks TNG, DS9 and Voyager. As you can imagine, not all episodes are very good and some are downright insipid. The following are the rules of thumb that I have arrived at when deciding whether to skip an episode:

Over the last couple of weeks, I've managed to catch up with all the superhero movies that came out this summer.

• Hellboy 2: The worst of the lot; Insipid hollywood-ized version with poor direction, bad editing and a lacklustre story. Stay away from it.

Nowadays, if you are curious about a band (or in some cases, not die-hard enough to want their entire discography) and are looking for an introductory or a best-of compilation to wraps your ears around, something or the other will always piss you off. The recording industry in their insatiable greed indulge in marketing gimmickery and cheap ploys to boost sales in any way possible and it is annoying to say the least.

I've been something of a fanboy of Opera for a long while now. It's quick-loading, has strong caching and doesn't hog memory like Firefox used to. However, with FF cleaning up house for its 3.x family, by fixing all those memory leaks, improving performance by leaps and bounds and introducing those little features (page zooming for e.g.) that make things ever so friendlier, I'm of a mind to switch back to it.

It's a bit unsettling how Opera (9.25) starts your download even before you've clicked "Save". For e.g., just now I wanted to download the Windows version of wget and visited the appropriate site and clicked on "download". I didn't click "save" and specify a download folder etc. and switched over to a video I was watching. There was also another download progressing at the same time.

Has anyone else ever noticed how certain characters in Anime are drawn with one single canine sticking out most of the time? I just realised how much such characters automatically annoy me just because of a few select pixels lol While I suppose that it's supposed to convey a mischievous personality, my brain just tightens up in annoyance every time :S I really wonder what sort of conditioning brought that about :S

I just finished watching the first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Wow! The acting was so bad (and the story line wasn't much better :S) that I'm going to be getting the rest of it :D

All seven seasons of it - about 55GBs worth ;)

I just finished listening to the Gears of War demo that's available on Megadeth.com, and what a fucking disappointment it has been :/ I hope that it sounds so lame, weak and poppy due to it being the title track of the console game of the same name :| Or maybe the demo doesn't represent the final cut.. One can only hope.

The lyrics sound like they were written by Justis or Electra Mustaine (his kids) :S An excerpt (the chorus):

Smart bombs, precision guided armament
A more sophisticated way to end up dead

A couple of the guys at work were having this rather inane argument yesterday on which was the better browser - Opera or Firefox.. apparently vi vs. emacs is no longer 'in' any more :S I generally keep away from these ultimately inconclusive arguments, but I thought that I might blog about it..

So here's my take on it (Versions: FF 1.5.0.4 Opera: 9.0). This is something of a draught at the moment:

Firefox plus points:

• Free and Open Source.
• Extensions, extensions, extensions.. the biggest plus point of Firefox.
• Vibrant developer community.
• Second most popular browser out there.